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Beauty on CD

Mariano/Hübner²/Beirach - Beauty / Charlie Mariano has always been a pioneer of beauty in jazz. Where other jazz musicians cause opposites to collide, working with syncopation and dissonance, he has always searched for the greatest possible harmony, and did so even though, at Charlie Parker's side, he was partly responsible for one of the greatest cultural clashes of the twentieth century. But Mariano was one of the very few who knew hot to transform the subversive energy of bebop into a spiritual urgency. What this old, wise man of the saxophone is now offering up to our ears, together with the Beirach on piano and the Hübner brothers on violin and bass, is the quintessence of all his musical expeditions of past decades. Naturally a seasoned expert like Mariano knows that he cannot answer all the fundamental questions of life himself. And hence the composition of this quartet is no coincidence. Beauty results not from the typical session acquaintances that can be so fatal in jazz: recording three takes each of eight pieces on two afternoons, only to go their own ways thereafter and then join up again a year and a half later for a joint tour. No, the Beauty quartet is part of a musical family tree that spans more than two generations. Richie Beirach is strongly marked by his teacher Charlie Mariano. He has manifested his view of profound beauty in sound in the bands of John Abercrombie and Dave Liebman, among others. Beirach was in turn mentor to the German musician Gregor Hübner, who lives in New York, and in a trio with George Mraz they enjoyed success with unconventional arrangements of compositions by Béla Bartók and Federico Mompou. Marino, Beirach, and Hübner were already working as a trio before they brought Hübner's brother Veit on board for additional grounding. That this constellation works at all lies not least in the contrasting timbres of saxophone and violin, which never get in each other's way, or even produce interference.