Record Review: Pictures in Sounds by Ekkehard Wölk Trio (2020)

An album of jazz compositions performed by the Berlin-based Ekkehard Wölk Trio, Pictures in Sounds is played like a collection of short stories told in the language of music in which the 17th century Italian minstrels are followed by the 19th century American drifters, each song depicting a scene in the history of western culture.

Ekkehard Wölk's musical adventures take him to places. At the end he returns where he has started first. Home? Maybe. It's a place only he knows. No wonder the opening track is called Circulus Vitiosus which is a piece in Thelonious Monk's spirit: spiral and downward whose bipolar bop sounds emotionally restrained. Nonetheless, like the best of Monk, repetition leads to a liberation of emotions.

Recorded in May 2019, Wölk brings together thirteen of his composition from the past two decades, tunes which explain and define where he is standing now, musically and artistically. The album is also a documentation of search for new possibilities in improvisation. It draws influences from literary sources; searches the vast heritage of fine arts and even includes the seventh art which the album's composer passionately loves. (Wölk  lives a parallel life as a silent film accompanist and has acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of German and American cinemas.)

"Although some of my more recent recordings clearly connect with classical jazz traditions," Wölk says, "an essential and repeated feature of my concept was to open up new sound spaces inside of the individual compositions." For achieving this, he mentions how he would like to break into free improvisatory forms in the mid-section of each song, "seeking to unlock the listener's personal association when hearing the music."

Wölk is accompanied by perhaps his longest running musical mate, Andrea Marcelli on drums. Lars Gühlcke is on bass whom I'm hearing here for the first time but love what he does in pieces like Circulus, Viaggio and Dulcinea.

The guest musicians, Kristoff Becker and Walter Gauchel, I have heard live in multiple occasions and specially Gauchel in his unassuming mastery has never ceased to move me.

The recording is using arts as its map of the road. There are two compositions rooted in Italian culture. Viaggio is an homage to Commedia Dell'Arte and Master Gepetto's Nightmare, a tribute to Pinocchio.

The Ballad of Mose Harper and His Rocking Chair sounds like a tip of the hat to The Band and drummer Marcelli's opting for a funky, behind-the-beat accompaniment gives an air of joy to this lightest of the set's compositions. (Mose Harper comes from John Ford's 1956 western, The Searchers, but here, the sense of light and movement has little in common with Ford's dark odyssey.)

The first blues piece of the album is written for Bartleby, the fictional character by Herman Melville. It's a first-rate character study, mirroring Bartleby's inexplicable psychological withdrawal in the form of play-stop-play. Walter Gauchel joins in on tenor sax and adds poignancy to the eccentricity. 

A pensive mood is evident in Grandparent's Garden, which has a deliciously beautiful melody, and Island's Evocation, this one inspired by a rare Victor Hugo watercolor painting! (I was totally unaware of his life outside literature.) Another solemn ballad of note is Dulcinea which instead of the two leading characters of Don Quixote focuses on the female figure of the story. Wölk is a master of these tiny details, both in his approach to arts and in his musical interpretations of them.

But what I love even more is the personal explorations of the composer/pianist, such as in the penultimate track, the brooding and mysterious Snowy Landscape whose textural qualities are rather different from the rest of the album, or, on the opposite side, Fairy-Tale Waltz, composed in Schuman's vain, which I first heard in an official recording from the early 2000s and been in love with ever since.

The album concludes in a solo piano piece and glimmers with what I admire most in Wölk's music: a drama unfolding in sound, an abstract story told with an intensity which instantly captivates the listener. A music about an occurrence which is never fully explained, an occurrence whose characters remain mere ghosts.

Pictures in Sounds can be purchased here as vinyl or CD.