Rolf Kühn
Total Space
Cologne, Cornet Studios, January 1975. Rolf Kühn on clarinet with a band that reads like a German jazz roll call: his brother Joachim Kühn on piano and electric piano, Philip Catherine on guitar, Gerd Dudek on tenor and soprano, Albert Mangelsdorff on trombone, Bo Stief on bass, and two drummers, Daniel Humair and Kasper Winding.
Kühn chose not to record in the MPS studio in the Black Forest and brought in the engineer Wolfgang Hirschmann instead. In his own account, quoted in MPS's reissue note…
The Day After
Rolf Kühn and Phil Woods had worked together in New York in the late 1950s, when Kühn was there with Benny Goodman and the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. The Day After, released by MPS in 1972, is their reunion: Woods on alto, Kühn on clarinet, Joachim Kühn on piano, Peter Warren on bass, Oliver Johnson (Steve Lacy's drummer for a decade) on drums, and Naná Vasconcelos on percussion and berimbau.
Five pieces, forty-one minutes. Ca. 1-9-5-2 looks back to the bop era but is played modally. The title trac…
Transfiguration
1967. Joachim Kühn had left the GDR the year before and settled in Hamburg; Rolf Kühn, his elder brother, had come back from six years in New York (Benny Goodman, the Tommy Dorsey band) to run the NDR television orchestra. They had already played Newport together. Transfiguration, on SABA, is the Rolf + Joachim Kühn Quintet with Karl Berger as guest on vibraphone, made in the months before Joachim moved to Paris for good.
It sits between two records the brothers made the same year: Re-Union in B…
Stop Time!
First release of a previously unknown album from the personal archives of 'clarinet bird' Rolf Kühn, recorded 1962 in Hamburg. Outstanding modern jazz and hard bop session featuring Klaus Doldinger (ts), Ingfried Hoffmann (org/ p), Cees See (d) and Herman Schoonderwalt (b), with plenty of tunes made famous by Horace Silver ('Sister Sadie'), Charlie Parker ('Au Privave'), Miles Davis ('Solar') or Thelonious Monk ('Bemsha Swing') - all arranged by Kühn.
Bloody Rockers
Featuring the title track, picked by Andy Votel for B-Music's The BYG Deal compilation. "Recorded during the same sessions as the Mad Rockers LP, with the same musicians, Bloody Rockers features more free jazz meets rock explorations by the Kühns and Co., plus a couple of incredibly groovy floorkillers. The album was only released in France back in 1969 and has never been reissued before. This edition comes in remastered sound (by mastering magician Denis Blackham @ Skye Mastering) and faith…