Recorded in Oslo’s Talent studio in 1980 and released the following year tunes are by Rainer Brüninghaus. Manfred Eicher produced and the sound engineer was Jan Erik Kongshaug (1944-2019). The album, in English, ‘Set Free by the Wind,’ is notable for its still very unusual use of oboe in a jazz context and doesn’t sound at all bizarre, contrived or dated at all given how future facing Brüninghaus’ approach comes over. The means in which the sound waves coalesce around Kenny Wheeler’s miraculously cajoling, soothing tones is ingeniously shaped so the sound appears fuller and proves a perfect match for the music’s almost New Age philosophy and ecology.
If only I had heard Freigeweht in 1981
Led by pianist, composer Rainer Brüninghaus it took some 11 years after the release of the album for me to actually hear the German in the flesh. Because the gig I first heard him at was within the orbit of the Jan Garbarek group. But even then in the 1990s I was still oblivious to this album which because it had a German language title must have suffered a certain disadvantage when sold in stubbornly monoglot, as often is the case now still all these years on, English speaking countries.
I had listened to bootleg cassettes of Garbarek purchased in a stall set up in a subway near the Warsaw train station when I lived over there and saw Garbarek a few times in the 1990s – most memorably during the annual Jazz Jamboree and later – not such an epic gig but still impressive – in London at the Royal Festival Hall during an era when the Festival Hall put on a lot more jazz than it does now, long since eclipsed by the far better jazz policy reigning for years now at the Barbican.
Chimes with the Wheelerian zeitgeist
It’s an unusual album given the featured space for the oboe and English horn contributions of Brynjar Hoff, from the Oslo Philharmonic.
There are only 6 pieces. Since the CD era we had got used to much longer album playing times. But since streaming the reverse applies and while that format allows massive airtime for any individual digital-only album, a lot of people just listen to jazz singles more than they ever used to.
You have to listen for the long haul here, though, for the full impact to wash all over you.
How Freigeweht thus transplanted into the now chimes with the current 2024-25 Wheelerian zeitgeist surging all the time is spookily completely right for the times.
- A certain simpatico mood conjured by the quietly melancholic Edwardiana of Superlocrian on Hills & Valleys set the ball rolling.
- The release of Wheeler With Words give a bigger hint.
- And swelling to a climax a glimpse via a new version of ‘Smatta’ from a transatlantic Wheelerian Lost Scores project ups the ante further.
75 recently
Maybe the milestone Brüninghaus birthday is one of the reasons ECM decided to reissue the album, which is coming out next month, on better vinyl than has been available hitherto.
When I think of my 1980s self I would not have liked the record at all because it’s only since the 90s that I have learned to love synths more.
It’s the great Belonging band drummer Jon Christensen (1943-2020) here among the small number of musicians who is perfect on ‘Spielraum,’ a track in our playlist today and the one that led us down the long and winding road that led to listening to the whole album and to writing this review.
He is so open and colouristic.
But the best thing about Freigeweht is the moving, often extensive and yet even occasionally rambling (if that isn’t too heretical a word – not that it hampers enjoyment at all) solos from Wheeler who plays flugel throughout.
The Eiliff years
Born on 21 November 1949 in Lower Saxony in the tourist town of Bad Pyrmont, Brüninghaus was playing Mozart sonatas by the time he was even 10.
Following sociology studies at the University of Cologne from 1968 to 1972 then music studies until the mid-1970s he founded a Krautrock band called Eiliff and joined Volker Kriegel’s jazz-rock group Spectrum.
An apotheosis with Weber and then Garbarek
But it was his long time collaboration with the great Stuttgart bassist Eberhard Weber nine years his senior – Brüninghaus is on the classic of Weber’s The Colours of Chloë (1974) – that pointed both players in the direction of eventually achieving great things with Garbarek.
Legend of the Seven Dreams
A few years after Freigeweht, Brüninghaus’ Continuum picked up acclaim and the keyboardist went on to work with the likes of the great tabla player Trilok Gurtu who also became a Garbarekian.
With Garbarek check especially Brüninghaus’ visions of colour when you peel back the sheer primeval calm of the stark saxophone themes on 1988 classic Legend of the Seven Dreams.
- Freigeweht is to be issued by ECM in the label’s ongoing Luminessence audiophile friendly vinyl reissue series on 24 January released in a tip-on gatefold and containing new accompanying text.
