Rolf Kühn, Joachim Kühn

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 Berlin for CBS, and Impressions of New York for Impulse!, with Jimmy Garrison and Aldo Romano. Joachim had presented the first free jazz in East Germany with his own trio in 1964, and by 1967 he was the more radical of the two; Rolf's clarinet, warm and exact, is what keeps the music inside a shape. Berger, who was then in Don Cherry's Paris band, is the third voice.

MPS's own note on Rolf Kühn describes the 1970s MPS records as milestones and collector's items; this SABA session is the one before them, from the moment when both brothers were still deciding which side of the Atlantic they belonged to.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's MPS series.