Franz Koglmann
The Austrian jazz musician and composer Franz Koglmann likes to swim among his favorite artists, touching them and then cruising by. On his new album, “Lo-lee-ta” (Col Legno), he’s thinking about Vladimir Nabokov. How do you evoke Nabokov with music? It’s a matter of indirect inspiration: “detachment and coolness,” as Mr. Koglmann explained in the liner notes, has something to do with it. (A lot of his music sounds detached and cool, whatever it’s about.) But as a practical link, he uses Bob Harris’s “Love Theme” from Stanley Kubrick’s film “Lolita” as the centerpiece for an album of chamber-ish quartet music and duets with the pianist Wolfgang Mitterer: first you hear the seesaw waltz of “Love Theme” in full, and then parts of it echoed in later tracks.
Mr. Koglmann knows how to make an album hang together, and his band, the Monoblue Quartet, has a presence. Mr. Koglmann’s trumpet and flugelhorn playing is restful, clean, with more space than notes; Peter Herbert’s bass playing is the group’s locus of swing; the guitarist Ed Renshaw jumps wide intervals delicately; and the great British musician Tony Coe, when he’s away from the alto saxophone, plays clarinet rapturously, with drive and soul, beautiful tone and minimal affect. It’s nice if the album gets you reading Nabokov again, but the sound of Mr. Koglmann and Mr. Coe together is a spur to thoughtfulness in its own right.
The Austrian jazz musician and composer Franz Koglmann likes to swim among his favorite artists, touching them and then cruising by. On his new album, “Lo-lee-ta” (Col Legno), he’s thinking about Vladimir Nabokov. How do you evoke Nabokov with music? It’s a matter of indirect inspiration: “detachment and coolness,” as Mr. Koglmann explained in the liner notes, has something to do with it. (A lot of his music sounds detached and cool, whatever it’s about.) But as a practical link, he uses Bob Harris’s “Love Theme” from Stanley Kubrick’s film “Lolita” as the centerpiece for an album of chamber-ish quartet music and duets with the pianist Wolfgang Mitterer: first you hear the seesaw waltz of “Love Theme” in full, and then parts of it echoed in later tracks.
Mr. Koglmann knows how to make an album hang together, and his band, the Monoblue Quartet, has a presence. Mr. Koglmann’s trumpet and flugelhorn playing is restful, clean, with more space than notes; Peter Herbert’s bass playing is the group’s locus of swing; the guitarist Ed Renshaw jumps wide intervals delicately; and the great British musician Tony Coe, when he’s away from the alto saxophone, plays clarinet rapturously, with drive and soul, beautiful tone and minimal affect. It’s nice if the album gets you reading Nabokov again, but the sound of Mr. Koglmann and Mr. Coe together is a spur to thoughtfulness in its own right.
