Presented by Earshot Jazz and Nonsequitur

Friday, April 9, 8 pm
Gebhard Ullman Clarinet Trio
Supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department and the Goethe Institute

JA Deane
Performing solo on a custom-made steel dulcimer (YouTube video)

Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Ave N, 4th Floor (Wallingford), Seattle

Tickets available at the door; sliding scale $5-$15

JA Deane

Dino J.A. Deane opens for the Gebhard Ullmann Clarinet Trio. Deane is a multi-instrumentalist who performed with John Zorn on his pioneering 1985 Cobra works, and has since worked extensively in trumpeter Butch Morris’ Conductions. Deane performs on trombone, synthesizers, live real-time samplers, and as he will here, a custom-made lap steel dulcimer. Deane’s music has investigated “the idea of a nonlinear multidimensional approach to music.” You will know exactly what he means when you hear his lap steel dulcimer layer melodic cells, prickly harmonics, and lush, bowed backgrounds through his assortment of electronics and live samplers. Highly recommended.

Gebhard Ullman Clarinet Trio

By Andrew Bartlett

New carpeting can lead to new questions: As the letter “R” came down from my shelving, the unit unbolted from the wall to allow new carpeting to go in, I wondered ‘wither ROVA?’ By the time “W” came around to show off the World Saxophone Quartet, I could only think that the all-reeds ensemble has retreated or been re-jiggered, perhaps tamped down by the pileup of recessions of which the jazz and improvising industry has felt the pressure. Just as new carpeting leads to new questions, though, spring leads to new discoveries and new opportunities. Chief among them is the chance to re-unite with the joys of an all-reeds ensemble, for German reedist Gebhard Ullmann’s Clarinet Trio plays the Chapel Performance Space on Friday, April 9.
Peripatetic as anyone playing improvised music today, Ullmann’s recordings alone could almost fill my “U” shelf. As a leader or co-leader, he’s busting up against 40 releases, a prodigious collection not often realized in the years since Blue Note’s peak. You may think that 40 recordings was a milestone reached out of economic necessity, a need to keep fresh product in consumers’ hands. But Ullmann is mono-syllabic when asked whether he cranks out albums to stay commercially viable: “No,” he says.

His motivation is the need to document the myriad ensembles he works in and around, a different form of material necessity perhaps. We exchanged emails as Ullmann returns from Egypt, and when asked about the origins of his different projects he responds: “Sometimes [it’s the] the musicians I work with, sometimes because I hear some music that gives me an idea, but sometimes just because I wake up and think ‘this could be something interesting to follow up’.”

Ullmann is a follow-up guy in a world of intermittency. We hear sounds in snippets, music in simple, single song structures, see acts come and go with astonishing speed. Yes, improvisers come up with different ideas constantly, never uttering the same exact thing twice, but the extended suite on Ullmann’s new Ballads and Related Objects comes back again and again to a series of firefly-like blinks, woody auras with sonic embers around the core combustion, as on “Variations on a Theme by Claude Debussy.” But the blinks go to yelps and clarinet shouts, barking that front-ends a chatter of clarinet/alto clarinet/bass clarinet, a recurring intensity.

Ullmann sees his follow-ups more concretely, too: “However I may seem to go in different directions at the same time, I follow up most of the formats for many years. Mostly more than a decade.” He’s right, too, bringing bands back time and again to explore the platform, to survey how the ensemble has grown as individuals. Ballads is the third session from Ullmann, Jurgen Kupke (clarinet), and Michael Thieke (alto clarinet), and as it’s released, Ullmann is also putting out another date with trombone madman, Steve Swell. The simply named Ullmann/Swell 4 spills out News? No News!, a rambunctious blurt of energetic action that records no distance or creative tension between Ullmann, a Berlin transplant who spends most of his time in Europe, and the New Yorker. One could imagine the difference in scenes, Europe more friendly to the avant-garde, North America more occupied by its love for the mainstream, its measuring of art by the yardstick of commerce. But Ullmann resists the characterization: “We are all trying to move forward musically and be able to survive. There is no difference,” he replies when questioned on how we differ on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

As for the Clarinet Trio, Ullmann infuses the music with what qualities he sees in Thieke and Kupke: “They bring in contemporary music, performance, jokes.” He’s emphatic about their musical potency, too: “You never heard a trio like this. It is at times more than a trio almost an orchestra. It is all of my woodwind music.” Like ROVA and the WSQ before them, the Trio does indeed encompass Ullmann’s many interests, his core. “Be it bands like Henry Cow or Can, be it the classical music I grew up with or the contemporary composed music I listened to as a teenager, composers like Lutoslawski, Henze or Stockhausen,” he comments, the woodwind elements didn’t exist. And even as some of Ullmann’s impetus was to “transpose to wind instruments” what he heard in music that did not feature them, he also knows that “minimalistic techniques and techniques using overtones, multiphonics and such [can] give the impression of more than 3 players,” enabling the ensemble to move beyond some of the limitations of the source material.

“Déjà Vu,” the thrice visited theme to Ballads exemplifies the impact Ullmann creates with a repeated motif, played on the three clarinets so closely that you almost hear a trumpet, a bass, a snare drum. It’s got tinges of Ravel and of Mingus/Dolphy even without pyrotechnics. And just as swiftly, the theme shifts to a more cavernous expanse where the clarinets exclaim in turn, marking each harmonic territory indelibly. This piece is key to Ullmann, from his tentet Ta Lam to the cluster effect of the Ullmann/Swell 4. He loves to mingle in the shared territory where the ear revels in the crowd of sounds, perhaps unable to disentangle one range from another. Nonetheless Ullmann continually returns to musical beacons, clarion calls from each player to claim his individual terrain.

As for the future? “I am experimenting with samplers, sound processing and such at the moment,” he says. And after his sojourn across North America he “will take a month off in May to work on a new program using these techniques.” Ullmann can animate things quickly and completely, as the Clarinet Trio shows. Catching it live will help determine the whereabouts of the improvising wind ensemble, quietly chugging along.