Bob Brookmeyer

Musicians names can automatically make us assign certain styles or sounds to them so it is no surprising that the name of Bob Brookmeyer does not suggest us ‘modern music, even if he left behind quite a bit of it. Early in his life he started to be interested in modern music and contemporary new music. He sometimes let that facet peek through his music. Less obviously when playing his elegantly flowing, smooth improvisations on the valve trombone, the instrument he is best known for, and more often as a pianist, sometimes awkward, unconventional and certainly not strictly by the book. Wolfgang Hirschmann, a producer and manager at the WDR Big Band, heard this side of him as a pianist during orchestra rehearsals, sensed his interest in experimental forms and got the WDR to commission On The Way To the Sky.

It was a perfect fit. Public broadcasting could be meaningful by supporting a composer’s creativity liberating him of pressure of the results and he could write the music his instinct or current taste was demanding. This artistic freedom was precisely what had driven him to Europe in the early 80s and on the fertile ground of the Cologne WDR he slowly entered in the world of electronic music and synthesizer sounds. On The Way to The Sky with his dear friends Jim Hall and Mel Lewis, we can see a different Brookmeyer. Music which would influence on one of today’s greatest big band composers like Maria Schneider and that he, himself considered one of the compositions which better reflected his life after the wedding with his fourth and last wife Jan which meant the start of a calmer period for him.

PERSONNEL:

BOB BROOKMEYER, valve trombone
JIM HALL, guitar
MEL LEWIS, drums
RAINER BRÜNINGHAUS, keyboards
JOACHIM BECKER, keyboards
TOM VAN DER GELD, percussion

and the WDR Big Band Cologne

Cologne, Germany, April 1989

TRACKS:

01. Awakening
02. Earth
03. Fire
04. Water
05. Ascension
06. The Sky