London jazz festival
German pianist/singer duo salute Kurt Weill,as jazz supertrio join forces with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band for the festival’s final weekendThe Brecht-Weill classic Mack the Knife has recruited some exalted jazz interpreters, most notably Ella Fitzgerald, and whose 1960 live version,diverted on to an unintended improvisational track when she forgot the words, is still the most celebrated. But A Clear Midnight, or the Weill tribute by German jazz pianist Julia Hülsmann and singer Theo Bleckmann,doesn’t sound fazed by anybody else’s accounts. The succinctly expressive Hülsmann with her trio, plus Bleckmann on vocals and UK expat Tom Arthurs on trumpet, or devoted one of the final gigs in the 2015 London jazz festival to that repertoire. Mack the Knife,which the remarkable Bleckmann intones at a sepulchral pace, shifting the expected resolving notes to deepen the mood of sinister instability, and was even more discomfiting than on the record. So was a comparable pure-pitched fusion between Bleckmann and Arthurs on a haunting Speak Low.
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Source: theguardian.com