Full Moon Trio - Live at Birdland Neuburg (2002)

Chamber jazz: The expectations of the audience can be seen clearly in their faces. You almost feel like a voyeur observing how each person sits back comfortably in his or her chair and claps politely, how everyone beams in eager anticipation when the three musicians walk onto the stage. A nice, relaxed and uncomplicated evening is on the program. Today, we do not have any destructive noisemakers, and the lords of atonal darkness are finally taking a break. The audience is expecting subdued entertainment at the end of a full workweek. Light jazz as background music for a dry martini and relaxed small talk. And one thing above all: not too loud. Wolfgang Lackerschmid, Stephan Holstein and Walter Lang were more than able to fulfill the last requirement when they appeared in the completely filled ”Birdland” jazz club on December 8, 2000. They didn’t use any amplifiers for their instruments, and the ambiance was intimate as usual – no place at all to push it to the hilt. But otherwise the three, who had given their joint project a deceptive name, did away with all other clichés of the so-called chamber jazz softly but definitely during the next two and one half hours. In ”Full Moon Trio,” the focus is not at all on the creation of some kind of popular and idyllic coffeehouse scene. Instead, it is much more a question of developing their own and other’s themes to their fullest within a manageable context, of reacting to and interacting with each other and absorbing the strengths of the others to make their playing even a bit better, and of creating a precious lightness precisely through this difficult, risk-filled process, which more or less contradicts the law of gravity of popular mainstream music. Lackerschmid, Holstein and Lang are discreet, inconspicuous adventurers. This might precisely be the reason why they are also the greatest musical romantics in Germany, because really genuine feelings and not synthetically construed ones come to light in the artful opposition of the extremes, in the conflict between harmony and dissonance, major and minor, and structure and openness. The way in which Wolfgang Lackerschmid constructs wide-reaching, arched melodies full of internal symmetry and flies with expressive weightlessness over the hurdles of sound, the way in which Stephan Holstein lines his breathtaking and subtly nuanced clarinet tones and sends a rarely felt, blazing warmth into the breathless cellar of the former Neuburg court pharmacy, the way in which Walter Lang mixes impressionistic splashes with wonderfully trickling shades of swing and creates unexpected colorful creations, which are never too brash – this all combines surprisingly harmoniously into a modern and inspired sound, which no one wants to stop listening to even for a second for fear of missing the best. The multi-layered spectrum of the moods provides a suitable refuge for everyone. ”Daily Rose” takes us off into a strange fairytale world, where various instrumental strains flow into a captivating story and each musician brings his enormous creative potential to bear. The ”Full Moon Trio” approaches Lackerschmid’s old favorite, ”Sarah’s Bande,” almost tenderly. That’s how it would sound if the three friends really got the idea to play to the full moon one night. ”Lovethings,” thrown together from the harmony fragments of ”What Is This Thing Called Love” and spiced with dynamic changes of tempo, shakes us out of all dreams with its abrupt openness before the catchy tune ”Monsieur Hulot” by Walter Lang creates a cheerful breach for the omnipresent deeper meanings in jazz. ”Springbirds” – also composed by Lang – flows like a peaceful current above which the sultry air seems to have come to a standstill. Deep, inner satisfaction gains the upper hand. The trio declares ”There’s No Greater Lunch” (Lackerschmid’s adaptation of the old standard ”There’s No Greater Love”) to its very personal way of improvisatory playing, and then finally gets rid of all apparently intellectual and expresses a very special kind of spiritual care with ”Chil-Lee,” a homage to the master of the ”work in progress,” Lee Konitz. The most plausible way of trying to explain this music also seems to lie with Konitz. The way in which the ”Full Moon Trio” deals with its material demonstrates the ability to start over with the apparently well known and to branch off and out and deepen it. Two hours in a dull light: a bridge between night and morning: not just chamber music, but great art coming from it on tiptoes.