The major work on the disc is Andersen’s “Independency”, a piece written in 2005 to mark the centenary of Norway’s liberation from the union with Sweden, presented as an epic voyage of continually changing musical emphasis, from guided free playing to post-bop group interaction, beautiful balladry and evocative sound-painting.

The stripped-down sax/bass/drums format will make long-time Andersen listeners recall his historic collaborations with Jan Garbarek/Edward Vesala (Triptykon) or Sam Rivers/Barry Altschul (Hues, on Impulse); Live At Belleville is also in this tradition. Scottish tenorist Smith makes a magisterial showing. Reviewing a live performance of “Independency” in the Birmingham Post, Peter Bacon wrote. “As a demonstration of what the saxophone is capable of, this was something of a master-class. Smith’s mastery of whole areas above the instrument’s normal range - and then to draw such sweet notes from that stratosphere - simply takes the breath away.” Smith’s versatility is emphasized also in a yearning and freely expressive version of Duke Ellington’s “Prelude To A Kiss”. Throughout, the interaction between the trio is exemplary. Apart from driving the trio forward with his muscular bass-lines and locking in with Paolo Vinaccia’s detailed drums, Andersen also expands the band’s sonic palette with discreet electronics, building layers of strings with digital loops, and creating arrangements in the moment.

The End Of A Summer is the ECM debut of the Julia Hülsmann Trio, its program of songs without words guided by the playing, composing and aesthetic priorities of its leader. Hülsmann has said, “My music is all about melody”, and everything in her work is informed by it, a rigorous sense of poetic compression uniting the writing and arrangements, the solos, the improvising, even the group interaction.

Sightings of German jazz groups are rare on ECM, from the outset an internationally-inclined German label. But the clearly delineated music of Julia Hülsmann’s trio is channelling more than German jazz. Her musical sense of purpose was reinforced by studies in New York with Richie Beirach, Maria Schneider and Jane Ira Bloom. Jazz on ECM is amongst the influences the group members share, but individually they have been inspired by the most diverse musical experiences. Drummer Heinrich Köbberling, for instance, hears parallels between the ‘minimalism’ of house and techno music and the simple pleasure of a pulsing cymbal in a jazz ballad. Bassist Marc Muellbauer, who writes labyrinthine music for his group Kaleidoscope and once participated in workshops with Stockhausen and Kagel, recognizes that complexity can be a vantage point from which to view the value of simplicity. In the trio, he says, “the music is often between the notes.”

Muellbauer has played with Hülsmann since 1996, when both were at Berlin’s Hochschule der Kunste; Köbberling became the drummer five years later. Since then the trio has built a substantial German following “while hardly playing a trio gig”. Instead the focus has been on projects with guest singers, and settings of poetry. A recording with verse of E.E. Cummings and the voice of Rebekka Bakken (Scattering Poems, ACT 2003) won the German Jazz Award and sold prodigiously. It was followed by discs and/or concerts with singers Anna Lauvergnac, Roger Cicero and Daniel Mattar.

The lyrical spirit prevails on the present all-instrumental recording, whose impetus came from Manfred Eicher. The producer and the pianist first met at the Jazzahead Festival in Bremen in 2006, subsequently exchanging ideas that would lead to the recording of The End Of A Summer in Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in March 2008. (In the same month, the trio members contributed to a second ECM disc: Fasil with guitarist Marc Sinan, release of which is scheduled for 2009).

Material featured on End Of A Summer was composed over the last decade, the most recent piece being the title track, which was “written quickly, in a melancholy mood, with summer fast disappearing. It’s about saying goodbye to a few things, with a tearful smile.”

“Sepia” is a piece inspired by the chromaticism of Jobim’s “Picture in Black And White.” “’Sepia’s’ changed a great deal in performance. It started out as a slow bossa, but the recorded version is quite free.”

“Gelb”, by contrast was a commissioned work on a theme related to beat writer Ruth Weiss, “part of a suite of colours. I wanted to write something simple that grooved.” “Not The End Of The World” is from Hülsmann’s New York years, a study on a descending scale. From the same period, “Senza” explores polyphonic and contrapuntal elements, as the theme returns each time with different accompaniment. Hülsmann credits former teacher Beirach with underlining the need to find and maintain an original voice in her writing. “He emphasized that I had to drill deep into my material and dig out what is authentic in it.”

Muellbauer and Köbberling also contribute material. Muellbauer’s “Last One Out” was “originally conceived as a piece for saxophone trio, no harmonies intended. We’ve done it many different ways, including fast and open. Now we play it slow, and there’s lots of chords but no harmony and the theme arrives only at the end.”

Köbberling’s “Konbawa” (Japanese for “good evening”) was written in New York in 1999, and “Where In The World” also celebrates a New York experience: “I used to go every week to hear Kurt Rosenwinkel’s group. They had a song in 3/4 which I really liked and I wanted to write something in that spirit. I tried but could not – and something totally different emerged.” Hülsmann: “On this piece I play only the chords Heinrich wrote out. Very well-chosen, beautiful chords.”

