Tiny Reviews: Pommelhorse, Georg Breinschmid, & John Ambrosini

Tiny Reviews, featuring Pommelhorse Pommelhorse, Georg Breinschmid Fire, and John Ambrosini Nine Stories.

Pommelhorse – Pommelhorse

Pommelhorse is a very cool quintet of clarinet, sax, Fender Rhodes, bass, and drums.  Healthy doses of electronic effects.  It has hints of the austere introspection of the Swiss & Nordic Euro-jazz sound, but the ebullient groove like it’s trying to party until happier days arrive.  Nice juxtaposition of the ethereal and the jam.  Cool music.

Your album personnel:  Lukas Roos (bass clarinet), Joel Graf (alto sax), Olivier Zurkirchen (rhodes), Jeremias Keller (bass), and Gregor Lisser (drums).

The embedded song is my least favorite track on the album, but it was all I could find.  When Pommelhorse employs a lighter touch to the composition, they really do shine.  They do moodiness better than jab-and-move, but overall, this is a decent recording with all kinds of promise for future efforts.

Released on the Unit Records label.  Jazz from the Bern, Switzerland scene.

Available on eMusic.

Georg Breinschmid – Fire

Interesting release from Austrian double bassist Georg Breinschmid.  Trained and performed as a classical musician, he also broke into the jazz world with artists like Kenny Drew Jr. and Archie Shepp.  Fire has Breinschmid playing in a variety of settings, some live, and a bonus disk of live and outtakes.  Strong Hungarian folk music influences with some serious swing.  Whimsical, flighty, and fun. Not World Jazz, per se, just Jazz from a different part of the world.  And, actually, ‘different’ is a good word to utilize when talking about this album in many contexts; Fire is, well, it’s a little different.

Your album personnel:  Georg Breinschmid (bass and vocals).  Some of the album has Breinschmid in a duo with Thomas Gansch (trumpet and vocals), and some of the album has Breinschmid in a trio (“Brein’s Cafe”) with Roman Janoska (violin) and Frantisek Jonoska (piano).

Released on the Preiser Records label.  Jazz from Austria.

Available on eMusic.

John Ambrosini – Nine Stories

Nice little straight-ahead release by pianist John Ambrosini.  Featuring a strong line-up of David Binney (sax), Drew Gress (bass), Ben Wittman (drums), and Mike Moreno (guitars), it’s a very likable recording. Nothing revolutionary about the recordings; just strong playing and straight jazz.

The album is Self-Produced.  Jazz from NYC.

Available at eMusic.

That’s it for today’s article, and the second of two parts of the Tiny Reviews from this batch of new arrivals.

Here’s some language to protect emusic’s rights as the one to hire me originally to scour through the jazz new arrivals and write about the ones I like:

“New Arrivals Jazz Picks“, courtesy of eMusic.com, Inc.
© 2012  eMusic.com, Inc.

My thanks to emusic for the freelance writing gig, the opportunity to use it in this blog, and the editorial freedom to help spread the word about cool new jazz being recorded today.