It is a stroke of luck for the German jazz scene that New Yorker Tim Collins came to Munich twelve years ago. The 45-year-old belongs to the small group of the world’s best vibraphone players. American critics already attested to this when he was still playing in his home country with musicians like Ingrid Jensen or Aaron Parks: Collins “is nothing less than exemplary,” wrote Downbeat Magazine, for example. Across the pond, he has proven it in collaborations with a wide variety of greats from John Hollenbeck to Danny Grissett to Henning Sieverts or Shinya Fukumori to the world musicians Quadro Nuevo or the young whiz kid Shuteen Erdenebataar. Now he underlines it with his fifth album “For Good People”.
Listen to the music: https://glmmusic.de/ForGoodPeopleWE
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The combination of flute and organ trio is refreshingly unconsumed and appealing, especially when it comes along with as much ingenuity as it does with Isabelle Bodenseh, Thomas Bauser, Lorenzo Petrocca and Lars Binder, who already attracted attention in 2018 with the album “Mrs. Bo’s Cookbook”.
The unexpected always seems logical with him, wrote one critic. On “Live in Ottobrunn” Martial Solal proves this from the very first note: Only a D is heard at first, which keeps you on tenterhooks until a pianistic whirlwind follows: expressionistic disharmonies dissolve into blue notes, glissandi runs lead into long sustained chords, classical motifs merge with echoes of half of jazz history. Everything is rhythmically varied in a highly complex way, without ever falling out of time.
The great writer Gertrude Stein once said: “Jazz is tenderness and powerful violence.” A definition that has shaped the pianist Cornelius Claudio Kreusch already at the beginning of his career – and which now again perfectly applies to his new album “Eye of the Storm”. Whereby improvisation as the primal ground of these strong forms of expression is absolutely part of it.