Pianist Julia Hülsmann and singer Theo Bleckmann, in a first – and long-awaited – collaborative recording, celebrate the “unsung Weill” alongside the master’s best-loved works including “Mack The Knife”, “Speak Low” and “September Song”, adding also Julia’s settings of Walt Whitman, with whom Kurt Weill felt an affinity. The project came together at the instigation of the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau in 2013 and since then has gained new life on the road and been fine-tuned in this studio recording made in Oslo in June 2014 with Manfred Eicher as producer. It marks a musical advance for the Hülsmann group at a number of levels, and these recastings of Weill open up new imaginative possibilities for the players. English trumpeter and flugelhornist Tom Arthurs, who made his debut with Hülsmann on In Full View is fully integrated on A Clear Midnight.
Since they started in the early 1970’s, ECM has been giving the world one excellent jazz piano disc after another–significant names include Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, and Paul Bley, more recently Anat Fort, Bo Stenson, and now Julia Hulsmann. Leading a trio on her ECM debut, THE END OF SUMMER, Hulsman displays a graceful, muted, and melancholy air. In the manner of Stenson and Bley, Hulsmann expresses maximum emotion and mood using the fewest (but well-placed) notes. Unlike the aforementioned gentlemen however, Hulsmann favors almost folk-like, affable, and concise melodies. Her bassist and drummer seem subdued at times, but they’re constantly lending the tunes a sense of forward motion.
Not Far From Here introduces award-winning pianist Julia Hülsmann’s new group in which her long-time working trio with Marc Muellbauer and Heinrich Köbberling (together now for 17 years) is expanded to a quartet with the addition of Berlin-based saxophonist Uli Kempendorff. In Kempendorff’s playing “both suppleness and unruliness are in ample supply”, Jazzthetik has noted, and he brings a fresh energy to the Hülsmann group concept. Each member of the quartet contributes original compositions, with Julia herself penning five new pieces for the album.
When Julia Hülsmann was little, there was a memorable concert on the television. A man was sitting alone at the piano singing wonderful things with a uniquely appalling voice. Julia Hülsmann found it particularly appealing… And she was especially delighted that, by coincidence, her parents had bought this very man’s sheet music. This encouraged her to sit down at the piano at home and practise for the first time her classical studies. They were of course the songs of Randy Newman. It was the beginning of a long love affair.
Julia Hülsmann has herself in the mean time become a well-known pianist. In 2003 she made the recording "Scattering Poems" with her own trio and Norwegian singer Rebekka Bakken. The release was a special success with public and critics alike…
It is difficult to imagine two greater opposites. On the one hand, Jazz, the rough companion who made ends meet in the big cities of the 20th century. On the other, Emily Dickinson, the quiet poet from a Calvinist family, who spent all of her life in the rural community of Amherst, Massachusetts. When Dickinson died at the age of 56 in 1886, jazz had not been born yet. It was no more than a dark premonition, lingering in the dank swamps of the Mississippi delta.
Do they go together? Without doubt. But to achieve this union requires a unique talent. Great musicianship. A feel for words, images, and sounds. It requires the ability to invent tunes that linger in the ear and move the heart. Only then can we fully appreciate the brittle, secretive art of Emily Dickinson…
On The Next Door Julia Hülsmann returns with the quartet from 2019’s Not Far From Here, and presents her unique pianistic voice in a varied programme of almost exclusively original music, composed by herself and her colleagues – tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, Marc Muellbauer on double bass and drummer Heinrich Köbberling. A deep respect for the jazz tradition, as cultivated in the post-bop and modal jazz of the 60s, permeates this session and, with the quartet’s modern twist, sets the stage for highly expressive soloing and profound interplay.
After two acclaimed trio albums pianist Julia Hülsmann proposes a different project for her third ECM release “In Full View”, motivated initially by a performance by Berlin-based, English trumpet player Tom Arthurs: “I found the music so beautiful that I asked him on the spot to collaborate…” After first rehearsals had established musical compatibility, Hülsmann called upon the services of her trusted rhythm section of Marc Muellbauer (double bass) and Heinrich Köbberling, but a vocalist was no longer needed. Thus the Julia Hülmann Trio became the Julia Hülsmann Quartet – with a prominent role for Tom Arthurs as strong new frontline voice that not only inspires Julia Hülsmann as player and arranger, but also had a stimulating effect on the composing activities within the quartet, with all members bringing compositions to the table.