Karl Berger

Munich, Studio 70, 24 June 1972. Four players who would otherwise never have been in the same room: Karl Berger on vibraphone and marimba, the Japanese pianist Masahiko Sato (the trio Trinity for Enja dates from the same period), the Austrian bassist Adelhard Roidinger, and Allen Blairman, the Pittsburgh drummer who had played with Albert Ayler and was then Mal Waldron's regular in Germany.

Berger had been in Don Cherry's Paris band, had recorded for ESP and Milestone, and in 1972 was founding the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock with Ornette Coleman and his wife Ingrid Sertso. With Silence was Enja's twenty-second release, an early entry in the Weber-Winckelmann catalogue.

Six pieces: five by Berger, and Sertso's The Smile, which closes the record at almost ten minutes in what one long-time listener calls possibly its most abstract version. Coleman's melodic and rhythmic thinking is audible throughout; the same listener describes a tough, fairly free, hard-cooking session and singles out Roidinger's invention. From Now On reworks the title of Berger's ESP debut. Flow runs ten and a half minutes.

Japanese CD edition from Solid's Enja Real Jazz Classics series (no. 37), remastered, with liner notes by Hidetoshi Tanaka.