| No, Martin Küchen isn’t a composer of programmatic music, conceived only to accompany silent movies, dancers or stage actors, but even if this wonderful Swedish saxophonist also had made music for theatre, dance and cinema, his main work in the fields of jazz and free improvised music has as a personal characteristic the particularity of telling stories. Or, at least, of presenting specific situations you can visualize. Each recording of the several projects lead by Küchen is, somehow, a narrative, and the new Trespass Trio album, “Bruder Beda”, is no exception. We’re told about a relative of his, Ernst Gerson, a Jewish German veteran of the World War I who became a Catholic monk, adopting the name Bruder Beda. When he decided to return to the secular world, when both the Nazis and the Zionist movement were growing, big troubles waited for him. The music has a narrative drive, telling us a story without words but with emotional depth. It’s like a film with sounds, enabling our imagination to build the details. There’s intense moments and there’s space, with the interposed silences adding more unquietness to the flux of events. Always combining economy of notes and restraint of expression, only going to the extremes when it’s relevant and necessary, this is another great accomplishment by Trespass Trio, With other words; Martin Küchen, Per Zanussi and Raymond Strid are back! Don’t miss this one: the sax, the bass and the drumkit cry, shout and sigh as if they were alive… Per Zanussi always present, an true anchor, he stands like an old beautiful tree in the middle of a newly erected garden... and Raymond Strid , a master of timbre and dýnamics, is sometimes forceful, other times delicate, but always strangely precise in everything he does. Highly recommended. |