Heinrich Köbberling laughs when he plays, sometimes visible to everyone, sometimes to himself. Perhaps it is the secret of why the music of the Julia Hülsmann Trio seems so self-contained, even though it rambles on in many directions. Because Köbberling’s drums are an opulently networked instrument, determined by the idea of a pulse that does not reveal the complexity of its structure. Many rhythms are odd or so unusually accented that they tend to fall apart if they are less accurate or less cheerfully emphasized. In general, the beat is the basis, but not the focus of the music, and so Köbberling, the bassist Marc Muellbauer and the pianist of the trio Julia Hülsmann come together in an irritatingly complementary way, so that in the end it doesn’t matter who the respective one is creative impulse has just run out.
One notices this creative interweaving of the sound organism, which has been acting together for around two decades, in many places, for example in the balance of the characters, which ensures that the trio appears as a unit, through to the compositions, which come from all participants, fundamentally, however, are strikingly similar. Nevertheless, the personalities do not retreat behind the concept. They have all the space to develop, with Muellbauer fitting himself furthest into the structure as a soloist and understanding his lines and his sound as a breeding medium for the collective musical effect.
Hülsmann, on the other hand, plays with the pianistic legacy, lets beautiful sound and harmonic contrast, melodic elegance and moments of diffuseness embrace each other, and it doesn’t matter whether they use motifs from radiohead or old and new pieces from the common repertoire. The concert in the double cone of the BMW World is an all-round lucid and confident chamber jazz debut for the restart of the “BWM World Jazz Awards”, which after a two-year pandemic break under the sign “Key Position” brought a total of six bands to Munich over a period of one and a half months in order to select the winner of the 13th round of the competition at the finale on July 9th.
But it also shows that it is actually no longer a competition in the classic sense of a performance record to be evaluated. Because the trio has long stood for itself with its own sound aesthetic, as well as the three participants as artistic personalities. And it is an important project for Julia Hülsmann, but not the only one that is challenging. On April 8th she will come to Munich again, this time in an octet at the Unterfahrt jazz club, with other partners and the voices of Aline Frazão, Live Maria Roggen and Michael Schiefel as a counterpoint to the energy.