Jazz breaking news: Bruno Heinen Tierkreis Quintet spin Stockhausen through the Zodiac

The personnel has changed slightly since the album was recorded: Fulvio Sigurtà’s supple trumpet is missed, while James Allsopp, who played bass clarinet on the disc, is replaced by George Crowley. Big shoes, which Crowley not only fills, but dances around in.

Heinen’s version of ‘Tierkreis’ (‘signs of the Zodiac’) is an adaptation of a 1974 score by German experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen containing about 30 seconds of melody for each Zodiac. Each melody is scored on a music box, and Heinen (pictured left), whose musician parents have worked with Stockhausen, plays the original boxes in some tracks. Each melody has to be played at some point, otherwise performers can spin these looped themes as they like. They do so with verve and skill, dipping in and out of many styles of contemporary jazz without disguising the ethereal character of the original melody.

It’s a great concept for jazz, and Heinen’s arrangement ensures that everyone in the band has the chance to shine: all five members have substantial solos, toying, wrestling with the tune, riffing remorselessly on the rhythm as drummer Jon Scott did in a captivating solo at the end of ‘Cancer’.

Tom Challenger on tenor sax almost stole the show, though that’s partly because the very resonant acoustic favoured the sax sound (see below). He played ‘Aquarius’, for example, with an irresistible fluency in both the scored and improvised sections, belching cascades of golden, burnished notes with breathtaking speed and precision.

Crowley’s bass clarinet blended tantalisingly with the sax in a series of duos, of which ‘Pisces’ was perhaps the standout. The similar tone and range of the instruments made their collaborations all the more exciting, the brawny, twining lines acquiring an almost erotic charge.

Heinen is an unusually modest and generous leader, but his own playing, fluid and effortlessly skilful, were subtly brilliant. And Andrea di Biase on bass had ‘Sagittarius’ all to himself, giving a masterclass in spooky harmonics, though where he had to compete against the reeds he struggled to be heard.

The music boxes have their own kind of solo in some of the pieces, though neither the sound nor fixed, mechanical rhythm could easily be assimilated into the ensemble. A clockwork tune playing on loop, slowing all the while as its spring uncoils, is difficult to blend with the dynamic variation of a jazz quintet. The tone of the boxes, hard but quiet, curdles slightly in the velvety reeds. Despite the brilliance of both adaptation and performance, it did occasionally feel as if the music-box-concept tail was wagging the instrumental dog.

In Germany, Stockhausen’s piece is so popular that it’s played daily from the clock tower of a Cologne church; here, the name has unfairly become a byword for the nails-down-the-blackboard excesses of the classical avant garde. This piece, at least, is charmingly melodic, and the originality and stylistic diversity of Heinen’s arrangement a stroke of brilliance. As Selwyn Harris wrote in his album review in the June issue of Jazzwise, Heinen “explores diverse and often surprisingly lyrical settings considering the subject, echoing at times Miles’ free bop quintet… and elements of Keith Jarrett’s European quartet”. With so much skill and inventiveness at his disposal, we can surely look forward to Heinen breaking more classical-crossover jazz moulds in his next work.

As ever, it’s encouraging to see a new jazz evening launch, but the Shaftesbury’s beautiful room, all glossy wood and polished stone, currently offers an echoey acoustic in which the sharp-elbowed sounds, particularly upper-range sax, can be overwhelming. The venue either needs a Jan Garbarek season to exploit the resonances, or should find some baffles or a PA to contour the sound.

– Matthew Wright