CD: Joachim Kühn - Beauty & Truth

The youthful old master of European jazz raps on the Doors of Perception for his latest album, Beauty & Truth, with his piano trio of drummer Eric Schafer and bassist Chris Jennings.

Their subject for analysis is The Doors’ “The End” and “Riders on the Storm”, delivering distilled and deconstructed versions of the band’s music and the singer’s intent – both dark, apocalyptic Sixties tone poems of dread and release, and both led by Shafer’s superb drumming, with Jennings’s supple double bass tacking between that and Kühn’s finely fractured piano lines.

Around them, he and ACT producer Siggi Loch have chosen an eclectic selection of older tunes – Ornette Coleman for the opening title track, an angular rendering of Gershwin’s “Summertime” and a fine, extended closer in Gil Evans’ “Blues for Pablo”, alongside four Kühn originals, and two lush, haunted tunes by the Polish film composer for Polanski’s early classics, Krzysztof Komeda.

A veteran of the international Seventies jazz and fusion scene, who has worked with both Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp (subject of his 2013 album, Voodoo Sense), as well as Billy Cobham and Joe Henderson, in more recent years Kühn’s work with Moroccan ghimbri and oud master Mejid Bekkas across five studio and live albums has been outstanding, marking him out as an expansive, inclusive musical explorer honed by the discipline of playing four hours every day in his remote finca in Ibiza. Sounds great. Beauty & Truth continues the good work, but at closer quarters, the mastery and delicacy of interpretation remains seemingly effortless, the conversation between his instrument, his musicians and his material as compelling as ever, and always worth hearing.