Traumhochzeit oder Mesalliance?
Early (i. e. pre-classical European) music and contemporary Jazz: a subject of some re-levance in the 1950s with its profusion of Bop-Baroque-fusions (culminating in the music of the Modern Jazz Quartet), but long dormant since, with few exceptions (e. g. Albert Mangels-dorff’s adaption of the medieval German song Es sungen drei Engel on his 1964 LP “Now Jazz Ramwong”). The 1990s, however, have seen renewed interest in the fusion of Early Music and Jazz, mostly by European improvisors attempting to affirm their Old World roots, and especially in the wake of the extraordinary commercial success of “Officium”, the CD combining medieval and renaissance vocal polyphony and Jan Garbarek’s saxophone improvisations. The stylistic range has widened: Now it is no longer a question of “Bop meets Baroque”, but a wide panorama of possible combinations of pre-classical and contemporary idioms.
The paper discusses relevant projects by Michael Riessler, Michel Godard, Maya Hom-burger / Barry Guy, Joachim Kühn, Richie Beirach, and Uri Caine. In many cases, the references to Early Music turn out to be rather superficial and arbitrary, while others (such as those of Joachim Kühn and the trio Beirach/Huebner/Mraz) display a lack of understand-ing of even the most elementary principles of historical performance practice. Only few pro-ductions (e. g. Homburger’s and Guy’s “Ceremony”, fusing the baroque violin language of Heinrich Biber with contemporary improvised music) achieve a convincing and meaningful artistic synthesis of Old and New.
Today, the problem is no longer finding musicians equally competent in European music and jazz, but rather, to sidestep the temptations of shallow postmodernist eclecticism, a problem well evident in Uri Caine’s re-composition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with its aesthetically unmotivated, over-obvious juxtapositions of diverse idioms.