A Clear Midnight is the first joint recording of the Julia Hülsmann Quartet and singer Theo Bleckmann, a programme on Kurt Weill and America. Next to best-loved songs such as Mack The Knife and Speak Low, it brings forward the "unsung Weill". Hülsmann adds three settings by Hülsmann of poems by Walt Whitman, a writer Weill admired. The tempos are mostly slow, the arrangements discreet, and the lyrics stay at the centre.
The project began at the instigation of the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau in 2013 and was refined on tour. This studio session was recorded in June 2014 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering. Hülsmann plays piano, with Marc Muellbauer on double bass, Heinrich Köbberling on drums and the English trumpeter and flugelhornist Tom Arthurs, who had joined her on In Full View. Muellbauer arranged four of the songs. It was Hülsmann's fifth appearance on ECM and Bleckmann's first there as a jazz singer, after two albums with the Meredith Monk ensemble, mercy and impermanence.
"These wonderful lyrics seem to me to demand that you give them space," Hülsmann has said, and the record follows that idea. Mack The Knife, in Marc Blitzstein's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht, opens on slow open fifths in the left hand. Arthurs commenting between and behind the vocal lines. On Beat! Beat! Drums! Hülsmann sets Whitman to her own melody instead of Weill's, and her A Clear Midnight gives the title to the album. The closing Great Big Sky, with words by Langston Hughes, moves over piano arpeggios and ends on a long, vibrato-less note from Bleckmann. Throughout, Arthurs's trumpet often doubles or underpins the voice.
John Fordham wrote in The Guardian: "This might just be one of the great jazz treatments of the songs of Kurt Weill." John Kelman of All About Jazz heard Bleckmann as "without question the best vocal pairing of her recorded career", and in Jazzwise Peter Quinn praised the "supremely understated reinterpretations". The programme also travelled in concert, among other dates to the London Jazz Festival at Milton Court in November 2015.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2418, first released in 2015.
