Julia Hulsmann Quartet & Theo Bleckmann - A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill and America (2015)

Pianist Julia Hülsmann and singer Theo Bleckmann, in a first and long-awaited - collaborative recording, celebrate lesser-known Weill works alongside the master s best-loved songs including...
Mack The Knife , Speak Low and September Song , adding also Julia s settings of Walt Whitman, with whom Kurt Weill felt an affinity. The project came together at the instigation of the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau in 2013 and since then has gained new life on the road and been fine-tuned in this studio recording made in Oslo in June 2014 with Manfred Eicher as producer. It marks a musical advance for the Hülsmann group at a number of levels, and these recastings of Weill open up new imaginative possibilities for the players. English trumpeter and flugelhornist Tom Arthurs, who made his debut with Hülsmann on In Full View is fully integrated on A Clear Midnight. Often his trumpet doubles or underpins Bleckmann s singing, giving a new color to the vocals. As for Theo Bleckmann, this is the sensitive vocalist s first ECM appearance as jazz singer, although he has recorded twice for the label as a member of the Meredith Monk ensemble on Mercy and Impermanence.