Noon in Tunisia

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Noon in Tunisia
George Gruntz's studio album

Publication
(s)

1967

admission

1967

Label (s) SABA / MPS , Universal Japan (CD Edition)

Format (s)

LP, CD

Genre (s)

Ethno jazz

Title (number)

3

running time

38 min

occupation

production

Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Studio (s)

MPS-Studio Villingen

Noon in Tunesia is a 1967 jazz album by George Gruntz for the German SABA label, which documents a first encounter between avant-garde jazz and Tunisian music .

Prehistory of the album

Joachim-Ernst Berendt has been organizing encounters between jazz musicians and the folklore of selected countries since 1962 , which were an important basis for what later developed into world music . He had two instruments for this, a series at SABA and the MPS label, Jazz Meets the World, which developed from it, and a series of concerts of the same name as part of the Berlin Jazz Days, which he directed .

The Noon production in Tunisia was the sixth album in the series. In 1964, at the invitation of the harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer, Gruntz went on vacation to Hammamet (Tunisia). A group of local musicians played a folklore evening at the hotel and met with the musicians the following day. He recognized similarities "between the music he heard there and modal jazz and immediately had the idea of bringing jazz musicians and Tunisian musicians together."

After careful preparation, Gruntz looked for ways to enable jazz and Tunisian musicians to meet. At first he met with rejection, for example from Hans Gertberg , who at the time organized the NDR jazz workshop as editor . Finally, he got in touch with Berendt, who recognized the potential of the idea and in the spring of 1967 traveled to Tunisia with his fiancée Gigi to find musicians for the project. He contacted the composer and musicologist Salah El Mahdi , commissioner for music and folk art at the Tunisian government and director of the Rashidiyya Institute, who was enthusiastic about the idea of ​​bringing together Tunisian and jazz music; besides himself, he named Berendt three other suitable musicians.

Recording and album

Since there were no suitable recording studios in Tunisia at the time, the album was recorded in Germany. On June 2nd and 3rd, 1967 the recordings took place in Villingen ; Sound engineer was Willi Fruth . Saxophonist Sahib Shihab, a Black Muslim , also identified with the project outside of the musical environment and greeted the Tunisian musicians with passages from the Koran . However, the Tunisians in the Black Forest felt uncomfortable not only because of the cold weather and went into the studio tense: “They felt unsafe in the environment of jazz and western music. The initial nervousness quickly dissipated. ”Gruntz also welcomed the musicians:“ Their faces opened and their eyes began to shine when I mentioned some rhythms after their arrival, Bunauara, Gerbi, Alagi etc., which they trust through and through were."

Gruntz had increasingly begun composing since the mid-1960s. In his Maghreb Suite ( Maghreb Cantata ), which was to be the focus of the album “Noon in Tunisia”, he interwoven folkloric material, Arabic rhythms and jazz elements. This suite “contains sentences named after Tunisian rhythms, each sentence with a jazz-like theme composed by me (as a free invention or Bedouin melody phrases made into jazz riffs), which had to mix with the modal play of the Bedouins or to serve as a template for the improvisations of the jazz musicians. ”In doing so, Gruntz pursued the following basic idea:“ The most diverse patterns of side by side, on top of each other and against each other of the interplay were structured in such a way that a wide range of possible combinations could be tried out. ”The improvisations of the jazz musicians were accordingly in that of the Traditional material presented to Tunisian musicians is interwoven like a dialogue. The piece Buanuara in particular contains intense solos from bagpipes, soprano saxophone, violin and piano.

In retrospect, Gruntz stated that the album was by no means a synthesis of world music: “The 'world music' of my experiences in North Africa is limited to the fact that a useful result was only achieved because we didn't even try to believe that it had to be in Tunisia come to a new acculturation! ”Jean-Luc Ponty was even of the opinion that the company was an“ impossible blend ”and“ a little dirty ”. Gruntz himself regretted in his autobiography that his original intention of slowly getting to know each other in the home environment of the Tunisian musicians could not be realized. The musicians only met in the recording session, the first session of which lasted only four hours. "The record was finished in a single day of recording, so on the second day we only sat around making friends in the studio and kept listening to the recordings."