In this context, however, even pop singer Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose” sounds like a piece that Hülsmann might have written. Her insistence on working with the substance of a melody and a staunch disinclination to over-embellish puts her in a jazz tradition that includes such stubborn spirits as Monk, Carla Bley and Ahmad Jamal. Of the Seal tune she says: “I heard it on the radio and liked it. The original arrangement is rather bombastic: we made it ‘small’ and more intimate but didn’t change much – simply helped it to breathe better.”

LANG LANG

"When you play the piano, you feel your blood pressure go up," says the single Chinese-born virtuoso, 26, who performed in the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. "You become part of it. It's a very sexy instrument."

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Giya Kancheli’s tenth album on ECM New Series offers two recent large-scale choral works with unconventional instrumental forces. While the composer has frequently stated that his love for music began with Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington rather than with Bach and Schubert let alone with traditional Georgian polyphony, his highly compelling new compositions mirror impressions of both Western and Georgian sacred music without actually alluding to religion itself. Written in 2003 and 2005 respectively, both “Little Imber“ and “Amao Omi” are melancholic musings about the absurdity of war in conjunction with the power of beauty. In a BBC-interview about his concept behind “Little Imber” Kancheli quoted Dostoyevski: “There is this saying that beauty will save the world. But who will save beauty? I think when you sit down at the piano and write music you are trying to do just that.”

Commissioned by the English foundation Artangel for a three-day-festival in the deserted village of Imber in the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire/England, “Little Imber” is the first site-specific work in Kancheli’s oeuvre. Already in the late 19^th century the British War Office had begun to buy land in the loosely populated area and shortly before the Allied invasion in mainland Europe in June 1944 all 160 Imber villagers were evacuated to make way for the training needs of US soldiers in preparation of expected street fights in Germany. Following World War II the former inhabitants’ hopes of returning to their homes faded despite public protest as the area was now used for military training, particularly preparing soldiers for their duties in Northern Ireland. Only once a year the former residents were allowed to return to the village for a special service in the small 14^th century Church of St. Giles.

The Georgian composer first visited Imber in 2001, two years before the premiere of the piece, “however, since intuitive thinking plays a significant role for me, I started subconsciously thinking about the project even before”, says Kancheli. “In the last few years the world has had (and continues to have) so many important cataclysms that undoubtedly must have marked the character of my music. Possibly it became sadder than my previous work. But the presence of a certain irony in it, I think, is a sign of hope.” Keeping in mind the small acoustic space in the church of St. Giles, Kancheli wrote the score for a very transparent ensemble. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich comments in his liner notes: “Far removed from a lavish ceremonial piece of music, it is a quiet, sublime portrait in the quintessential Kancheli manner, yet one that pursues its own despondent, nostalgic dreams and thoughts. Especially striking is the torn and fissured compositional fabric, which seems more like a gathering of loose threads than a coherent tissue.” The text is based on an anonymous traditional poem about Imber.

John Dowland had travelled widely in Europe, and the English court was itself truly international with many visitors from abroad, so it is not at all surprising to find such gems as the exquisite French Airs by Guédron, versions of Italian monodic songs by the renowned Giulio Caccini (including "Amarilli, mia bella") side by side with the lyrical and rhythmically stimulating songs from Spain by anonymous composers.

The ECM New Series discography has addressed music from the period around 1600 for much of its now near- 25 year existence and Monika Mauch's and Nigel North's subtle recording of this important cross section of Renaissance European song offers a welcome addition to the catalog. The first two issues of John Potter’s Dowland project were dedicated to the music of John Dowland and his English and Italian contemporaries while both Rolf Lislevand’s Nuove Musiche (which borrowed its title from Giulio Caccini’s famous publication) and Steven Stubbs’ Teatro Lirico based their improvisational music on instrumental scores from the same era.

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Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Deutsche Grammophon B0011340-02; CD.

FIRST impressions count for a lot, so it was no surprise when the hot young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel began his tenure on the venerable German label Deutsche Grammophon with recordings of symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler. Those discs, recorded with his Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, featured performances more confident and assured than revelatory. Still, they established Mr. Dudamel, who will conduct the Israel Philharmonic at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on next Saturday and at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 16 and 17, as an artist capable of handling the core classical literature honorably.

Deutsche Grammophon deserves credit for fostering Mr. Dudamel’s growth rather than pigeonholing him. But after a video of him and his players tearing through Bernstein’s “Mambo” (from “West Side Story”) at the 2007 BBC Proms in London swept around the Internet like wildfire last year, the label was also wise to recognize the demand for a sampling of his more incendiary wares.

“Fiesta,” recorded live in Caracas, Venezuela, presents Mr. Dudamel and his players in an appealing mix of Latin American works, including a few staples of the international repertory. In well-trodden works like Revueltas’s “Sensemayá” and Ginastera’s “Estancia” dances, the Simón Bolívar players match all comers in finesse and power, and outdo all in sheer exuberance. Some of the less explored byways here are just as compelling, including Antonio Estevéz’s impressionistic “Mediodía en el Llano” and Arturo Márquez’s seductive “Danzón No. 2.”

The sound quality, vivid and detailed, befits the exotic, colorful contents. Apart from some murky passages in Aldemaro Romero’s buoyant “Fuga con Pajarillo,” the youth orchestra plays with all the style and precision of a professional institution. And “Mambo,” the closing track, remains a barnburner; just close your eyes and imagine the spinning trumpets.
- STEVE SMITH

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