Manfred Schoof Quintet

Resonance brings together music from the three albums the Manfred Schoof Quintet made for JAPO, the ECM imprint, in the late 1970s (Scales, Light Lines, Horizons). The German trumpeter chose the programme himself, and it was the first time any of this music appeared on CD. His quintet was one of the most respected bands in Europe at the time, and Scales won the German Critics Prize as album of the year (Grosser Deutscher Schallplattenpreis 1977).

Schoof plays trumpet and flugelhorn, with Michel Pilz on bass clarinet beside him in the front line. Both were also members of Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra and recorded with it for JAPO. Jasper van 't Hof is at the piano, electric piano and organ on the first two albums, and Rainer Brüninghaus (piano, synthesizer) takes his place on Horizons. Double bass and the drums of Ralf-R. Hübner complete the band. All three albums were cut at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, in 1976, December 1977 and November 1979, with Thomas Stöwsand as recording producer and Martin Wieland as engineer.

The repertoire is original: most pieces are by Schoof, with two each by Hübner and van 't Hof. Scales and Light Lines are included complete, and four of the six pieces on Horizons. The first disc opens with the title piece of Scales and continues with Ostinato, built on a figure that bass clarinet and bass repeat beneath the trumpet. Hübner's Weep and Cry and van 't Hof's Flowers All Over bring in other voices from inside the group. The Horizons pieces close the second disc, with Brüninghaus's synthesizer widening the sound around the horns.

The set was welcomed as the return of a band that had been hard to hear for decades. In Jazz Journal, Michael Tucker called it "some of the most lucidly conceived and atmospherically unfolding music I remember hearing in the late 70s". Ray Comiskey wrote in The Irish Times that the band combined freedom with structure, and heard in it "one of the great European bands at a peak". In Jazzwise, Duncan Heining singled out the pairing of Pilz's dark-hued bass clarinet with Schoof's trumpet, in music where "form and improvisation merge seamlessly and harmoniously".

This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 2093/94, released in 2009 in the Old & New Masters series, which gathers earlier recordings in multi-disc editions. The booklet has photographs from the period and liner notes by Schoof in German and English.