Karl Off

Albert Mangelsdorff - Albert Mangelsdorff And His Friends (2017) {MPS 0211961MSW rec 1967-69}
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© 1967-69, 2017 MPS Records / Edel | 0211961MSW
Jazz / Post Bop / Progressive Jazz / Trombone

This album of duos stands out as one of a kind; recorded during a phase in which he began to consistently incorporate a freer musical language into his playing, and set within a constellation of diverse duo formations, there emerges an exciting portrait of the central figure in German jazz: Albert Mangelsdorff. With tongue in cheek – or better said – in mouthpiece, Mangelsdorff accompanies Don Cherry on a journey that culminates in a zany duel staged almost without instruments. With his close friend Elvin Jones, Mangelsdorff unfurls so many melodic and metric parameters that one could believe they are listening to a full combo that dissolves conventional time patterns into kaleidoscopic polyrhythms, whereas the colorful tonal confrontation between Karl Berger’s agile, inspired vibes and the questioning, challenging trombone stands out as a lesson in Avant-garde brainstorming.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding. The roles of Caesar and Sextus, moreover, are taken by men, and there is not a countertenor in sight.