Wolfgang Lenze

On "Lockdown Releases" you follow the path of Wolfgang Lackerschmid's creative and varied musical history from the late seventies till 2020. All these tracks were either digitally remastered, finally completed or even recorded during the lockdown in spring 2020.

Wolfgang Dauner has now been highly active on the scene for more than fifty years. Dauner hired top young musicians to be around him for the current upgrade to United 2.0. The second United generation, like the first one, is eagerly researching the crossing points between jazz, rock, funk and world music. Featuring some of the finest avant-garde jazz players from Germany and beyond the Ensemble began life in 1975. Pianist Wolfgang Dauner, initially recruiting musicians from his home base of Stuttgart (then a hotbed of avant-garde jazz), put together a rotating cast of musicians, and shared writing and arranging duties with guitarist Volker Kriegel.

Michael Haydn wrote his Italian "Serenata" to a libretto by Metastasio on the theme of the lover's grief felt by the goddess Diana, who took vows of chastity without thinking that she might be hit by Amor's arrows. This opera in two acts from 1778 celebrated it's premiere during Michael Haydn's lifetime but then was forgotten for more than two centuries; it was first performed again in full in Salzburg in 2018 and now is finally available on cpo.

This year the Bremen Cathedral Choir is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and with its director of many years, Wolfgang Helbich, it also has certainly enjoyed a »musical marriage« of a rare kind. And then there is the splendid Bremen tradition that has been observed for some eighty years now: the Christmas song concert in St. Peter’s Cathedral so very dear to the hearts of the Bremen public. Since cpo, as a label with its home in Northern Germany, has long maintained close ties to the Hansa city (cf. Radio Bremen, Weser-Renaissance Bremen, and not least Helbich himself), it seemed to us to be high time to document this event full of the Christmas spirit for the pleasure of a wider listening audience. Everything that lends the Christmas season its musical magic is represented in traditional arrangements, from Adeste Fideles to Vom Himmel hoch.

During her lifetime Marianna Martines was a highly regarded composer. In 1772, for example, the English music historian Charles Burney praised her 'very well written' compositions, her keyboard artistry asmasterly,' and her own person as a singer who was 'more perfect than any singer I had ever heard.' Pietro Metastasio, her mentor, valued her talent and art just as very much as did Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who frequently participated in her 'musical evening entertainments.' With these evenings, which were held 'at least once a week', she exercised a considerable influence on Vienna’s music life.

After a pair of quintet offerings with Brad Mehldau and Ambrose Akinmusire, Austrian guitarist and composer Wolfgang Muthspiel returns to the trio format he established on ECM with 2014's Driftwood. Whereas the previous outings all featured bassist Larry Grenadier, it is Scott Colley who claims the bass chair here. All three members have worked with one another sufficiently to make Angular Blues sound relaxed, natural, and locked in. Blade and Muthspiel have been working together on-stage and in the studio for quite a while; in addition to Muthspiel's bands, the pair work together in the duo Friendly Travelers. The guitarist and Colley played together often in the '90s, and the bassist and drummer have worked together in the Steel House trio with pianist Edward Simon. The group cut this date in a Tokyo studio after a three-night, six-set run at the city's Cotton Club…

On the cover of this album you can see a picture of New York taken in Hoboken, New Jersey where we recorded these tracks. To me it represents the beauty of a familiar place seen from a different perspective. I come from a small town in Austria called Judenburg. If my family when I moved to the next bigger city, Graz, it felt like the navel of the world. Graz is considered provincial for the Viennese.