by Ian Mann
April 19, 2012
/ ALBUM
"Wasted & Wanted" is arguably the group's most adventurous recording to date. [em} remain one of the world's best and most distinctive piano trios.
Michael Wollny’s
“Wasted & Wanted”
(ACT 9515-2)
One of my personal highlights at the 2011 London Jazz Festival was the brilliant performance at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho by the German piano trio featuring pianist Michael Wollny, bassist Eva Kruse and drummer Eric Schaefer. The trio made their ACT début in 2004 with the hard hitting “Call It ”, which adapted a broadly groove based approach inspired in part by the methods of the label’s flagship act E.S.T.
The album was a critical and commercial success and the trio consolidated their position with 2006’s “2” before adopting a more lyrical approach for “ 3” (2007).
The group nearly split up at this point as Kruse took time out to start a family and Wollny developed a parallel solo career releasing the solo piano albums “Hexentanz” and “Wunderkammer” plus duo and trio recordings with saxophonist Heinz Sauer and fellow pianist Joachim Kuhn. Following this hiatus returned in style with “ Live”, a dynamic concert set recorded at the 2010 JazzBaltica festival in Salzau. This saw the band returning to the intense, high energy style of their first two albums and attracted considerable critical acclaim.
Last year’s London Jazz Festival performance featured items from the live recording plus several newer compositions which are now included on this stunning new record. I’m rather perplexed by the re-styling of the group as Michael Wollny’s as I’ve always considered the trio to be one of the most democratic of units. All three musicians contribute material and the level of interaction between the three is often remarkable. I can only assume that it’s a marketing ploy designed to capitalise on Wollny’s solo success and perhaps clear up any confusion about the trio’s identity. It’s certainly not the case that the redesigned is any less of a band with John Fordham of The Guardian awarding a rare five stars in his review of their most recent London performance at Ronnie Scott’s as part of Jazzwise Magazine’s 15th anniversary celebrations.
“Wasted & Wanted” maintains the energy levels of the live recording with Wollny emphasising the importance of the breaking of musical rules and the blurring of stylistic boundaries. He once stated that wanted to have “some punk in their jazz” and the trio’s iconoclastic approach certainly reflects this, but this punk spirit is in turn applied to the classical canon with “Wasted & Wanted” containing no less then three radical interpretations of classical works by Mahler, Schubert and Luciano Berio. There’s also a remarkable remake of fellow countrymen Kraftwerk’s “Das Modell” plus a selection of excellent original pieces from the three group members.
The album commences with the energy of Wollny’s pounding title track. Rock rhythms and a catchy hook invite comparisons with the UK’s Neil Cowley Trio. Schafer then brings hip hop inspired rhythms to the trio’s astonishing makeover of the “Trauermarsch” (funeral march) from Mahler’s
Symphony No. 5. Arranged by Schaefer the piece also includes samples of strings and choir inserted by producer Guy Sternberg who asserts a considerable influence over the recording and can almost be considered an auxiliary member.
Kruse’s “Metall” is a highly sophisticated piece of writing building from Wollny’s tinkling piano arpeggios and Schaefer’s appropriately metallic percussion to embrace edgy grooves and soaring arco bass before coming almost full circle. It’s a piece that builds a lot of information and stylistic diversity into its sub four minutes duration. {em] compositions tend to be lean and mean with no note or beat wasted but they still have much to communicate.
Schaefer’s “Blank” retains the focus with Kruse again excelling with the bow, her sound sometimes by manipulated by producer Guy Sternberg into E.S.T. style electronic shapes. Meanwhile Schaefer drums with power and precision as Wollny moves up and down the gears at the piano on this slow burning, highly effective groove based track.
“Wasted & Wanted” finds the trio experimenting with sound more than ever before. Schaefer’s “Kulintang” features his playing of the instrument of the same name, a configuration of small gongs to be found in various South East Asian cultures. Elements of this were apparent in his set up at the Pizza Express show and the resultant sound is both exotic and delightful to Western ears. The delicate, metallic sound of the kulintang permeates throughout this atmospheric track, a counterpoint to Wollny’s lyrical piano and Kruse’s rich, underpinning bass.
The third of three consecutively scheduled Schaefer pieces sees the trio extending their sonic experiments further with Wollny making use of the spinet on “Cembalo Manifeszt”. The piece is a fascinating blend of old and new with the spinet’s delicately, high pitched tones ingeniously juxtaposed with powerful rock and hip hop style grooves. It’s clever and inventive yet eminently accessible.
Wollny’s dream like solo piano version of Berio’s “Wasserklavier” is something of a palette cleanser after the sonic experimentation of the three Schaefer pieces. This is followed by the trio’s arrangement of “Ihr Bild”, the Heinrich Heines poem set to music by Franz Schubert in 1828. The group’s arrangement is initially spacious with plenty of room for Kruse’s resonant bass but as the piece builds in intensity the hard grooving of Wollny and Schaefer transforms the piece into something highly contemporary. are routinely compared to The Bad Plus, a group known for their radical reinventions of pop material. Here Wollny and his colleagues take something of the American group’s methodology and apply it to the classical repertoire with equally effective results.
Kruse’s “Nr. 10” is jagged and brittle but always full of interest with Wollny frequently reaching under the lid of the piano to strike the strings. Parts of it sounds improvised with the members of the group thinking on their feet.
One of the highlights of the LJF show was the trio’s reworking of Kraftwerk’s the model, the three young Germans picking up on the motorik rhythms of vintage Krautrock and making them their own. Here Wollny sketches a delicate solo piano opening before the accelerated 4/4 rhythm kicks in and the energy levels steadily accrue culminating in Wollny’s thunderous block chords as Kruse and Schaefer pound away for all they’re worth. It’s the kind of cover The Bad Plus would be proud of but with a distinctive Germanic twist.
After reaching this peak of energy Wollny’s two closing pieces lower the temperature somewhat with the album eventually closing album on an elegiac note. “Dario” is a two part composition featuring eerie melodica from Schaefer and tinkling glockenspiel and melancholy arco bass from Kruse before a sudden gear shift which sees the piece finish with a blistering passage of percussive grooves. Once again all this in less than four minutes.
Wollny’s “Whiteout” was a distinctive feature at both of the group’s recent London shows, a piece written for the white keys of the piano only. It’s appropriately minimalistic with Wollny’s keyboards accompanied by the ethereal tinkle of tuned percussion, almost subliminal mallet rumbles and the rich, cello like sound of Kruse’s bowed bass. Slowly gathering momentum the piece acquires a quietly anthemic quality as Schaefer adds cymbal shimmers and sparse tom beats to the mix. It’s a richly atmospheric piece of music that had the unusual effect of reducing a Ronnie Scott’s crowd to reverential silence.
“Wasted & Wanted” is perhaps the group’s most adventurous recording to date with Sternberg’s sonic manipulation judiciously increasing the trio’s
range. It’s the first time that they’ve worked with an outside producer and the strategy is totally validated by the results. I’ve written in the past about ‘s “Gothic tinge”, a darkness in the trio’s music that has its origins in the classically trained Wollny’s love of Gothic imagery, horror movies and film noir. It’s something that helps to give the group a distinctly “German” identity but with Sternberg in charge is less pronounced this time round.
Instead the group focus on their country of origin by their choice of cover material, particularly the Kraftwerk, although the music Mahler and Schubert, both Austrians, can be considered to come from the Germanic tradition. All this plus ‘s dazzling musicianship helps to make them one of the world’s best and most distinctive jazz piano trios and a considerable draw on the European concert and festival circuit.