CD: The British Double Bass

Works by Gordon Jacob, Elizabeth Maconchy, Thomas Pitfield, Lennox Berkeley, David Ellis, John Walton, Alan Bush, John McCabe, Elisabeth Lutyens and Alfred Reynolds
Leon Bosch (db)
Meridian CDE 84550

This CD is a significant release for the British bassist fraternity. Its programme claims nine premiere recordings and comprises works by ten distinguished 20th-century British composers.

Fittingly, Leon Bosch ditches his Gagliano for an English instrument by Lockey Hill (c.1750); but he retains his renowned mellow tone, ­decisive characterisation and sensitive musicianship based on a secure technique and a strong appreciation of musical structure and style. The importance he attaches to freedom and spontaneity in performance is most evident in his solo playing, for example in David Ellis’s challenging Sonata op.42 and John McCabe’s ethereal Pueblo, one of the composer’s effective ‘desert pieces’, inspired by a quotation from Reyner Banham’s Scenes in America Deserta.

Bosch is joined by I Musicanti for an excellent account of Gordon Jacob’s A Little Concerto. These performers shape Jacob’s abundant melodies with intelligence and care, particularly in the central Largo, and Bosch’s playing is consistently warm, radiant, and full of vitality in the outer movements.

Pianist Sung-Suk Kang takes the more prominent role in Thomas Pitfield’s brief Sonatina, with its ‘name that tune’ quodlibet as a centrepiece. She also assists Bosch in expressive readings of Lennox Berkeley’s lyrical Introduction and Allegro, Elizabeth Maconchy’s Music for double bass and piano and Elisabeth Lutyens’s The Tides of Time op.75. Alan Bush’s Meditation and Scherzo op.93 and bassist-composer John Walton’s A Deep Song are performed with an ease and fluency that seems inborn and Alfred Reynolds’s Hornpipe has all the requisite humour and verve. The recordings are exemplary.

ROBIN STOWELL

CD: Preludio Del Primer Día

Lila Horovitz (db)
www.lilahorovitz.com

The spotlight is firmly on the bassist on this tango album with a difference. This is a surprisingly successful record, an intimate project with plenty of Latin fire in its belly. Talking of bellies, the gloriously pregnant one sharing the cover photo with a curvaceous bass belongs to Lila Horovitz herself, who focused on creating her first solo record in the run-up to giving birth. Horovitz, born in Argentina in 1975, led the Tangata Rea tango group which made an excellent CD for Munich label Winter & Winter ten years ago. Her heart is in the classic tango as still danced in Buenos Aires milongas (dance clubs), and the track list here includes tunes by 1940s tango superstars Carlos Gardel and Anibal Troilo, as well as a convincing solo bass reading of Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Contrabajeando’. The other works are by Horovitz herself: two extended suites featuring the bandoneon of Mike Augustsson from the Swedish Skanstull Tango Trio. This trio is one of Horovitz’s projects since relocating to Europe, as is fellow Argentinean singer Susana Rinaldi, who graces the closing ‘Sur’ with her subtle vocals. Nothing is grander than a trio, and the huffing of bandoneon bellows or percussive tapping on bass body serve to enhance the intimate, close-up atmosphere. Horovitz can swerve into contemporary sounds or occasional fierce jazz interplay, but the heady whiff of tango is never far away. The playing is loose and convivial, more concerned with warmth, colour and emotional directness than technical perfection.

CLIVE BELL

CD: Elopement Suite

Bänz Oester (solo db)
Leo Records CD LR 496

Blosperment Suite (Elopement Suite) by Swiss bassist Bänz Oester is everything you’d hope a solo bass disc would be. Tactile, busy playing challenges conventional expectations and deconstructs the instrument into its constituent parts, with hectic melody lines accompanied by percussive rattles and rhythmic scritchy-scratching. But the disc has other dimensions – the opening track, ‘La Plage’, incorporates percussion instruments and miscellaneous effects into a light-on-its-feet, spontaneously evolving montage with structures that work themselves out from the overlaps and jump-cutting clashes of material. Later he incorporates fruity whistling into the soundscape, and Oester expresses a sound world that’s beyond the double bass using the instrument as his starting point. This is Oester’s first solo bass album, although he’s appeared on the Leo label before in sessions involving percussionist Gerry Hemingway and pianist Michel Wintsch.

If the idea of supplementing the bass with percussion and whistling suggests that Oester might be running the risk of gimmickry then the quality of his inventive material is enough to dispel such thoughts. Oester re-creates Charlie Parker’s ‘Donna Lee’ by retaining the harmonic excitement of the original and fusing it with the formality of a Bach Invention. ‘Café Longtemps’ is an extended exploration of a basic vamp, while ‘Alpsäge’ starts out in the upper reaches of the bass and, as the register drops, introduces a folksy sounding theme that gradually blossoms. An emerging solo talent, a highly enjoyable record.

PHILIP CLARK