HANS FAHLING QUARTET "Hamburg - Port of Call"
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You've got to give Hans Fahling a lot of credit - it isn't easy to run one jazz band, let alone one in each hemisphere. Perhaps it would be more proper to call this a CD by the Hans Fahling Quartets!
HAMBURG: Port of Call is a CD of eleven songs, each one inspired a Patrick Haskett painting (all eleven paintings are depicted in the liner notes). Four songs are performed by Hans' "German" quartet and the remaining seven by the "American" group. Each song, much like any good painting, deserves to be heard over and over again. Every new "viewing" of a particular piece reveals more depth.
Hans is an accomplished guitarist but you are very much aware that this is a group effort. The principles of both quartets get a turn to shine. But it is their work as a band that lingers with you. The way that Hans's guitar blends so effortlessly with either sax player (Ralph Reichert of the Berlin group and Aaron Birrell, his American counterpart) is mesmerizing. I especially liked the snappy, joyful interplay between Hans and Aaron in "How Deep Are You" as well as the hauntingly beautiful and seductive "Golden Seven."
The rhythm sections (Andreas Heinze and Phil Sparks on bass, Wolfgang Roggenkamp and Steve Korn on drums) are flawless, whether in full swing mode ("Savage Fair") or in moody contemplation ("What Do You See?").
If you like jazz, then you owe it to yourself to make the acquaintance of both of the Hans Fahling Quartets. And if you've always thought about learning more about jazz, this a great CD with which to start your collection.
CD review by David Hodge 2002-02-22
Hamburg Port Of Call. The Hans Fahling Quartet
This is amazingly only the the second CD from established professional "Jazz Guitarist, Composer and Music Educator" Hans Fahling. Since returning from studying Jazz Theory and Improvisation with Scott Henderson at The Musicians' Institute in Los Angeles, a busy touring schedule has kept him out of the studio, but thankfully he has now found the time to complete this, his most ambitious composition to date. Inspiration was sought from Patrick Haskett's paintings of Hamburg's industrial shipping sector. Stretching from the eastern borders of Hamburg and nestled in the arms of the Norder- and Süder-Elbe it reaches out westwards to Finkenwerder, once the dual pulse of The Hanseatic League, a powerful continental trading partnership largely dominated by German merchants in the cities of Lübeck and Hamburg. Each original tune comments on a different aspect of life in the harbour; playing visual games amongst the ripples breaking on a dappled hull, or taking a moonlit stroll along the slumbering quay. Each piece has some individual comment to make, and yet taken as a whole, the compositional continuity juxtaposes the scenes skilfully presenting a frieze-commentary, Fahling's personal narrative of the life he sees in Haskett's work. What better when words cannot adequately interpret art. The packaging is excellent and includes the artwork for you to share whilst you listen.
The music is sublime, moving comfortably between bebop and uptempo guitar and brass-led quartet settings and reflective tone poems where the guitar proves most expressive. Thoughtful comping and strong soloing gives Fahling the JM sound from somewhere around 1967-1968, time spent recording with The Gordon Beck Quartet (Experiments With Pops), Jack Bruce (Things We Like) and Sandy Brown and his Gentlemen! Friends (Hair at its Hairiest). This will keep us happy until Fahling's third CD.
By Julian F. Derry John
McLaughlin Archives.com
September 2001
Bill White, jazz critic, P-I and Earshot Jazz named Hamburg: Port of Call as one of the jazz-recording highlights of 2000.
"An evocative sequence of musical interpretations drawn from Patrick Haskett's paintings, half recorded in Germany, the other half in Seattle(with local musicians). Fahling's trans-traditionalist approach to the guitar runs the gamut from Mundell Lowe to Bill Frisell."Bill White, Earshot Jazz Jan. 2001
Hamburg: Port of Call Hans Fahling Quartet (Origin Records)
Hamburg guitarist Hans Fahling wrote eleven compositions for Hamburg, each accompanied by a Patrick Haskett painting in the liner notes. The artistic intent behind this dual presentation (funded by a number of international sponsors) is well-realized through a series of shifting moods and styles. However, the interdisciplinary approach on Hamburg disguises the high-level improvisational bent of the music considered on its own.
Fahling's German Quartet, responsible for a third of the tracks, operates smoothly and seamlessly. This group appears equally at home trading fours, serving up solos, or working together to expand melodic themes. Saxophonist Reichert uses his clear, bell-like tone to alternately support and offer contrast to Fahling's processed guitar sound. Fahling's regular solos rely upon intensely scalar construction, using a occasional slicing attack to emphasize turning points. The remainder of the record, performed with the guitarist's American quartet, also displays a highly sympathetic sense of cohesion. While the other musicians in the group play in an inspired and effective fashion, it's Fahling's virtuostic winding solos that draw the most attention. It would be a stretch to describe Hamburg as cutting-edge jazz, but the record certainly offers a solid contribution within the well-traveled category of bop.
Track Listing: Looming Out of the Fog; Savage Fair; Golden Seven; How Deep Are You?; To Walk at Night; Russian Ships at Hamburg; Hopes and Dreams; Ready to Take Lines; What Do You See?; Gibraltar to Starboard; Sunday Rain. Personnel: Hans Fahling: guitar; Ralph Reichert: tenor saxophone; Andreas Henze: acoustic bass; Wolfgang Roggenkamp: drums; Aaron Birrell: tenor saxophone; Phil Sparks: bass; Steve Korn: drums.
