liner notes by steve holtje 2004 decades ago, albert ayler famously proclaimed, "it's not about notes." of course, he continued playing notes; what he apparently meant was that "lines and dots," harmony and the tempered scale, were no longer priorities or necessities, timbre and texture -- raw sound in the service of pure emotion -- being more important. but ever since, there have been adventurous musicians who have wanted all those things in their music, who have wanted to keep their options open, have all tools at their disposal to be chosen according to what any given moment demands. yes, there are "free" players who make a point of avoiding harmony, regular rhythm, and melody, but there have equally been players -- sun ra being a perfect example -- who can do that for an hour and then whiplash listeners into a different headspace of highly arranged music (in ra's case, stuff he might have written for fletcher henderson). this has become a common strategy as we have moved into the current post-everything period, when personal style in the jazz world is less and less about what genre one uses, more and more about the player having a distinctive voice, or voices, across any number of contexts. gebhard ullmann, who splits his time between berlin and new york and is in at least six semi-regular groups, keeps his options open even on the level of instruments. his main axes, all deployed on this album, are bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, and soprano sax; he's also been heard on at least five types of flutes, plus alto sax. his key instrument (no pun intended) seems to be bass clarinet, arguably the most sonically versatile wind instrument in terms of variety of tones and something of a halfway point between the opposed sounds of saxes and flutes. when he has all of those sound-generators plus brass, he revels in the plethora of timbres, as heard on the album you have in your hands, a program of his compositions arranged by others for big band, which puts at his disposal all the additional sounds of the ndr (north german radio) big band, thirteen other horn players plus a five-man rhythm section. "think tank," a composition from ullmann's first soul note album, basement research, with ellery eskelin's trio, opens this disc. then, the similarities and differences of the two horns sparked the piece. here, satoko fujii's arrangement heralds the importance timbre and texture will have on this tune and throughout the album; it begins with several members of the band on flute, with no accompaniment, grows with the addition of trumpet and spare percussion, then bursts forth, the repeated melodic statement peaking at great density before returning to the flutes alone and repeating the process, but with ullmann soloing on soprano sax until the flutes again take over to end the piece; the effect is like theme-and-variations within a head-solo-head structure. "tá lam" is the title track of one of ullmann's most striking projects, documented on a 1998 release on songlines (actually compiling material from two German releases) and a leo album, tá lam zehn: vancouver concert; on those albums, aside from accordion, all the instruments are saxes, clarinets, and flutes. here, arranged by chris dahlgren, it starts with a brassy intro suggesting a bebop chart before switching to a more typical (for ullmann) relentless development of thematic material in the head that is then starkly juxtaposed with a drastically different weight of texture, a duet between ullmann on bass clarinet and baritone saxophonist julian argüelles that later finds more and more instruments gradually joining in to thicken the textures again. then, with no accordion, pianist vladyslav sendecki instead gets to shine, and as though to compensate for his instrument's relative lack of variety of timbre, he deploys contrasting textures that start thin and add more and more voices until, eventually, it's redolent of tyner-ish modal harmony. polyphony grows into a final bold statement of the theme; the piece has the medley "fourteen days/café toronto," arranged by guenter lenz, is the album's ballad, pretty and accessible, with rich, shimmering harmonies over which claus stötter on flugelhorn and ullmann on tenor sax display their comfort within more traditional melodic and harmonic boundaries, enlivened by a vamp section in which the two soloists intertwine their lines; this builds into a lush, lengthy, shifting outro that brings late gil evans to mind. "d. nee no," apparently a favorite of ullmann's based on how many albums he's featured it on, here is heard in another fujii arrangement, and again offers a striking opening in which timbre and texture have primacy as saxes twitter and flit amid a rolling landscape of brass chords that come and go. a martially toned tango with an amusingly buffoonish oom-pah to it surfaces after a couple of minutes, buoying an ullmann tenor excursion. the accompaniment mutates under a glinting electric guitar solo by stephan diez until the perspective shifts and the brass move into the foreground momentarily; then the rhythm mutates back to the tango, but with interrupting sections; the effect is like a huge, multi-paneled narrative painting. after a very brief pause, we're transitioned smoothly into the album's only studio recording, "kreuzberg park east/high lam earth" (the first half is the title track of another soul note album), arranged by andy emler. pointillist punctuations and throbbing fanfares alternate until dropping away to reveal an ullmann bass clarinet solo (at first unaccompanied) that's a masterpiece of shifting timbres. diez's brief post-hendrixian solo pivots the piece into another example of timbre-shifting mastery, stefan lottermann's mercurial muted trombone solo of growls, whispers, burbles, glissandi, etc., joyful freedom splayed out over carefully calculated kaleidoscopic backgrounds that shift mood and style and density every few bars. the album closes with the longest track, "blaues lied," its twelve-and-a-half-minute arrangement (dahlgren again) a big growth spurt in both time and instrumentation since the piece's three-and-a-half-minute appearance on the clarinet trio's Oct. 1, '98 (leo). It still lives up to its title with a bluesy treatment, here held together by walking bass against occasionally herky-jerky rhythms in the brass. ullmann's bass clarinet solo gradually emerges as the background shifts into a boppish uptempo over which he sprays some dolphy-like intervallic leaps accented by lightning-fast changes in timbre; it even seems as though he's trading solos with himself. he gives way to trumpeter ingolf burkhardt, who nags and pecks at some intervallic/melodic nuggets and blurted scales. lutz büchner takes over the spotlight on alto sax, but the bombs of drummer tom rainey and spiky comping of sendecki compete strongly; after a brass section, all three soloists combine over the rhythm section in a glorious profusion. finally the massed brass take over in a climax that briefly calls back the slower head to end the show on a wry note. Sometimes harmony has been important to these tracks; often it's been incidental. instead, ullmann uses organic structures from which each piece seems to blossom naturally on the macro level, dictating textural shifts while timbre shifts on the micro level mirror the process, making each composition and, indeed, the entire album cohere despite all the disparate moods and stylistically varied playing. so-called "inside/outside" distinctions become not issues of merit but tools to be applied. certain mainstream jazz musicians and their advocates in the press have rejected the avant-garde for not utilizing jazz history, but in fact music like ullmann's uses jazz history more broadly than anything heard at, ahem, lincoln center, and in a less self-conscious manner. proclaiming this approach to be the future of jazz would be not only too grandious, but absurd, both because jazz by its nature is ever-changing and because it's what jazz is now, an approach many artists are using in their own personalized ways. orthodoxy may not be dead, but it's certainly looking and sounding rather stiff; all hail flexibility. steve holtje editor, musichound jazz: the essential album guide

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