Julia Hülsmann Trio

The End of a Summer was the first ECM album by the Berlin pianist Julia Hülsmann and her trio with bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling. She had led the group since 1997, and by then it was one of the most popular on the German jazz scene. ECM describes her as a first-rate composer as well as an incisive pianist, with a poetic sense of compression in both roles. The record bears it out, with ten pieces of under seven minutes built on clear melodies and a lot of air.

Born in Bonn in 1968, Hülsmann moved to Berlin in 1991 to study jazz piano at the University of the Arts. Before this debut she was known in Germany partly for her work with singers, among them Rebekka Bakken and Roger Cicero, as Stereoplay noted at the time. The trio recorded the album in March 2008 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Hülsmann wrote six of the tunes, Muellbauer one and Köbberling two. The tenth is Kiss From a Rose by Seal.

The title track opens the set and sets the balance of the whole record, the three voices sharing the space rather than piano leading over accompaniment. In Not the End of the World, the longest piece, the bass and Hülsmann's left hand move as one while Köbberling works small figures on the rim of the snare. Quint is brighter and more upbeat, and Muellbauer's Last One Out is a short nocturnal aside. The Seal song is played instrumentally and very bare. Writing in Die Zeit, Peter Rüedi observed that it sounds as if she had invented it, while her own originals sound like standards.

The English-language press heard a new voice. In The Guardian John Fordham wrote: "Hülsmann is an interesting discovery with a subtle harmonic mind; Muellbauer and Köbberling are right on her wavelength." Ray Comiskey in The Irish Times (November 2008) praised her "spare, melodic approach and richly surprising harmonic sense" on the ballads, and the intimacy of the trio's interplay. Stuart Nicholson in Jazzwise linked the music to her love of well crafted verse. In Germany Stereoplay made it Jazz CD of the month, and in France Jazz Magazine gave it a Disque d'émoi. The same trio made Imprint for ECM in 2011.

CD edition, ECM 2079, first released in October 2008.