Inside Colours Live (Jazzwerkstatt)
Julie Sassoon
Released May 29, 2024
All About Jazz Best Jazz Albums of 2024
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I’ll never forget that afternoon in July 2016: an open-air concert in a historic courtyard in Regensburg at the annual Jazz Weekend, where the setting was more akin to a big civic festival than a music festival: the audience was free to come and go at will, creating a constant hubbub. However in just a few minutes, the atmosphere changed completely. A duo entered the stage whose incredibly gentle tones immediately moved the audience to silence. Suddenly, you could hear a pin drop. The crowd was spellbound. The musicians’ delicate sounds possessed an enormous power.
And so they still do today. When you listen to recordings of pianist Julie Sassoon and saxophonist Lothar Ohlmeier, you instantly recognise something special, an enveloping aura in their music. For instance, on the first track, CLOUD, the delicately meditative piano intro increases in tone and density, expanding the sound spectrum with angular bass notes, until the tenor saxophone comes into play with shimmering tones, like a gentle, resonant reflection, before gradually adopting a sharper, more plaintive undertone, leading into a dramatically intensifying dialogue.
Julie Sassoon’s compositions for the INSIDE COLOURS DUO are full of subtle urgency. Their melodic lines are easily accessible, captivating and, as the pieces develop, lead the listener down unexpected paths. This unique musical partnership provides jazz chamber music with a fascinating repertoire for wind and piano.
And you soon sense that there’s a deeper undercurrent in this music. Rooted in a very somber past. Julie Sassoon’s ancestors fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s; not all of them escaped: Her grandmother’s family was murdered in a concentration camp. Eventually, in 1994, Julie came to Berlin. She attended a concert at the Kulturbrauerei where Lothar Ohlmeier was playing. She later sat down at the piano and played some of her own music – whereupon Ohlmeier approached her and expressed his interest in making music with her. That was the initial spark for their duo and for the life that they’ve shared together ever since.
Since moving to Germany, Julie has consciously reflected on her Jewish identity in her work. One piece, notably, is entitled LAND OF SHADOWS – the land of shadows where she now resides and where her many forefathers had lived until the 1930s.
Since 2016, several recordings have been made of Julie Sassoon and Lothar Ohlmeier for Bayerischer Rundfunk’s BR-Klassik radio programme. Here, you can hear items from that earlier open-air Bavarian Jazz Weekend concert as well as others from pandemic year 2022 in a smaller Regensburg venue. As ever, the couple’s intimate intensity prevails. The compositions reveal a poignant beauty combined with finely pulsating emotion. It is wonderful that these special moments are now available to an even wider audience, at a time when new, unsettling clouds are gathering over Germany’s LAND OF SHADOWS. After all, this is music whose delicate, refined beauty extends a hand of friendship to all its listeners.
Roland Spiegel (Music Editor, BR-Klassik, Munich)
Track Listing:
CD 1
Bayerischer Rundfunk Live Recordings
1. Cloud 9:20
2. To Be 9:27
3. This One’s A Boy 10:13
4. Shifting 8:25
5. Coming Home 7:59
6. Land Of Shadows 8:25
7. Baghdad Cafe 8:14
8. Somnia In B-Flat 7:33
Personnel:
Inside Colours Duo
Julie Sassoon: piano / composition
Lothar Ohlmeier: tenor & soprano saxofone; bass clarinet
CD 2
Live at the Berliner Philharmonie
9. Shifting 13:13
10. To Be 11:13
11. Coming Home 9:37
12. Land Of Shadows 10:31
13. Expectations 11:42
Personnel:
Inside Colours Trio
Julie Sassoon: piano / composition
Lothar Ohlmeier: tenor saxophone; bass clarinet
Mia Ohlmeier: drums
Review:
Shedding warm illuminations on all our fragile, secretive, sensuous moments, is the underlying axiom behind British pianist/composer Julie Sassoon ‘s vulnerable and telling music. A classicist at heart who, whether she is aware of it or not, comes at her music in much the manner as Marilyn Crispell—visceral, personal, labyrinthine, yet ultimately accessible—Sassoon’s sense of the improbable and the possible doesn’t so much dominate the live performances that comprise Inside Colours Live as they green-light both to occur simultaneously.
A resourceful composer with a CV that includes Ingrid Laubrock, Andreas Willers, and Willi Kellers Sassoon instructs and constructs Inside Colours Live into a fully realized 2CD set exemplifying her conceptual, conversational approach. “Clouds”is a most beautiful passage which begins things quietly. An expansive band of cirrus clouds blends into to the rolling and tumbling of sunlit cumulus . . . There are storm clouds of course but their fury is brief. Accustomed to the pianist’s dramatic minimalism and open constructs—the duo have the held listener’s rapt attention before, notably 2022’s quartet endeavor Voyages (Jazzwerkstatt) and 2000’s trio recording Azilut! (Babel) with drummer Bart van Helsdingen—saxophonist Lothar Ohlmeier, his tones at once sonorous, caustic and ruminative, reflects and calls forth. He beckons within the sonata “To Be.” He flutters and breathes life to the seismic contours of the Bach-like suite “This One’s A Boy.” The riveting testimonials “Coming Home” and “Land of Shadows” both inspired and built upon the riff-space and austere logics of Steve Reich and Phillip Glass soothe and hypnotize.
Disc Two of Inside Colours Live adds daughter Mia Ohlmeier to the drummer’s chair, and “Shifting” comes into focus. Borne on Sassoon’s innate lyricism, the music shape shifts and magnifies. Revisiting several of the compositions from Disc One, the trio bring new spark, a new light. Themes return (“Shifting,” “To Be,” the explosive “Coming Home,”) but are never held onto long enough to get staid or predictable or too much like the duo version before it. Young Ohlmeier holds her own, lending a rawer, rockier voice. The cataclysmic “Expectations” (with the whole family unit locked into something bigger than the music and the stage) closes Inside Colours Live, making the album, unlike so many family outings that result in doom scrolling or familial bickering, a rich and riveting listen.
Mike Jurkovic (All About Jazz)
