| liner notes by stuart broomer (march 2000)
ceremony to change
tá lam is a special project for gebhard ullmann. it began in 1990 as a musical commemoration of his world travels, a combination of the moods and musics that he had encountered in africa, asia, australia, and new zealand, as well as his dual residency in berlin and new york. the first tá lam was an intensely personal exploration of reed textures, as ullmann built up the pieces in the studio, overdubbing saxophones, flutes, bass clarinet and piccolo, up to sixteen layers, with the addition of only the swiss accordionist hans hassler (99 records 2117). to play the music in public necessitated the addition of a host of other musicians. to do so, he assembled a band of berlin's most adventurous saxophonists and clarinetists, resulting in tá lam acht, a group consisting of seven reed players and hassler that recorded moritat (99 records 2132) in 1994.
in 1998 ullmann expanded the group to ten pieces, adding further gravity to the ensemble with hinrich beermann's baritone saxophone and theo nabicht's bass clarinet for a month-long north american tour that took tá lam zehn from new york to san francisco and touched down at several canadian jazz festivals. vancouver, perched on the pacific, where the idea of west tips inevitably into the east, was the site of the extraordinary concert heard here. the vancouver label songlines issued a compilation of the two german cds as tá lam (sgl 1520) to mark the event.
the keen interest in reed textures is apparent in ullmann's other ensembles. his quartet basement research, with two releases on soul note, pairs him with ellery eskelin, and it's marked by the sonic contrasts between ullmann's soprano sax and bass clarinet and eskelin's tenor. recently he has explored clarinet sonorities with the clarinet trio: oct.1, '98 (leo lab cd 058), combining one regular b flat clarinet and two bass with tá lam members jürgen kupke and nabicht. one might point to the all-saxophone bands of the seventies and eighties as an influence on tá lam - the world saxophone quartet, rova, six winds, the köln saxophone mafia, and others - but ullmann has done something very different, exploring the rhythmic use of clarinets and achieving striking orchestral breadth with the use of sections and layered chords. tá lam zehn, after all, is a band that includes four bass clarinetists and three flutists as well as seven saxophonists, and ullmann has made crucial distinctions about the brassiness of saxophones and the woody qualities of clarinets and flutes.
as striking a composer as he is an orchestrator, ullmann has built up harmonic and rhythmic languages from modernist composers, jazz, and the world's musical reservoirs. while there are broad and brassy chords that may suggest paul hindemith or carl ruggles, the strongest resemblance is to olivier messiaen, both in the use of rapid unisons and the compounding of assymetrical scales and rhythms. like messiaen, ullmann draws materials from different sources and fuses them into a distinct idiom. it's the methodology of jazz, however, it's rhythmic drive and the spirit of improvisation, that welds tá lam's music. the energy heard here is collective, and it's tribute to the composer's vision that he has turned so individual a project into a genuine band, highlighting the very different instrumentalists' voices in a way that suggests duke ellington or charles mingus.
each piece heard here is a special event, a wedding of composition and soloists. "tapping the foot, tapping the brain," its title suggestive of mind/body split and reunification, divides the reed orchestra into sections, using the clarinets for a repeated rhythmic figure that might suggest the music of the central african rain forest, while the wide intervals of the saxophone choir suggest european sources. following beermann's explosive baritone solo, the centre of the piece emphasizes that duality, with a sustained duet by daniel erdmann on tenor and ullmann on bass clarinet, the latter making the most of his instrument's harmonic - rich lower register. volker schlott's alto soars out of the almost glutinous mass that introduces "speak low," while jürgen kupke weaves a liquid solo line in "heaven no 2.4" that the other winds punctuate with different backdrops - first a swarming hive of sound and later a tense melody of slow, wide intervals voiced in looming chords. joachim litty's bass clarinet on "blue prixx" is set against the rhythmic pad slaps of the other reeds. theo nabicht's soprano is distinctively dry, while klemm's warm tenor sound is a contrast to erdmann's intensity.
the wooden bolivian flutes of "oberschöneweide" simultaneously evoke mountain air and the special blues of fifties cool jazz in a piece that began as a portrayal of an industrial area of berlin and then developed new elements through a southeast asian tour. "black cat," a theme written through european and african sojourns and which has played its way through ullmann's different ensembles, is a remarkable vehicle for heiner reinhardt's rivetting bass clarinet. then there are kurt weill's two most famous melodies - "speak low" (written in america) and "die moritat von mackie messer" ("mack the knife" in its popular incarnations, written in berlin) - pressed into new forms with aggressive orchestration and soloing. the role of hans hassler's accordion - a reed instrument that also sounds when it inhales - is that of other or double, one of the world's most traveled instruments, a portable organ that nestles comfortably in a host of idioms. hassler does handily what the other reeds cannot, whether adding a distorting touch of the cabaret to the weill tunes or becoming a cluster machine in the "theme" portion of "blue prixx."
there is nothing sentimental or nostalgic, nothing idealized, in ullmann's travel diary. there is the sense of lush vegetation pressed against an industrial landscape, the feel of real air (dry or humid), a sense of individual voices in the suddenly shifting terrains of our experience, of traditions crossing an unstable world and messages that open to suddenly reveal others. it's music with a vitality that strikes immediately and with depths and perspectives that continue to unfold.
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