Act Music

Ghana has been considered a land of storytellers for many centuries. But this great tradition does not necessarily have to be continued with words or the voice. Peter Somuah spins storytelling with his instrument: as a young trumpet player, he embarks on a fascinating search for identity between the highlife of his homeland, his idol Miles Davis and the cosmopolitan musical language of his new home Holland. This journey is his "Letter To The Universe".

East Forest has a natural talent for creating soundscapes that speak to the heart. Lush and emotional, they are designed to engender deep spiritual experiences. But it would be a mistake to think of East Forest as just a musical project.

Krzysztof Komeda has legendary status in Polish jazz, and was also one of the pioneers of European jazz. His wider fame resides largely in his work as a film composer – he wrote the soundtracks for all of Roman Polanski’s early films, notably "Dance of the Vampires" and "Rosemary's Baby". Komeda died in 1969, tragically early, at the age of just 37, but left a hugely influential body of work. Joachim Kühn, now a jazz piano icon in his own right, is a great admirer of Komeda, whom he met in person in Warsaw in 1965. As part of the Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic concert series, curated by Siggi Loch, he performed a major tribute concert to him on 14 October 2022, at which he played in three formats: solo piano, with his New Trio, and alongside Poland’s Atom String Quartet.

Generally speaking, a souvenir is a token of remembrance, a symbol of a past that is meaningful to its creator, dedicatees, addressees, and the whole community for which it is created. A souvenir may quote, recall, evoke, imply, et al., and the realization of these potentialities is always strictly connected with the what, the how, and the why of its existence, structure, and creative/manufacturing process. As such, along the centuries and throughout the cultures of the world, the souvenir has been actualized, experienced, shared, and interpreted as a personal keepsake, a moral memento, a commercial reminder, a socio-political narrative, and so on.

It is hard to believe it as one listens to this album: pianist Vincent Meissner is just twenty years old. The drummer in the trio, incidentally, is even younger. Recognition for this major talent has started to grow, however, and the prizes are rolling in.

An important new recording, ‘The Spirit of Love’, featuring chamber music and songs by British composer Alisa Dixon (1932-2017), will be released on the Resonus Classics label on 22nd August.

From the moment Arthur Fiedler lifted his baton in 1964 to lead the Boston Pops in a wild, surprisingly effective arrangement of "I Want To Hold Your Hand," symphony orchestras have tried to include Beatles music in their "pops" song bags. The trouble is, the Beatles' brilliant original recordings are so indelibly embedded in our collective mental hard drives that they are a tough act to follow – despite the high quality of the songs on their own merits, despite the good intentions of those who pay them homage. So it is with Erich Kunzel, the Cincinnati Pops and the British early music/classical/pop vocal sextet The King's Singers – an undoubtedly sincere labor that gets it all wrong. From this album, a visitor from Saturn would get the idea that the Beatles' music was all about pretty tunes and satin-smooth harmonies.

"As an improviser, you often find that it‘s not the compositions themselves you‘re playing, but your own memories of them. And as these memories come back to you in the moment, they assert their continuing existence in the here and now," says Michael Wollny. In other words, songs are like ghosts. Wollny‘s new album "Ghosts" is a gathering of some of the ghosts that regularly haunt him. Typically for Wollny, they range from classics like Franz Schubert's "Erlkönig" to jazz standards, film music, songs with a certain fragility by Nick Cave, say, or the band Timber Timbre, and also include his own darkly evocative original compositions.

The 2022 Jazzfest Berlin performance by revered, iconoclastic reedist Peter Brötzmann, Moroccan Gnaoua adept Majid Bekkas playing the two-stringed, camelskin-backed guembre, and Chicago-bred drummer Hamid Drake, documented as Catching Ghosts, is historic.