Year: 2005
Record Label: fenommedia
Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde
Musicians: Emmanuelle Somer (oboe, English horn), Michael Rabinowitz (bassoon), Erik Friedlander (cello), Marcin Oles (double bass), Bartlomiej Brat Oles
Review: Polish twins Marcin Oles & Bartlomiej Brat Oles are amazing composers, startling musicians and sensitive characters. Bassist Marcin Oles and drummer Brat Oles awe us with their authorship on Chamber Quintet by the variety and freshness of the melodic climate which they invent at every moment.
Marcin & Brat Oles composed this music, inspired by “Phanthasy op. 32” written by Benjamin Britten. With an audacity, they wanted to combine oboe and bassoon reverberations with those of cello, double bass and drums. The challenge culminated in eleven masterpieces.
Chamber Quintet also features highly spirited musicians Emmanuelle Somer, Michael Rabinowitz and Erik Friedlander.
The eclectic Somer has explored jazz with her impressive talent and abilities to master instruments and musical subjects. A traveler throughout the world, she has enriched her musical path. Somer’s phrases are a model of subtlety. Her interpretations convey great victory in her art/craft … and her horn is of a language which opens out using a clean sonority with incredibly wide nuances and amazing casting.
Michael Rabinowitz’s supremacy with his bassoon impressed me a few years ago when I first caught his “Bassoon in the Wild” playing in New Jersey. Listening to his music is enrapturing as he flies easily from classical to jazz. With his intense demeanor, he has been called by great musicians such as Dave Douglas, Wynton Marsalis, and Joe Lovano among many others. On Chamber Quintet Rabinowitz’s rank offers us a friendly oddball as well as a superb lyricism dotted with virility. From “Abyss to Source”
Rabinowitz’s bassoon summons a broad emotional range of sounds.
New York's Erik Friedlander strikes us with his constant melodic invention, which exceeds and inspires geniality. As soon as he puts his hands on the cello there is a discernment to combine the approaches and to mix techniques: phrases with the melody on the bottom and syncopated expressions in the acute medium with robust bragging which can be superimposed with improbable harmonies.
Bassist Marcin Oles boasts with his string technique as well as his discerning glance. One feels in Oles a wistful step and a maturity which does not choke in its energy and its patience. Oles pizzicatos are dwelling in miscellanea joy and fury while his staccatos are performed with babbling needs, sometimes high, sometimes strong, and sometimes compelling. Marcin Oles’s stringed attitude, excavating the sounds and transcending the duration, is more than one fair promise.
A plenteous imagination, a breaching necessity and an elegant improvisational ability extracted Bartlomiej Brat Oles from the middle of the boiling creative Polish jazz scene. His brushes and sticks --which I believe has his own copyright-- combines precision and lace-making smoothness with a delirious imagination. It is blissful to discover Marcin Oles’s double bass and Brat Oles’s cymbals and drums pas de deux.
Marcin & Brat Oles’s Chamber Quintet is inspired with beauty, passionate musical alchemy, and great celebration. The delicacy of this quintet as well as its lyricism without any assignment is unarguable!
Tracks: Abbyss, Galileo, Eternity, Enigma, Rien que nous deux…, Reflection, Horror vacui, Phoenix, Desert walk, Nostalgia, Source
Record Label Website: http://www.fenommedia.pl
Artist's Website: http://www.oles-oles-com
Reviewed by:
Dr. Ana Isabel Ordonez
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