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![Touch the Light]( "Touch the Light")
Joachim Kühn
Joachim Kühn
Touch the Light
VÖ: 26.02.2021
Genre: Beliebte Alben, Piano Jazz
Joachim Kühn / piano
“Maybe when I’m ninety...?” When Siggi Loch first floated the idea that Joachim Kühn might like to make an album of ballads, the pianist’s response was typically jocular, even defiant. That initial resistance didn’t last long, however. Kühn, now in his mid-seventies, soon started to settle down at the fine Steinway in his home – he keeps it impeccably tuned – to switch on his DAT recorder, and set to work. “The advantage of being here at home in Ibiza is that I can simply make a re cording when I want to. When the feeling comes, I just re cord,” Kühn reflects.
Over a period of about fifteen months he sent a total of some forty individual tracks to Siggi Loch. He would often take pieces, re-think them, and end up sending off sever al different versions to Berlin. So what emerges on this new solo piano album “Touch the Light” is a distillation from those individual takes, all made on the same piano and in the same space. It flows extremely well as a coherent and delightful programme.
There are pieces here which re-visit im portant phases in a fascinating and varied career. “A Remark You Made” by Joe Zawinul has a special and deep personal resonance for Kühn. It takes him straight back to a pivotal moment: Zawinul was a juror at the 1966 Gulda competition in Vienna, the event which facilitated the 22-year-old pianist's escape from East Germany. Gato Barbieri’s theme from “Last Tango In Paris” recalls not just the fact that Barbieri enlisted Kühn in 1972 to play on the soundtrack, but it is also a tune he would play countless times later, in his trio with Daniel Humair and Jean Francois Jenny-Clark. And the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony not only brings to the fore a composer whose music has always made the deepest of impressions on Kühn, but also the fact that his physical resemblance to Beethoven often resul ted in fellow musicians – notably Gordon Beck, with whom he worked on the Piano Conclave project in the 1970’s – giving him the nickname Beethoven.
The variety of Kühn’s pianism in this collection is quite rem arkable. The listener is first welcomed into the inviting, comforting and regular pulse of Mal Waldron’s “Warm Canto”. And yet later, by complete contrast, Kühn’s own composition “Sintra” gives a masterclass in freedom, delay, and the alche mical art of keeping the listener waiting on tenterhooks. Prince’s “Velvet Rain” is achingly soulful, whereas Kühn found the encouragement to re-visit Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece” from the dignity and restraint of classical pianist Igor Levit’s version of it.
Joachim Kühn can show us ineffable lightness of touch in the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But he can also be forceful, as he gives full and sonorous arm weight to Barbieri’s “Last Tango” theme. There are also homages to the melodic gifts of some reeds players: “Warm Canto” recalls the way Eric Dolphy on clarinet hovers over the melody on the album “The Quest”, and the spaciousness of Milton Nascimento’s composition “Ponta de Areia” clearly keeps in mind the airy, touchingly lyrical voice of the great Wayne Shorter.
Above all, however, it is in the sim plicity and the sheer delight in m elody of his own com positions that Kühn both touches the heart and gives us the greatest surprises on this album. “Sintra” is a tune written down in a peaceful mo ment outside a cafe in the one-time sanctuary of the Portugue se kings. And the title track “Touch the Light” captures the beauty of the sunset over the sea that Kühn often contemplates from his terrace. Kühn’s remark about that tune is also true of the album as a whole: “There’s a lot of love here. And joy.”
“Maybe when I’m ninety...?” When Siggi Loch first floated the idea that Joachim Kühn might like to make an album of ballads, the pianist’s response was typically jocular, even defiant. That initial resistance didn’t last long, however. Kühn, now in his mid-seventies, soon started to settle down at the fine Steinway in his home – he keeps it impeccably tuned – to switch on his DAT recorder, and set to work. “The advantage of being here at home in Ibiza is that I can simply make a re cording when I want to. When the feeling comes, I just re cord,” Kühn reflects.
Over a period of about fifteen months he sent a total of some forty individual tracks to Siggi Loch. He would often take pieces, re-think them, and end up sending off sever al different versions to Berlin. So what emerges on this new solo piano album “Touch the Light” is a distillation from those individual takes, all made on the same piano and in the same space. It flows extremely well as a coherent and delightful programme.
There are pieces here which re-visit im portant phases in a fascinating and varied career. “A Remark You Made” by Joe Zawinul has a special and deep personal resonance for Kühn. It takes him straight back to a pivotal moment: Zawinul was a juror at the 1966 Gulda competition in Vienna, the event which facilitated the 22-year-old pianist's escape from East Germany. Gato Barbieri’s theme from “Last Tango In Paris” recalls not just the fact that Barbieri enlisted Kühn in 1972 to play on the soundtrack, but it is also a tune he would play countless times later, in his trio with Daniel Humair and Jean Francois Jenny-Clark. And the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony not only brings to the fore a composer whose music has always made the deepest of impressions on Kühn, but also the fact that his physical resemblance to Beethoven often resul ted in fellow musicians – notably Gordon Beck, with whom he worked on the Piano Conclave project in the 1970’s – giving him the nickname Beethoven.
