Tandem

One swallow doesn't make a summer, but two excellent instrumentalists can make an excellent album: Mannheim saxophonist Alexandra Lehmler has recorded a pandemic duo album together with her partner, bassist Matthias Debus, after various trio, quartet and larger formations, in which a lot of fowl flutters around - perhaps because there are usually two of them with bird wings, perhaps also because flying has been rather denied to most of us lately. After the opener, the aforementioned, but French intoned swallows, a few "weird birds" appear now and then, small free intermezzi, sometimes as a well-structured noise management, then again as a short bop progression. Central is a chorale that frays into an improvisation full of baroque ornamental phrases like an ancient tapestry (which in its time also liked to depict feathered things) - with gold brocade.

Highly sensitive, volatile, intensely intimate duets. Partly at the beginning "only" condensed sound studies, from whose complex structures suddenly very catchy melodies develop. In "Flieg kleiner Vogel" the © Christina Laube/Mehrdad Zaeri self-imposed two-part harmony is extended by means of looping and multi-tracks to an agile polyphony, which in a completely undusted way can even pay homage to the good old New Orleans style.                   

Alexandra Lehmler plays on sax-related reed instruments presumably everything that doesn't turn into reed at three back: virtuosic with a round, warm tone. Matthias Debus was already her reliable sideman in previous formations, and here as a duo partner with double bass he places himself at eye level, very eloquently and with decidedly accurate intonation.

Tandem is Alexandra Lehmler's third release for Neuklang. In pairs it becomes at least a bird that flies.

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