By Martin Schray
It’s no secret that I’m a fan
of Olaf Rupp’s music. His way of playing guitar (acoustic and electric), how he
combines Flamenco, alternative rock and free jazz is simply unique. So, it’s no
wonder that I was excited when I heard that he was going to release
Skyhook, the second album of his outfit with bassist Jan Roder and
clarinetist Rudi Mahall. The first one, JR3, was also well reviewed on our site.
Skyhook is in no way
inferior to the trio’s debut, the music is a hodgepodge of stylistic elements
that seem to be completely contradictory, but in the end they fit together very
well. A perfect example of the trio’s music is the second track, “vernünftig“.
It begins with Rupp’s guitar trills colliding with the emotional ebb and flow of
bowed bass notes that seem to stream directly from Roder’s instrument, while
Mahall intersperses his contributions very economically. When Roder puts away
the bow and begins to pluck, the dynamics change. The bass sounds tumble, Rupp
explodes as if Cecil Taylor was playing guitar and Mahall murmurs in the depths
of his instrument, he groans, but also dares to make longer runs and sprinkles
in a melody here and there. The whole thing is a zigzag run, you never know
where it will go.
Skyhook consists of twelve tracks, the titles
are cut up from the sentence
Es ist ebenso vernünftig, eine Art Gefangenschaft durch eine andere
darzustellen, wie irgendetwas, was wirklich existiert, durch etwas, was nicht
existiert (It is as reasonable to represent one kind of captivity by another as it is to
represent anything that really exists by something that does not). Albert Camus
had borrowed it as the epigraph for his novel The Plague, it’s actually
from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Oran, the city on the Algerian coast
where Camus’s novel is set, soon becomes an island, an isolated space - like
Robinson’s island. Apart from the fact that the music becomes a metaphor for
what’s going on around us there is a also another connection: The album was
recorded at Au Topsi Pohl, a venue of the Echtzeit network in Berlin, which
unfortunately is soon closing down but which was itself has been an island for free
improvisation.
The title of the album refers to a figure from
freestyle snowboarding. Rupp says that it somehow makes sense because making
music is often a kind of throwing stones into the sky. And it symbolizes
optimism. And even if he mentioned that as to his standards the recording was
not quite perfect in terms of sound, I must say that I can’t hear any
shortcomings. Rupp said that he, Mahall and Roder wanted to release the album
because they liked the music so much. Me too.
Skyhook is
available as a CD. You can buy it from Olaf Rupp’s Bandcamp site.
P.S.: The pigeon on the cover
was sitting on Olaf Rupp’s kitchen shelf on the first day of the 2020 lockdown
and was very tame and obviously used to people. She has been coming to
visit the guitarist every day since then. He feeds her a few sunflower seeds and
gives her some water and then she sits on the window ledge looking out into the
yard. Since she is a competition pigeon, she has rings on her legs, so he was
able to track her back to the neighboring town to where Rudi
Mahall lives. Thus, she became the cover girl for the album.
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