Reviews that mention Ben Abarbanel-Wolff
July 13, 2009
Suites
Jazz Werkstatt JW 054
Looking for a personalized unbeatable definition of post-modern music? How about wanting to experience the compositions and arrangements of someone who has taken the mid-sized band concepts of Charles Mingus into the 21st Century? Guess what, the same person typifies both. It’s Berlin-based pianist/composer Ulrich Gumpert. Suites by his Workshop Band – note the echo of Mingus’ Jazz Workshop – is yet another exciting example of his talent.
For years a member and chief composer of Zentralquartett, the former East Germany’s most accomplished small group, Gumpert had been simultaneously writing and recording with a top-flight 12-piece Workshop Band. Suites however highlights the 63-year-old Gumpert’s accommodation with the generation of improvisers that followed his own, plus recognition of the economies of scale. The now eight-piece Workshop Band is populated by some of the most accomplished young Berlin-based improvisers including reedist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff, who works with bassist Sirone; drummer Michael Grenier who plays with saxophonist – and Zentralquartett member – Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky; Monks Casino bassist Jan Roder; and reedist Michael Thieke, part of the well-regarded Clarinet Trio. MORE
April 4, 2005
And Now
Pi Recordings PI 13
SIRONE
Concord
NotTwo MW 751-2
Picking things up from when they were “so rudely interrupted” 27 years ago, as the expression has it, the members of The Revolutionary Ensemble (RE) got together for concerts and recordings in mid-2004.
Their appearance at New York’s Vision Festival and this recording show that they’ve lost nothing in the intervening quarter century plus. In fact, the close cooperation between the three provide the sort of sympathetic interchange violinist Leroy Jenkins, sometimes, and percussionist Jerome Copper most of the time, has lacked in solo projects. MORE