released September 4, 2020

STRELL
The Music of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington
WHO Trio

Michel Wintsch - piano
Gerry Hemingway - drums, vocal
Bänz Oester - bass

1 The Mooche 7:23
2 Fleurette Africaine 3:51
3 In a Sentimental Mood 5:38
4 Black and Tan Fantasy 3:10
5 Take the A Train 5:59
6 In a Mellow Tone 6:01
7 Passion Flower 6:20
8 Angelica 4:24
9 A Flower is a Lovesome Thing 4:29

Total length: 47:31

All works recorded at Studio du Flon, Lausanne, Switzerland May 11 + 12, 2019, Engineer - Benoît Corboz
except “Passion Flower” recorded live at Chorus, Lausanne Switzerland May 25, 2018
Post Production by Michel Wintsch, Gerry Hemingway
Final Mix & Master by Christian Guggenbühl
Photography by Jordan Hemingway
Liner Notes by Bill Meyer
Recording produced by WHO trio
Executive Production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul
Design by Travassos

whotrio.com

Liner Notes by Bill Meyer:

In his liner notes for Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, Stanley Dance quoted an assertion made by the British writer Benny Green:
“Duke Ellington was put into the jazz world to separate the men from the boys.”

Nearly 60 years later, one notes the quote’s bellicose, macho tone, as well as the failure to acknowledge the inseparability of Ellington’s artistry from that of the younger composer-arranger-pianist Bill Strayhorn. Some things don’t hold up over time. But the point is clear; this material sets the standard, and everything in jazz that follows must reckon with it.

The WHO trio took its time getting around to that reckoning. Pianist Michel Wintsch, double bassist Bänz Oester, and drummer Gerry Hemingway began playing as a discrete unit in 1998 (Wintsch and Hemingway first worked together in other settings in 1995). While their music has drawn inspiration and sustenance from the jazz piano trio tradition, the choice to work with original material and French chansons has ensured that a jazz fan dealt with the band on its own terms. They have established a collective voice that balances streamlined lyricism against contrapuntal density, and swinging rhythms against meter-less flow, and permitted each player to draw on inspirations outside of the jazz canon. Explains Wintsch, “I’m not a jazzman in the traditional way. I never went to school, and I love too many other kinds of music — rock, prog rock, soul, contemporary music, electronics — to limit myself and become a specialist of anything.”

The trio has channeled this breadth of interests into concentrated investigations of particular approaches. Each of their five previous albums emphasizes different methods and sources. “We seem to evolve as a trio in chapter form. Different concentrations at different times. That is, we take on a direction for some years,” explains Hemingway. Strell is the latest chapter. In 2018, the WHO Trio began rehearsing pieces from the combined songbooks of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington. “I believe Michel proposed this originally, and it somehow made sense,” says Hemingway. “At first, we basically played the pieces relatively traditionally, as part of understanding their nature and possibility.” While they started out learning familiar favorites, the exploratory process unearthed some less obvious choices, including two tunes, “Fleurette Africaine” and “Angelica,” which Ellington first recorded without his orchestra during the 1960s. Observes Banz, “More and more, I got into researching compositions that were new to me, discovering an impressive amount of beautiful material.”

As familiarity grew, they introduced strategies that reflected twenty years of group development and 21st century perspectives on musical structure and instrumental technique. Sometimes the jump is not a long one; when Hemingway vocalizes through an aluminum lampshade into his snare drum on “The Mooche,” his singing recalls the muted brass that so distinguished the 1920s-vintage Ellington Orchestra. While he has sung in solo settings, Strell is the first WHO album to feature Hemingway’s voice; in addition to wordless singing, he closes the album by crooning Strayhorn’s “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing.”

But these musicians don’t just echo the past. They work transformations that make familiar themes sound new, such as when Wintsch plays the theme of Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” at an antic pace, sailing over a counter-intuitive bassline, wheezing harmonica, and simmering percussion. “These compositions are at the same time strong and open,” the pianist observes. “You can grab objects, motifs, patterns, strange harmony, simple melodies, and from there go anywhere you want — even out of the jazz canon if you wish.”

In the WHO Trio’s hands, Ellington and Strayhorn don’t separate the men from the boys; they model inclusion. The spirit of curiosity that inspired works like The Far East Suite is close kind to the impulse to link one century’s jazz to the next century’s wider world of musical practices. Says Hemingway, “This music is to a certain extent embedded in world cultural consciousness, similar in a way to the Beatles. Ellington went out of his way to physically visit the whole world with his music, and it is that effort that was inspiring to me as a developing musician. In this project it is the sense of familiarity in his work that we utilize in contributing to a continuum of musical invention which can include a kind of impressionism, or picture-oriented relation between listener and improvised invention.”

Bill Meyer March 2020