The title of the album alludes to Dizzy Gillespie's classic A Night in Tunisia . Joachim-Ernst Berendt said in his liner notes that in 1967 it was no longer 'Night in Tunisia', where the “ land conquered by Rommel's Africa Corps and recaptured by the Allies” was still a colony, “whose freedom fighters were put in French prisons were. Now it's 'Noon'. "

Track list

1 Salhé (1:05)
2 Maghreb Cantata

Is Tikhbar (1:17)
Ghitta (5:08)
Alaji (4:26)
Djerbi (3:36)
M'rabaa (4:11)
Buanuara (8:52)
Fazani (3:21)

3 Nemeit (5:55)

reception

Down Beat praised the record in 1968 as a pleasant and promising start, but pointed out that the content of Tunisian music was quite high and had limited the jazz content. The French critic Michel Savy saw it differently; neither of the two idioms has lost its idiosyncrasies. For the musicologist Wolfgang Laade, too, the album was "the most interesting and most lively result of an organized confrontation of essentially different types of music"

Martin Pfleiderer points out that in this production, unlike on many other albums in the Jazz Meets the World series, in fact (here mostly European) "jazz musicians meet traditional musicians from a foreign culture". But he also characterizes the album as a “juxtaposition of jazz musicians and Bedouin music” and not yet a real synthesis. Allmusic rated the album with four and a half stars out of five. Noon in Tunisia developed into the commercially most successful album in the Jazz Meets the World series (with the possible exception of Tristeza on Guitar by Baden Powell de Aquino from 1966).

In 1969 the album received a prize from the French Club des Disques.

Further effect

Salah El Mahdi was interested in jazz through the project; he even saw a kind of “marriage” between the two musical languages ​​in the joint game. However, the public reaction was in Tunisia on the subsequent performance on the occasion of the Südwestfunk resulting documentary Noon in Tunisia by Peter Lilienthal (1969) and a tour of the Goethe-Institut much more restrained. With the music, a younger audience, also interested in jazz, could be reached, but the performance met with incomprehension among older Tunisians. Gruntz even remarked with resignation: "When visiting Tunisia it should later become clear that the audience, however, did not know what to do with exactly the music we recorded on Noon in Tunisia ." The later impression of Salah El Mahdi was more positive and saw advantages for both sides - on the one hand a forum for Tunisian music in Europe, on the other hand an interest in jazz was aroused in Tunisia.

The project brought Sahib Shihab to a more intensive occupation with North African music. He traveled to Tunisia and also took part in the Lilienthal film project in Tunisia in 1969.

In contrast to the other projects in the Jazz Meets the World series, the album was not directly linked to a live concert by the musicians involved. Gruntz later presented his project again and again on European stages (1969, 1971, 1974, 1996), partly with Berendt, partly without him, which Berendt was not very happy about. The “most beautiful record” of his Maghreb Suite from Gruntz's perspective was made in 1971 at the festival organized by Friedrich Gulda at Lake Ossiacher See with the Tunisian musicians, Ponty and the trio John Surman , Barre Phillips and Stu Martin and Limpe Fuchs .

