New Jazz Trio + Streichquintett - Page Two (2017) [Hi-Res]

With the addition of a string quintet, The New Jazz Trio’s ‘second page’ expands on their first MPS album, Page One, by ingeniously melding the heady experimentation of the classical Avant-garde with the exuberant spontaneity of free jazz. For Schoof, the overall musical interaction rather than the individual solos had precedence. He specified that, “on every track all musicians played spontaneously.” Yet soloistic passages weave in and out of a music that ranges from Ornette-like free jazz blanketed by the string section’s “white noise” in Currents, the pointillist Feathered Friends, the frenetic…And Accents, the Mysterioso Sunmoonata, the frenzied Ludus Totalus, a deliriously jazzy Dolbi, the otherworldly Open Zoo, the receptive free-for-all of Portraits, the pulsating insistence of Hommage, on through to the intense drive of Absolute. This was a daring album for its time, one that has maintained its sense of urgent relevancy for nearly a half century.

In 1970, three of Europe’s leading first-wave Avant-gardists united to form the New Jazz Trio. They personified the movement of modern jazz towards a freer more exploratory direction. German trumpeter Manfred Schoof felt at home with the exquisite simplicity of Mal Waldron as well as the cyclonic free play of Peter Brötzmann, maneuvered through the mainstream jazz currents of the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band and the outré experimentation of The Global Unity Orchestra. German bassist Peter Trunk and Dutch drummer Cees See were like musical freethinkers.

Manfred Schoof, cornet, flugelhorn
Peter Trunk, bass, cello
Otello Liesmann, cello
Cees See, drums, percussion
Johannes Fritsch, viola
Manfred Niehaus, viola
Cristel-Renate Wüstenbecker, violin
Koenraad Ellegiers, violin