Notes about the new release:
CD 888 184
BALLAD IS THE 'INNER
VOICE'
OF THE INTERPRETER
I've always been an
absolute ballad freak, but find that over the last few years,
the great moments of the celebration of this discipline are
becoming more and more rare. The young Miles complained once
about forty years ago to the older Dizzy, about why he could
not play the higher registers like him. Dizzy answered, ""Because
you don't hear them, you have to hear "high notes"
like these within you to be able to play them." From
that point of time onwards, Miles gave up the effort to try
and blow as high and brilliant as Dizzy, to want to sound
like his great rôle model. Instead of this, in the years following
this, Miles became perhaps the greatest jazz ballad player
of all times, because he only played what was natural to him.
Transposing the meaning of this, it might be postulated, that
the ballad is the "inner voice" of the interpreter;
it seems to have become silent, or else the younger ones don't
hear it any more.
Gunther Klatt is somebody
who knows how to listen to what's within him, so that whoever
loves ballads today cannot ignore or brush past him. Like
no one else in the country, he has prescribed this mode of
playing for himself, has made this his metièr. whether it's
ellington or Strayhorn, Kurt Weill or other standards, such
brilliant compositions serve him actually only as a vehicle,
he uses them to express himself, his personality, his inner
state of being. People can feel it, he lets them participate
in his gifts, which is why those who come are inspired, again
and again, whether he's performing in Munich, Calcutta or
Mexico City. I can remember a legendary concert - that was
in the late autumn of 1989 - a duo concert in Munich's Pep,
a little suburban theatre on the outskirts of Munich -and
Tizian Jost. He'd learnt his craft fast and proved to be a
congenial partner for Klatt and his unmistakeable sound, and
that 'touch of historical piano' has never left my ears since.
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