By Nils Jacobson, AllAboutJazz.com, Jan. 2001
STRANGER MAGAZINE - September 28, 2000
TOWERING OVER THE ELEMENTS
A Collaboration Produces Surprising--and Masculine--Art by Nathan Thornburgh
THE DEAD AIR of late summer brings out the truth of Lake Union: It's a macho lake. Despite the flotillas of sculpted yachts, Argosy dinner cruises, and seaplanes headed to Friday Harbor boutiques, Lake Union is still what they call "working water," a place where hulls are welded, turpentine is spilled, and heavy pollutants rest on the lake floor. It's only fitting then, that as I walked into painter Patrick Haskett's lakeside art studio, it was hard to tell where the smell of industry left off and the smell of art picked up. I had come to take a look at his new multimedia project about the Hamburg waterfront, created together with local jazz guitarist Hans Fahling (a German expatriate from the Hamburg region), and had expected that it could suffer from either the emotional weakness that is so typical of maritime art or the art house elitism that affects many ambitious jazz projects. I soon learned, however, that Haskett, a licensed tugboat captain, and Fahling, a physical guitar player born into a construction family, are each like a masculine King Midas: Everything they touch turns to muscle.
The waterfront is at the heart of Hamburg--Port of Call, and the only thing I knew going in was that Haskett saw in the Hamburg docks what one can still see in our own waterfront: constant reminders of the dangerous and beguiling oceans beyond the harbor. I myself have never been more than seven miles offshore, and that was in the placid Caribbean, so I came to Haskett's studio equipped with my own swarthy critics: Pavel, Igor, and Victor, three Russian crab fishermen on shore leave whom I had met while researching an earlier story on the Russian fishing industry. They were to be my bullshit checkers, if you will: They had dedicated their professional lives to crabbing, drinking, and whoring, and if Patrick Haskett's art had lost touch with their experience of the open ocean, then the project as a whole would have a real legitimacy crisis.
But Haskett hadn't lost touch. The hardscrabble Russians positively melted in the studio, subdued by a quick empathy with the emotion of the paintings, even recognizing some of the depicted ships by name. They quickly forgot about me, their translator, and somehow fell into direct communication with Haskett, gesticulating a conversation about boats and storms that I will probably never see. As of this week, those sailors are a thousand miles north of Lake Union, in the belly of their trawler, ripping thousands of live king crabs limb from limb, and probably thinking warm thoughts about Haskett's paintings. I can think of no better proof that Haskett is not merely an artist, but also a legitimate member of the international cabal of seafaring men.
Appealing to the sailor demographic is one thing, but there has also been heavy investment in the project from more demanding quarters. The chief sponsors, SAS Airlines, will be joined by high-ranking German government officials and many other well-dressed parties at Benaroya Hall for this Friday's joint reception/concert, the only complete showing of the project in North America. For this clientele, the project clearly needs to provide food for thought along with its seaworthy gristle. That's a harder assignment for Haskett the painter, because his art needs to treat maritime themes without earning the label of "maritime art." Haskett chafes at the label, and with good reason: "Maritime art" is a byword in critical circles for a genre of paintings that have the emotional intelligence of Hallmark greeting cards. Their chief subject, the perfectly rendered schooner churning against a perfectly enraged sea, is repugnant chiefly because it is so emotionally vapid. In a world where modern art has become more and more socially outspoken and intellectually rigorous, the cookie-cutter maritime painting is a sentimental haven for people who want their jangled nerves to be massaged, not pummeled, by art.
Thankfully, the 11 paintings in Hamburg--Port of Call defy the pejorative "maritime art" label both stylistically and thematically. Although Haskett has clearly demonstrated his ability to produce completely photographic realism, his preference has always been to stray toward the more clouded waters of impressionism. The result is a strong balance: At times he extends enough detail to demonstrate the tangled marvel of the cranes, masts, and ropes on the waterfront; but more often than not, he pulls back and lets the viewer interpret broader brush strokes for themselves. Therefore, the water of the Elbe river sparkles in photographic detail in How Deep Are You, while To Walk at Night shows a river lined by abstract light sources that, according to Haskett, "could be street lights or the flames of hell."
The paintings truly show their power thematically, however. As someone who spent a lifetime on or near the water, Haskett obviously feels a kinship with the paintings' great boats (all of which were built at the world-famous Blohm and Voss shipyard in Hamburg). In the best pieces of the collection, those ships serve as a stand-in for Haskett and a reminder of the painter's own authorial power, towering over all other elements in the frame and exercising absolute dominion, not only over the small human figures in the shadows but also over the chameleon waters of the Elbe. The paintings thereby exude an emotional potency that is a rare commodity in their genre.
Hans Fahling, as a jazz player, has a slightly different concern: the need to establish his relevancy not just to Haskett's paintings, but also to the industrial subject matter at hand. There is little chance, for example, that the Russian sailors would be great admirers of his work, no matter how bright the moment (Pavel, for example, is a diehard Anthrax fan). Indeed, if this project had been left in the more refined hands of some other jazz players in town, the result would have been an imbalance of power between muscular art and slack-spined music. Anyone who has seen Fahling play, however, can imagine how he avoided that problem. He brings a no-nonsense and eminently Germanic physicality to all his musical endeavors. Likewise, even though he wrote each of the 11 songs while staring at a corresponding painting, his work has none of the soulless veneer that high-concept art usually has. The album, which was recorded in Berlin with competent American and German sidemen and is released here on OriginArts Records, employs enough unison guitar-sax melodies and clear, strong solos to produce jazz that is complex without being weak or evasive. Therein lies Fahling's crucial common ground with Haskett: Both men have successfully milked their media to find textured, yet unerringly masculine, renditions of life on the docks.
