Joe Hertenstein - HNH (2015)

Here it is, the follow-up HNH album we hoped for so long. Joe Hertenstein’s trio with the surname initials of the three German musicians living in New York: Joe Hertenstein, Pascal Niggenkemper and Thomas Heberer. And indeed it’s a special album and the new music is quite different from their debut disc we released in 2010. From the beginning HNH was mixing the Big Apple feeling and the European gusto to turn things upside down. It grabs you from the beginning, the energy, the sound, the interplay. The drummer, the bassist and the cornetist are masters of their skills and they might just have created a grand opus, and they did it with a good amount of irony and humor and with lots of punch and cleverness. What we have here is angular music with lots of brain cells acting, but make no mistake: it’s also some of the most vibrant, pulsating jazz and improvised music you can get these days. Happening in a wide spectrum of nuances, going from recognizable procedures (Heberer is a classicist of the jazz trumpet, even when in avant-garde contexts) to the most unusual and surprising (Niggenkemper’s double bass preparations with metal lampshades), with Hertenstein pushing everything forward and expanding the drum set possibilities by adding unusual percussive instruments. Hertenstein’s and Heberer’s writings trigger group improvisation in a unique way and the improvised parts include structural cues for the band to move seamlessly in and out, always renewing the interactions between composition and intuitive play. HNH do it in such a way that, sometimes, you can’t distinguish one from the other. This music pulls you through every emotion, but ultimately, everything grooves…