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'Lo-Lee-Ta (Music on Nabokov)' by Franz Koglmann (Col-Legno, 2009)
Austrian trumpeter Franz Koglmann plays within a category of his own:
a sensitive intellectualist, an eclectist fusing classical music with
soundtrack and jazz, breaking the boundaries between music,
literature, theater and poetry, unafraid to explore new directions,
not always successful, mixing a kind of romantic German darkness of
approach with intimacy and drama, sweeping emotions with delicate
compositions. Half of his work I really can't listen to, the other
half is quite interesting and even beautiful. This album falls within
the latter category. It is structured around his quartet and duo
performances with pianist Wolfgang Mitterer. The quartet consists of
Tony Coe on clarinet and alto, Ed Renshaw on guitar and Peter Herbert
on bass, a band he's been performing and recording with quite
actively in the past years, and their interplay is really a treat.
The album is dedicated to Russian American author Vladimir Nabokov,
best known for his "Lolita", a wonderful stylist and explorer of
human emotions. No wonder Koglmann pays homage to him. The fourteen
tracks, of which 6 duets, demonstrate the leader's broad musical
baggage, and the band manages to keep it quite coherent in approach,
despite the variations in mood, now slow and sad, then sometimes even
joyful, and despite the variations in style, sounding very jazzy in a
traditional way, then avant-garde, or sometimes just sounding like
the musical accompaniement for a movie, which is actually the case
for the first piece, which is the "Love Theme" from Stanley Kubrick's
"Lolita". As usual, Koglmann's sense of style and structure go a
little bit at the expense of the emotional expressivity, but overall
it's one of his best albums so far.
http://tinyurl.com/qru7ge