Among new releases coming up this autumn looking at some top sounds from Europe here’s one that I thought I’d flag up because I like what I hear a lot. The work of the Rainer Böhm Sextet who release their first live album, doubling up from an earlier trio recording already issued by another label, these sounds were recorded across two winter nights at a jazz club Bird’s Eye in the Swiss city of Basel.
In the personnel the presence of English trumpeter Percy Pursglove caught my ear. In the horn section he is with the German Wanja Slavin on alto saxophone. Slavin also stood out at Jazzahead in Bremen in 2023 appearing as part of LIUN + Science Fiction Orchestra. The Swiss tenor saxophonist Domenic Landolf completes the section. Böhm and his fellow Germans the bassist Arne Huber and drummer Jonas Burgwinkel (good on the John Taylor influenced German piano icon Pablo Held’s 2020 album Ascent) are the rhythm section.
Böhm, 48, hails from Ravensburg in the Upper Swabian region of Baden-Württemberg north of Lake Constance, and is a professor of jazz piano and ensemble direction at the University of Music in Nuremberg (the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg).
It’s a seasoned approach. There’s nothing undercooked about what’s on the menu. You quickly realise that when you chart back and look on YouTube and there you will find the same sextet, in the video above, captured playing live in Berlin at a festival there 3 years earlier, a nine hour train ride from Basel where the upcoming sextet album itself was subsequently made.
The album is issued on interesting new label Treasure run by fine German clarinettist-composer Rebecca Trescher whose tentet album Character Pieces I remember liking a lot a few years ago.
The Bird’s Eye again proves a happy hunting ground for Böhm who previously recorded live there with a trio that involved the sextet’s bassist Arne Huber and drummer Jonas Burgwinkel that was issued by Enja Yellowbird two years ago.
Technically very strong indeed Böhm on that album’s ‘Mirror’ an original of his own makes me think impulsively of Gwilym Simcock‘s sound a bit. The trio album also includes a beautifully elaborated upon 9-minute plus treatment of the Sacha Distel melody, ‘The Good Life.’
