Jazzenzo review

Lately, it has been hip to let poetry and prose flirt with jazz. Stephen Emmer does this too, but differently. He uses texts by actors, musicians, and writers and has them spoken by personalities chosen by them or by him. He and his fellow musicians then improvise on top of this.

Seventeen pieces

It all flows together. That is immediately the great charm of this project. In seventeen pieces, the voices of Kazu Makino, Lou Reed, Richard Burton, Andrea Piovan, Sylvia Kristel, Ken Nordine, Michael Parkinson, Jorge Luis Borges, Remco Campert, Sacha de Boer, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Lonsdale, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Hugo Claus, Sylvia Ocampo, Kurt Schwitters, and Yoko Ono make an appearance. A more motley group is hardly conceivable. Through the procedure followed, texts are placed in a completely different context. As a result, they form new work, which, through the way the music is performed, also acquires other cross-connections.

Yearning for freedom

On ‘Recitement’, it is not about how the music sounds or how the texts come across. The emphasis lies on the total project, on how music and texts blend. Stephen Emmer translates the cultural icons he encountered on his life path into his views on music. Drama, lyricism, passion, timelessness, and a yearning for freedom are the elements that flow together ingeniously. It is a pity, however, that Emmer chose to have his soberly performed compositions blown up by Pete Whitfield’s Real Strings.