Jazz Articles about Joachim Kühn

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Joachim Kuhn: Voodoo Sense

by Ian Patterson
November 12, 2013

The fourth outing from German pianist Joachim Kühn, Moroccan vocalist and guembri (bass lute) player Majid Bekkas, and Spanish drummer Ramon Lopez continues the trio's exploration into free-jazz and North African roots that began with Kalimba ( ACT Music, 2007). The percussion and rhythms of the Magreb were more prominent on Out of the Desert (ACT Music, 2009) which featured a cast of Berber musicians, while Chalaba (ACT Music, 2011) returned to the stripped down trio format. Here, Kühn again ...

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Joachim Kühn / Majid Bekkas / Ramon Lopez: Chalaba

by Bruce Lindsay
February 16, 2011

The sleeve notes to Chalaba describe German pianist and alto saxophonist Joachim Kühn as a veteran “of the conscious avant-garde." This is certainly accurate--he's worked with Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman, among others--but the description sounds rather forbidding, a portent of some serious and complex sounds for the mind but not the body. Thankfully it misleads: for while Kühn, vocalist and guembri player Majid Bekkas, and percussionist Ramon Lopez do produce some serious music, they also create some splendidly joyous ...

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Joachim Kuhn / Majid Bekkas / Ramon Lopez: Out Of The Desert

by Chris May
June 22, 2009

Boundary busting and inventive though it was, Kalimba (ACT, 2007)--the first album by German pianist Joachim Kuhn, Moroccan vocalist and guembri player Majid Bekkas, and Spanish drummer Ramon Lopez--ultimately felt like Kuhn's album more than a fully integrated, cross-cultural group exercise. Two years on, the trio's second outing, Out Of The Desert, offers a deeper mix--and an altogether more absorbing one.

Kalimba was recorded in Germany. For Out Of The Desert, the trio travelled to Morocco. In the ...

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Joachim Kuhn - Michael Wollny: Live at Schloss Elmau

by AAJ Italy Staff
June 11, 2009

Figura centrale del pianismo jazz europeo, Joachim Kuhn si impone ancora una volta con questa ragguardevole incisione, non relegabile ai confini del jazz. Un disco davvero importante per maestria solistica ed arguzia interpretativa, dove ad imperare è la musica con la M maiuscola. Al suo fianco il giovane collega (classe '78) Michael Wollny, diplomato al conservatorio proprio con una tesi sull'improvvisazione di Kuhn. Maestro ed allievo a confronto, dove l'imperiosa cascata accordale al servizio di una concentrata prova virtuosistica si ...

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Joachim Kuhn and Majid Bekkas with Ramon Lopez: Kalimba

by John Kelman
August 8, 2007

While it's easy to categorize the assimilation of diverse musical cultures as world music, the term has become over-utilized and often misrepresented. German-born pianist Joachim Kühn, Moroccan guimbri/oud player Majid Bekkas and Spanish drummer Ramon Lopez intersect on Kalimba, an album that should dispense with oversimplified categorization. Instead, assessed on its own merits as an album that looks to capitalize on the strengths of everyone involved, it carves out its own distinctive musical niche.

This isn't the first time that ...

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Joachim Kuhn & Majid Bekkas with Ramon Lopez: Kalimba

by Chris May
June 2, 2007

Like the spectacular bouffant hairstyle he's sported since the 1970s, pianist Joachim Kuhn's music is at home in two, generally discrete traditions: intellectually rigorous, harmonically complex, longhair conservatoire music and a less cerebral strand of world jazz driven by vamps and grooves. Sometimes Kuhn keeps the two traditions apart--as on his classically oriented solo albums--at other times, as on Kalimba, he brings them together, in a sort of modal chromaticism, to their mutual advantage.

It's tempting, ...

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Joachim Kuhn: Europeana (Jazzphony No.1)

by Chris May
October 24, 2006

Owing little to the main stem US jazz tradition, composer Michael Gibbs' orchestral suite Europeana has more in common with the work of folk-influenced English composers like Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Malcolm Arnold, and their particular varieties of English lyricism.

It's a work of magnificence and beauty which was barely noticed on original release eleven years ago and seems since to have been almost entirely forgotten. This audio enhanced reissue provides a welcome opportunity to celebrate it anew.

Despite ...