September is a duet recording by reeds player Friedemann Matzeit and pianist Carsten Daerr. You might call it a “recital” – there’s a rather classical feel to the music, and even “Thinx,” based on “All the Things You Are,” comes off as indebted in equal measure to Chopin. The music is graceful and by no means stiffly formal; some tracks are so soothing and euphonious that they verge on mere lollipops, but there are also darker moments, notably Daerr’s tribute to the late Kenny Kirkland. Matzeit rarely seizes the foreground, and this really feels more like the pianist’s album – the fact that Daerr opens virtually all the tunes alone before Matzeit joins in is a tip-off. This is in many ways a lovely and accomplished album, but it sounds superficial beside the work of someone like Simon Nabatov.

Henning Berg is a highly fluent, no-tricks kind of trombonist – he avoids sound effects and multiphonics – and his solo work has a gratifying shapeliness that compensates for the slight lack of drama. Mìnnola is smart mainstream jazz, placed a little out of the ordinary by the group’s sympathetic interplay and the strong compositions. Complex time-signatures, different simultaneous layers of rhythmic activity, subtle gradations of time-feel from the barely-implied to the heavily insistent – these are all staples of contemporary jazz, and Berg touches on everything from Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet to current players like Osby and Moran. But there’s no trace of pastiche here, and on occasion the results are genuinely compelling. “It’s You or No One,” where Soll’s out-of-sync chords toll like distant church bells over tumultuous activity from his bandmates, is among the most striking recorded versions of the standard. “Stablemates” is even stranger, and nearly as good: the head is at first so abbreviated that they seem to be playing only every other bar of the tune; as the performance heats up it resolves into a hardswinging 7/4. The stealthy, slow-burn approach Berg takes to these two standards carries over to his own originals – on “Summer Samba für die dunklen Herrn,” for instance, it takes quite time for any kind of samba rhythm to surface. The album’s impact is slightly hampered by the second-rate studio sound, but it’s nonetheless well worth hearing for its best tracks.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, July 2004