In his autobiography, Gruntz emphasized the patronage role of the label boss Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer ; " Noon in Tunisia was, so to speak, the starting signal for a series of a good dozen LPs, which this far-sighted, open-hearted and clever man had made possible for me." Just twenty days later, Gruntz took Brunner-Schwer's next album From Sticksland with Love: Drums and Folklore , again an ethno-jazz album produced by Berendt, but which refers to the Guggen music from his hometown Basel.

literature

  • Andrew W. Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz. A look behind Joachim Ernst Berendt's record series “Jazz Meets the World” . Darmstadt contributions to jazz research. Vol. 10. Hofheim am Taunus 2008, pp. 17–44.
  • the same The return of Jazz , Berghahn Books 2009, Chapter 14 (The 1967 World-Jazz Encounters)
  • George Gruntz Jazz is world music in Burghard König (editor) jazz rock. Trends in modern music . Reinbek: rororo 1983, pp. 188-197.
  • the same Born as a white negro: a life for jazz , Berneck: Corvus Verlag 2002

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b See AW Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 17
  2. ↑ Cf. George Gruntz "Jazz is World Music". In: Burkhard König Jazzrock. Reinbek 1983, pp. 188-197.
  3. ↑ cit. n. Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 29
  4. ↑ On the other hand, Berendt wrote in the liner notes for the album: "It was the best musicians in the country that we selected after weeks of choosing new musicians in all parts of the country." El Mahdi, however, later wrote that the preliminary work was no longer than one Week and he had advised Berendt to go on vacation with Gigi to Djerba. See Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , pp. 30f. Hurley The return of Jazz , p. 188. Hurley cites a letter from El Mahdi in 2004.
  5. ^ Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 31
  6. ↑ a b c d e cit. N. G. Gruntz “Jazz is world music”. In: Burghard König Jazzrock. Reinbek 1987, p. 191
  7. ↑ Cf. W. Royal Stokes The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990 , Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, p. 195
  8. ↑ a b quot. n. Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 32
  9. ↑ See Ilse Storb Jazz meets the world, the world meets jazz. Münster: Lit-Verlag 2000, SS 187
  10. ↑ cit. n. Bert Noglik Arabian Aspects: On the "Orientalization" of Jazz Jazzzeitung 10/2006
  11. ↑ cit. n. Andrew W. Hurley The Return of Jazz. Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, p. 190. Ponty says this in Jazz Hot, May-July 1968, pp. 25/26. He also criticizes in Jazz Podium, April 1969, p. 122, that the Tunisian musicians could not adapt to playing in jazz.
  12. ^ Hurley Return of Jazz , p. 188
  13. ↑ Cf. Hans Kumpf A North African Country Fascinates Musicians In Tunisia, Arabic and Western rhythms mix ( memento of the original from January 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jazzpages.com
  14. ↑ cit. n. Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 30
  15. ↑ Larry Kart, Down Beat October 31, 1968, p. 21
  16. ↑ Savy, Jazz Hot, May 1971, p. 32
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Laade Globe Unity-Jazz meets the world , Jazzforschung / Jazz Research, Volume 2, 1970, pp. 138–146.
  18. ↑ M. Pfleiderer Between Exotism and World Music: on the reception of Asian and African music in jazz of the 60s and 70s. Karben: Coda 1998, p. 76
  19. ↑ M. Pfleiderer Between Exotism and World Music, p. 78
  20. ^ Hurley Return of Jazz , p. 189.
  21. ↑ Instead of Ponty Don Cherry and instead of Eberhard Weber, Henri Texier took part in the film. See also [1]
  22. ↑ See Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , pp. 33ff. He appeals to Salah El Mahdi. Performances took place in Tunisia in 1969 and 1978. Gruntz also regretted that no Bedouins, who originally inspired the project, attended the concerts in Tunisia. Hurley Return of Jazz , pp. 191f
  23. ^ Hurley Return of Jazz , p. 191.
  24. ↑ Don Cherry comments on this stay in Tunisia in Berendt Photo-Story des Jazz , Krüger Verlag 1978
  25. ↑ See Hurley, But Did the World Meet Jazz , p. 32
  26. ↑ Gruntz to Hurley 2004. Hurley Return of Jazz , p. 190.
  27. ↑ See the triple LP Ossiach Live (BASF 4921 119-3 / 1-3)
  28. ↑ George Gruntz: Born a white negro. A life for jazz. Autobiography. Corvus, Berneck 2002, ISBN 3-9522460-1-8 . P. 64