Search - Urs Leimgruber, Marilyn Crispell, Fritz Hauser :: Behind the Night

With scant documentation of Urs Leimgruber available . . .

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 03/30/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

". . . one should jump at the chance to pick up anything by this giant of European free jazz. When it comes in such a remarkably compelling setting, acquisition becomes a no-brainer.Really, the brilliant, iconoclastic wind-meister Leimgruber in the company of giants Marilyn Crispel (piano) and Fritz Hauser (percussion) should at the least arouse curiosity--if not instant procurement-desire--in any knowledgeable jazz fan. Add wild cards Hildegard Kleeb and Elvira Plenar on various treated and untreated pianos, and you have an avant-garde outing of the first water.And the participants seldom fail to deliver at the absolute highest level. The thing that perhaps sets this disc apart from other out jazz excursions is not only its strange instrumentation (three pianos, wind, and percussion), but its oddly effective deployment of such weirdness: the participants find themselves in all sorts of odd deployments with their bandmates--duo, trio, quartet, and full-band settings. This makes for an endlessly shifting and entirely attractive soundscape and aural palette, unique in the history of New Music/out jazz recordings. Coruscating, brilliant, éclat-suffused musical dynamism of the highest accomplishment. Must be heard by anyone with even the slightest affinity for avant-garde jazz/New Music."