The variety of Kühn’s pianism in this collection is quite rem arkable. The listener is first welcomed into the inviting, comforting and regular pulse of Mal Waldron’s “Warm Canto”. And yet later, by complete contrast, Kühn’s own composition “Sintra” gives a masterclass in freedom, delay, and the alche mical art of keeping the listener waiting on tenterhooks. Prince’s “Velvet Rain” is achingly soulful, whereas Kühn found the encouragement to re-visit Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece” from the dignity and restraint of classical pianist Igor Levit’s version of it.
Joachim Kühn can show us ineffable lightness of touch in the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But he can also be forceful, as he gives full and sonorous arm weight to Barbieri’s “Last Tango” theme. There are also homages to the melodic gifts of some reeds players: “Warm Canto” recalls the way Eric Dolphy on clarinet hovers over the melody on the album “The Quest”, and the spaciousness of Milton Nascimento’s composition “Ponta de Areia” clearly keeps in mind the airy, touchingly lyrical voice of the great Wayne Shorter.
Above all, however, it is in the sim plicity and the sheer delight in m elody of his own com positions that Kühn both touches the heart and gives us the greatest surprises on this album. “Sintra” is a tune written down in a peaceful mo ment outside a cafe in the one-time sanctuary of the Portugue se kings. And the title track “Touch the Light” captures the beauty of the sunset over the sea that Kühn often contemplates from his terrace. Kühn’s remark about that tune is also true of the album as a whole: “There’s a lot of love here. And joy.”
Joachim Kühn
Around his 80th birthday on 15 March 2024, the piano artistry of Joachim Kühn, Germany’s pre-eminent jazz pianist, is in its prime. Whereas he is able to draw on a vast wealth of experience from a life fully lived, his powers to concentrate entirely on the present and to live in the moment - things he has done all his life - are undimmed. Kühn’s 80th birthday is also a good moment to reflect on the extent to which the pianist has broken through internationally, and now has his place among the greats in a way that no other jazz pianist from Germany has achieved. He can look back on decades of creative work in which he has not just witnessed jazz history and adapted miraculously to it, but has also taken a role in shaping it and carrying it forward. Joachim Kühn has had a 50-year association with ACT founder Siggi Loch, stretching back to 1972 and the album "Springfever", released on Atlantic Records. Their partnership has prospered on ACT since 1992 and found a fruitful continuation in the current decade under Andreas Brandis. Kühn's 19 albums on ACT show a musician with a kaleidoscopic range. At the larger end of the scale is the jazz symphony "Europeana", other highlights include the Kühn / Bekkas / Lopez trio, which links North Africa with Europe, the Joachim Kühn New Trio, his fruitful cross-generational duo with Michael Wollny, and several solo recordings. In his playing, Joachim Kühn combines an irrepressible striving for artistic freedom with an unerring sense of musical quality in a way that is always truly compelling. Another hallmark is the way in which his playful lightness is always tinged with such strong and deep emotion. Each of Joachim Kühn's concerts or recordings is a special event. His beguiling improvisations unfold and develop in such fascinating ways, they seem to be happening of their own accord. And this is true not just of his solo performances, but equally in both his work in the New Trio with bassist Chris Jennings and drummer Eric Schaefer and his duo with Michael Wollny, - thirty-five years younger than him - which has been documented on two ACT albums, most recently "DUO", released in early 2024. Kühn and Wollny are kindred spirits in the depth of their musical sensibilities, in their exuberant imagination, their determination never to compromise artistically, and in their endeavours to transcend musical boundaries. Alongside echoes of the great classical and romantic piano tradition, Joachim Kühn - particularly in the trio- reveals how strongly and how fully he has assimilated the essence of jazz. Shadows and resonances of the past are transformed alchemically into an innovatively orientated sound language which is wholly his own.
Joachim Kühn's career is remarkable in the way it embraces different eras, countries and continents, and yet, despite the musical and political upheavals of the pianist’s eight decades, there is a constant: the pursuit of musical freedom. Born in Leipzig in 1944, he has had a homing instinct for the greats of the music since his earliest youth: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Bach. His older brother, clarinettist Rolf Kühn, became his role model and later his musical partner. He had a long, intense and significant collaboration with his early idol Ornette Coleman. And his admiration for Johann Sebastian Bach became a powerful memory in his joint music-making with the choir from Bach’s own church, the Leipzig Thomanerchor. Joachim Kühn's career in music has been so many-faceted, a brief summary will never do it justice: free jazz in the cauldron of the sixties in Paris, fusion music in California, modern jazz in New York, solos, duos, trios, countless records, and finally the decision to settle in Ibiza, which is the base from which the pianist travels the world.
For someone like Joachim Kühn, who lives one hundred per cent through his immersion in music, there is no standing still. He is driven by a force within which leads him to continue to develop all the time. It would be understandable if he were just to stand back and take pride in all that he has achieved - but he won't. He has played with the elite of jazz, with musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson. He recorded "Impressions Of New York" with his brother Rolf and Coltrane's bassist Jimmy Garrison. His trio with Daniel Humair and Jean-François Jenny-Clark became an integral part of European jazz history. And in the trios with Majid Bekkas / Ramón López and Rabih Abou-Khalil, he succeeded in opening up jazz to the cultures of the world. But for this pianist, the search is never-ending. He threw off all constraints and limits from the perspective of technique long ago. What matters to him, he says, is pure music. And to make it with the greatest urgency and truthfulness.
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Joachim Kühn
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