Wolfgang Muthspiel CD reviewed (original) (raw)
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Wolfgang Muthspiel CD reviewed
On his new record, the Austrian guitarist has an unbeatable band interpreting his lyrical original music.
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Published Nov 07, 2016 • 3 minute read
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Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel has just released his latest record, Rising Grace, on the ECM label. -
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Rising Grace (ECM Records)
Wolfgang Muthspiel
On this side of the Atlantic Ocean, jazz fans are not as familiar with Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel as perhaps we should be.
However, the names of his fellow musicians on his new ECM Records album Rising Grace should ring a few loud bells. Joining Muthspiel are pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier, drummer Brian Blade and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.
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What are the connections between Muthspiel and this American dream team? It turns out that the Vienna-based guitarist, 51, played with Grenadier more than 20 years ago when the guitarist, then a Berklee College of Music grad based in New York, in Gary Burton’s band along wiht the bassist. Blade too has some history with Muthspiel going back to the late 1990s, and indeed, the drummer and Grenadier are on Muthspiel’s 2014 trio record on ECM, Driftwood.
Rising Grace, released late last month, enlarges upon the intimate music heard on Driftwood, adding Akinmusire’s burnished, beguiling horn and Mehldau’s always incisive soloing and deeply empathetic accompaniment to enliven a program that stresses Muthspiel originals_._
The new disc is definitely a jazz quintet outing, but it’s less bound by certain jazz quintet orthodoxies. For one thing, there’s the less common trumpet-guitar “front line,” although Muthspiel’s canny arrangements do plug him at times into the rhythm section.
Meanwhile, while some songs feature a conventional sequence of soloists, it’s also common for Muthspiel, Akinmusire and Mehldau to share the soloing space as they weave melodies together. That’s a tricky feat that requires deep listening and the ability to find the best way for one’s playing to fit into the greater whole. Of course, Muthspiel and company consistently pull it off, in particular on the disc’s first two tracks, Rising Grace and Intensive Care, which are coloured by Muthspiel’s acoustic guitar and are expansive and broadly melancholy.
That last adjective might come as no surprise if you esteem ECM recordings for their moodiness and plangent lyricism. The rhythm team of Mehldau, Grenadier and Blade can certainly go in this direction, even if this is the same trio that backed Joshua Redman on his 1998 album Timeless Tales (For Changing Times), a groovier, poppier and more rhythmically explicit record than Rising Grace.
But there are more forthright songs on Muthspiel’s CD, including the uplifting 7/4 tune Triad Song and Mehldau’s lilting original Wolfgang’s Waltz. Both features Mehldau and Muthspiel soloing mightily, over floating, skipping accompaniment by Grenadier and Blade.
The charming, rootsy Father And Sun splits its melody between Grenadier and Akinmusire before the bassist and then Muthspiel take punchy, charged solos. Then, Akinmusire casts a mysterious spell and Mehldau is with him every inch of the way. Here’s a live and thrillingly extended version of that piece:
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Superonny has a rocking tinge and then grows more elliptical as Akinmusire, Mehldau, Grenadier and Blade enaging in some wide-roaming interactive improvising. Boogaloo grooves, although not to that ’60s, Sidewinders beat — Blade is too much his own man, and a painter at the drums, to fall in line.
Den Wheeler, Den Kenny is a tribute to the late Kenny Wheeler, of course, and the much-missed trumpeter and composer could not have asked for a better one. There’s a beautiful, shimmering rubato first act, borne aloft by Akinmusire, naturally, then some gentle grooving, and at then a crystalline passage by Mehldau, unaccompanied, leads into the last word by the band.
After that piece, the album’s final two tracks feel like a denouement. At less than 90 seconds long, Ending Music feels like an reverberant, outro-like snippet. Oak, is a slow, stately closer.
Sonically ravishing and filled with profound, singular music that speaks beautifully of communion, Rising Grace will reward your full attention, over and over.
phum@postmedia.com
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