Georg Gräwe Quintet

Georg Gräwe Quintet
Pink Pong
Corbett vs Dempsey CD 093

Georg Gräwe/Fred Lonberg Holm/Frank Gratkowski
Trilinear PolarityFundacja Sluchaj FSR 13/2022

Part of the second generation of German creative musicians, pianist Georg Gräwe has had a varied career over the years as part of large and small bands with international associates. The depth of his skills as player, composer and arranger in these suddenly reissued or previously unknown sessions.

Barely 20 Gräwe jumped into the Free Jazz fray with New Movements, a live Berlin session which featured his working group at the time: trumpeter Horst Grabosch, saxophonist Harald Dau, bassist Hans Schneider and drummer Achim Krämer. With substantially divergent sounds, the same band is on 1977’s Pink Pong. Since then, the pianist has been part of groups such as GrubenKlangOrchester and a long-standing trio with Ernst Reijseger and Gerry Hemingway. This connection with cellists has continued, with 2004’s Trilinear Polarity featuring American cellist Fred Lonberg Holm, along with clarinetist Frank Gratkowski, with whom Gräwe first worked with in the early 1990s.
Very much on the border of FreeBop and FreeJazz, the personnel on the first two CDs was negotiating its own identity. While Dau and Grabosch have since then been part of larger ensembles like the Berlin Jazz Workshop Orchestra, Schneider and Krämer have stuck closer to improv, including working with Stefan Keune. Schneider has also worked with Gratkowski, while Lonberg-Holm has played internationally with numerous others.

Three extended tracks on the first CD find the quintet putting its own stamp on Ecstatic Jazz, with the expected reed split tones and slurs, bugling brass squeaks, staccato string slices and drum rumbles. But by the time the extended title track slows down, idiosyncrasies such as Grabosch’s pinched straight-ahead portamento, Dau’s moderated tongue flutters and Gräwe’s back-and-forth formalized comping dig holes into New Thing orthodoxy. The pianist’s toughened slides coupled with the bassist’s sul tasto runs and prickly soprano saxophone tuns introduce modal and contrapuntal suggestions, with the curved interaction producing a linear flow. Mid-range and quicker, the program maintains this duality during the rest of the set, with wider coloration and harder processes propelled and overcome. Krämer’s slaps and paradiddles plus horn obbligatos in mid-range timbral lockstep continue to emphasize broken octave harmony over dissidence, Although the next tune climaxes with Jazz Messengers-like stop-time, “V 626” is mostly the pianist’s show. Tempered freneticism that’s one-third ragtime, one-third bop and one-third something else finds him examining a collection of tones from all over his instrument., bending them every which way and going on to the next. Bass strum interjections and half-vale brass effects slide the session to a notable end.

Pink Pong’s 11 selections move further away from Free Jazz and more towards POMO Free Music. Before the piano-bass-drums start churning out power pops on the fugue-like “Braunsscheich”, stop start emphasis and off-kilter horn parts seem to have implanted Cool Jazz tropes into the already variegated interface. Pushing forward with renal reed honks, drum pops and metronomic keyboard lines, the others draw back on the CD’s second half to open up space for Schneider. His sul tasto rubs and swells on “Approximated” are also approximated by continuous bubbling triplets from the trumpeter, whereas focused pizzicato plucks on the title track are matched with keyboard asides, preceding a concentrated upwards slinking climax. The bassist’s slow echoes on “Gerlinde-Gesagt” serve to rearrange the preceding group miasma into a striding pulse. During the final sequences his indefatigable pacing coupled with the horns’ doubled scoops, smears and screeching help define the set as something different while still lacking a definite identity.

Skip forward a quarter century and the pianist has worked out his unique style in such a way as to dovetail into the expositions from Lonberg-Holm and Gratkowski. Before the trio members entangles themselves in the four-part title suite, the define their parameters with expressive stops or spiky glissandi from the cellist; slide-whistle-like squeaks or dark rumbling snorts from Gratkowski’s three clarinets; and intermittent or player-piano-like continuous chording from Gräwe. The stops, slurs and spawls are stretched and blended in diverse manners during “Trilinear Polarity”. Adding a light swing to the piano’s iterations, Gräwe manages to herd reed slurs and whines, jagged sul tasto and thumping cello projections into a horizontal challenge that widens the interface as it moves forward. Not only is a groove established, but a pyramid structure is also established with clarinet on top, cello in the middle and piano on the bottom. Auguring the third and fourth parts of the improvisation, the suggestions are put into practice at that point. While no one would confuse this for a Benny Goodman trio the near-swing puts the advanced techniques into bolder relief. If keyboard pulses move from fragility to frenetic, then the underlying groove helps to link banjo-like cello twangs and nephritic reed bites with intermittent piano pulses that slide past inchoate to interaction. Individuality is maintained, but not at the expense of comprehension. A continuation “Trilinear Polarity pt4” undulates as rugged string bites, music-box-like keyboard plinks and repeated reed trills become a prestissimo showcase which moves forward as it confirms timbral melding.

Gräwe’s full musical definition has come in the 21st Century as this last CD confirms. Yet the first two offer glimpses of how his cerebral experiments led to this.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: New: 1.New Movements 2. Green Screen 3. V 626

Personnel: New: Horst Grabosch (trumpet); Harald Dau (soprano and tenor saxophone); Georg Gräwe (piano); Hans Schneider (bass) and Achim Krämer (drums)

Track Listing: Pink: 1. New Time 2. Hordel 3. Low Noise 4. Braunsscheich 5. More Noise 6. Fusion 7. Approximated 8. Pink Pong 9. Gerlinde-Gesagt 10. Holloposz 11. Moongun

Personnel: Pink: Horst Grabosch (trumpet); Harald Dau (soprano and tenor saxophone); Georg Gräwe (piano); Hans Schneider (bass) and Achim Krämer (drums)

Track Listing: Trilinear: 1. Isodynamics 2. Mittenpunkt 3. Trilinear Polarity pt1 4. Trilinear Polarity pt2 5. Trilinear Polarity pt3 6. Trilinear Polarity pt4

Personnel: Trilinear: Frank Gratkowski (clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet); Georg Gräwe (piano); and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello)