The times when free jazz, similar to the so-called new classical music, was regarded as a bailout, which caused empty concert halls, are over. Today free jazz, whose name goes back to an LP by Ornette Coleman from 1960, is widely regarded as one of the numerous expressive possibilities of jazz, and concert organizers are putting bands like the Weidner Quartet in its current line up relaxed on their event program because of enormous demand. After all, since Coleman's wake-up call, half a century has gone into the country and for almost two generations, free jazz is the normal event.
At Pirouet Records, the fourth album with the alto saxophonist Christian Weidner has now been released with Every Hour of Light and Dark. The immediate predecessor of the current album, the second album with the same quartet lineup - Dream Boogie - was an enormous success on the part of the press and the public, thanks to it’s universally praised elegant, almost lively but never smooth style. No wonder that Pirouet has dared to put on another album with the musicians of this successful quartet.
All pieces of the current album come from the bandleader's ideas pool, who, among other things, already at an early stage of his career inspired by the German avant-garde legend Gunter Hampel, but also by Kenny Werner recognized that an independent musical language is the prerequisite for it free jazz man. Christian Weidner has already proved with his previous albums that he is able to create something dividing new. He demonstrates immediately with the first piece of the now presented album that his special gait can be refined by a few degrees. In Thetys, the delicate saxophone sound that Weidner conjures out of an instrument hovers in the impressionist world of a Claude Debussy, above the heads of his quartet colleagues, who create an irresistible foundation for this undisturbed, colorful sound world on which it flourishes and thrives.
The Weightlessness in Weightless, owed to the sweeping spaces between the notes, creates a magical soundscape, which seems timelessly stretched to infinity. Contrary to this, Dance Fantasm pushes forward energetically and rhythmically, before the mood returns to calm water after this cheerful but short interlude with In Memoriam. The circle closes by returning to the mood of the opening title in As Long as Now.
Der feinmaschig gewebte, farbige Sound des Quartetts wurde von Jason Seizer im Oberhachinger Tonstudio von Pirouet Records kongenial eingefangen und kompetent abgemischt.
The fine-meshed woven, colored sound of the quartet was congenially intercepted and competently mixed by Jason Seizer in the Oberhachinger recording studio of Pirouet Records.
Christian Weidner, alto saxophone
Achim Kaufmann, piano
Henning Sieverts, bass
Samuel Rohrer, drums