Album Notes

HEINER STADLER -- RETROSPECTION

STRUCTURAL CONCEPTS FROM EUROPEAN CLASSICAL TRADITIONS APPLIED TO THE VITALITY AND PERSONAL EXPRESSIVITY OF AMERICAN JAZZ

"...clicks as an absolute must for anyone who likes Dee Dee Bridgewater at all." -Eugene Chadbourne, Cadence

As composer, record producer and impresario, Heiner Stadler moves across the borders of Jazz, blues, world and classical and contemporary music with ease and skill. Written and recorded during a period of just over ten years from the early sixties to the mid-seventies, the music on Retrospection emphasizes classical and modern techniques set inside large scale structures within which improvisation plays an integral role. In this music, the tension between composition and improvisation, the fixed and the free, the intellectual and the spontaneous, the preordained and the unforeseen, is completely rethought and renegotiated in a process of composition, collaboration and realization. Featured performers on this record include a handful of top-notch musicians from the New York and German jazz scene.

Retrospection makes available, for the first time in one volume, DEE DEE BRIDGEWATER'S 6-minute tour de force on Lenore Kandel's poem "Love In The Middle Of The Air," combo tracks featuring trumpeter JIMMY OWENS, saxists JOE FARRELL and TYRONE WASHINGTON, trombonist GARNETT BROWN, pianists DON FRIEDMAN and STADLER himself, bassists REGGIE WORKMAN and BARRE PHILLIPS, drummers JOE CHAMBERS and BRIAN BRAKE; a previously unreleased suite for the NORTH GERMAN RADIO STATION BIG BAND with European improvisers MANFRED SCHOOF, GERD DUDEK, ALBERT MANGELSDORFF, and WOLFGANG DAUNER; and two sensitive performances by guitarist MARK ELF.

Like JAZZ ALCHEMY, re-issued last year on Labor (LAB 7024), and Stadler's seminal TRIBUTE TO MONK AND on the Tomato label, Retrospection revises definitions and provides new standards for the merging of jazz and contemporary composition. Together, these three albums air many of the fascinating experiments and exploits from the distinctive musical mind of Heiner Stadler.


REVIEW (All Music Guide)

Composer Heiner Stadler's arrangements use the very advanced harmonies of modern classical music while leaving space for avant-garde improvisations. "The Fugue #2" from December 1966 has some surprisingly adventurous solos from a sextet that includes trumpeter Jimmy Owens, tenor saxophonist Joe Farrell and trombonist Garnett Brown and a similar group from October 1973 (with Tyrone Washington in Farrell's place) is heard on "Pointed." Most remarkable is Dee Dee Bridgewater's hair-raising vocal on "Love in the Middle of the Air" which she performs in duet with bassist Reggie Workman. Actually the most rewarding piece is also the longest, the 291?2-minute "Clusterity" which utilizes an all-star European sextet plus the Northern German Radio big band. Cornetist Manfred Schoof and trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff take spectacular solos.
- Scott Yanow