[Repost, after it got lost during the last website crash]

During the whole week I wanted to write this blog post, but never got around doing it.

About two weeks ago I stumbled about a CD called HA!, released this month as part of the “Young German Jazz” series of music label ACT. It’s the first CD of Jörg Brinkmann Trio. Jörg Brinkmann plays cello, Oliver Maas piano and fender rhodes, Dirk-Peter Kölsch drums, glockenspiel, objects. The description on the website sounded interesting and I looked for live concerts. The next one was in their home town Bochum, just a few kilometres away. And the venue was quite interesting.

The concert took place in a kind of big garage below a railway track, called ROTTSTR 5. With it’s arched ceiling it looked like a small hangar. While waiting for the concert to start you could even hear and feel the rumbling of a train or two. Fortunately there were no trains during the concert The audience was about 50 or 60 people, entrance fee was 5€. It was a great experience, the whole concert had a nice improvised feeling. I’m not very good at describing music. Therefore here’s a quote from the web site which fits rather well:

[…] which explicitly combine the unconventionally modern with a taste of nostalgia. […] Sometimes, as in “Hühner–Walzer” (Chicken Waltz), it sounds a little like the miniatures of a Yann Tiersen. Sometimes there is a sense of shady lounge music; here a scratching cello and prepared piano sound something like the sound track to a crime thriller, as in “Mister Nice”. “September” is a wild, arpeggio-filled, singing ballad, whereas in “Rapunzel” a hard bop line suddenly breaks out. On “Live in Hamburg” a little melody leaps up on top of an authoritative ska rhythm, and with its old-school-rhodes-sound, “Klassentreff” (Class Meeting) classic jazz-rock comes back with a vengeance.