What was it Toots Thielemans said. “I like that little place between the smile and the tear. That’s me. I like to get excited and play exuberantly, with many fast notes, but I feel most at home with a slow ballad.”
Toots’ fellow harmonica player Mathias Heise may well agree. Here with guitarist Pelle von Bülow they make for a well matched duo on Repertoire. Both are from what I gather prominent figures on the Copenhagen jazz scene, with Heise, who celebrates his 33rd birthday this week, having come to wider attention after winning a world harmonica competition in 2013, and von Bülow a few years younger emerging from a prominent Danish jazz family and the city’s bebop and swing scene.
Live footage of the duo performing in Copenhagen jazz club Montmartre, above.
Heise carries most of the melodic weight, while von Bülow moves between accompaniment and soloing. The format keeps things intimate, no need for guessing on that front.
Neither will you struggle to recognise most of the tunes as the repertoire folds in ‘Bésame Mucho’, ‘Bluesette’, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Overjoyed’ and even more familiar fare. Wonder is a formidable harmonica player himself and to be frank I was won over by this album by Heise’s channelling of Wonder on opener the just mentioned 1985 In Square Circle classic.
And yet while nearly everything is familiar I’d never heard the perky ‘Angel Zoo’ by Danish R&B duo Phlake (not at all flaky as it turns out) which is clearly the least familiar of the numbers certainly to anyone who doesn’t happen to live in Denmark. Overall I liked the delicate treatment of the Pat Metheny 1990s Secret Story piece ‘Always and Forever’ best of all.
After a few spins I went back to a similar album from Dutch duo Hermine Deurloo and Anton Goudsmit and their album Unfiltered reviewed earlier this year. But while newer to me and I haven’t lived with it for as long Repertoire seems better, a bit hipper and more up to date but yet works in a similarly unforced, intimate setting to what the intrepid Dutch veterans created just as admirably. Heise’s clear melodic lines are set against von Bülow’s understated guitar playing.
It’s a low key kind of release – can you get more stripped back than a mouth organ and guitar album wrapped inside minimal post-production bells and whistles? – and like the Dutch antecedent Repertoire isn’t pretentious at all just full of good vibes and positivity with a few bittersweet moments along the way to prevent it all being insufferably lush and smug. There’s real rapport between the two and it’s an album that provokes immediate affection.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
Leave a comment