Second of three evenings at Cologne Jazz Week
I started trying to remember good quotes about lightness, and there was a reason. W.B.Yeats wrote “tread softly because you tread on my dreams ” and there’s a Sonny Rollins liner note where he says “Live light on the planet, my sister and brother”. I was trying to sum up what it was about pianist Rainer Böhm’s playing that I really liked. It is the fact that his touch last night at the Loft could be so ineffably gentle, I was wondering if there is another pianist anywhere who does that quite so well. There were a couple of endings where he and all the others made a virtue of trying to get closer and closer to the border of silence. He and Seamus Blake were doing a call-and-response with filigree phrases that were getting ever softer and gentler. That really was something very special.
The other players in his trio, Arne Huber on bass and Jonas Burgwinkel on drums, know exactly how to aid and abet him when he heads off in that direction. The odd-meter ‘Eibohphobie’ (a palindrome to describe a phobia of palindromes, sic!) opened the second half and served as a reminder of quite how precise, controlled, communicative Jonas Burgwinkel’s drumming is – one starts to take for granted how good he is. Arne Huber whom I don’t remember hearing before also seems a very classy and unflappable player.
The programme was made up entirely of Böhm’s compositions. From the evidence of this performance, Seamus Blake, who confirmed that he has moved to Cologne from the Netherlands in the past few months, seems to be thriving in the musical company he has found himself. He has unbelievably impressive virtuosity and speed of thought, but it always seem incredibly natural and what the music demands, rather than trying to prove anything.
I checked a couple of facts with Rainer Böhm at the end of the evening, and couldn’t resist asking if he had ever been a student of John Taylor. His face lit up : “Yes, for two years.” It was a reminder of how important JT’s influence through his class in Cologne was.
The Loft is a small club where the music is the main thing. The attention to detail, the quality of the sound make it an ideal place to eavesdrop on very fine musicians creating magic in the moment and doing it as quietly as they dare. This Lightness was more than bearable. It was delightful.
