Markus Stockhausen, the son of the revered composer Karlkheinz Stockhausen, plays trumpet and flugelhorn and Florian Weber plays piano on Alba, a refreshing exercise released earlier this year. The pair honed skills as members of Markus’s world music sextet, Eternal Voyage, before performing duo concerts together, one in their hometown of Cologne, followed by a `mini tour’ around Munich.
Initially, theirs was an electronic experimentation, driven by Stockhausen, until Weber argued successfuly that the duo sounded better acoustically. So here you get the raw, organic product of two great musical imaginations exploring a series of moody landscapes. The opener, a thing of shimmering beauty entitled What Can I Do for You features Weber strumming the piano strings, before muted flugelhorn enters. It’s introspective and quiet as a glacier at rest, but with the sun shining bright on the chilly expanses. For there is palpable warmth most of the time.
What Can I Do for You? honours piano legend John Taylor, Weber’s first piano teacher, recalled by his alumnus in accompanying publicity. `` 'What Can I Do for You` was always the first question he (Taylor) asked when I came to a lesson, which I realised meant: `I don’t have anything to say, except in combination with whatever you would like to do.’
Weber sees this approach as testament to a lack of ego on Taylor’s part and his own aspiration is that the listener senses similar sublimation of the ego on the new record. There are improvised pieces, such as the charming Ishtar which began the session. In the case of Ishtar, Stockhausen followed his father’s belief that there should be no musical pre-agreement. “There’s no tune. Nothing. And this is sometimes when things really happen, when you become a channel of something.”
There are also actual ready-made tunes, notably Mondtraum, part of a commission undertaken by Stockhausen for a nine-piece children’s orchestra. Synergy Melody is wistful like a ballad, while Resonances is a curiously halting flugelhorn piece which depends on silence as much as music for its effect. The shortest track, it runs to just over two minutes.
Emergenzen is subtle and complex, while Surfboard is a delightful thing, built on a series of energetic piano runs, much like a pianist, well, trying to stay up on a surfboard, as his left hand and right hand do two different things. Recommended.
Paddy Kehoe
