Carsten Meinert Kvartet – To You
Tracklist Hide Credits
| A1 | NaimaWritten-By – John Coltrane |
7:20 |
| A2 | One For AliceWritten-By – Carsten Meinert |
2:22 |
| A3 | Blues To SomeoneWritten-By – Carsten Meinert |
4:30 |
| A4 | To You (Susanne)Written-By – Carsten Meinert |
4:16 |
| B1 | DanseviseWritten-By – Otto Francker |
12:30 |
| B2 | Requiem For Martin Luther KingWritten-By – Ole Matthiessen |
4:07 |
| B3 | Before Sunrise (Nætter På Vallekilde)Written-By – Carsten Meinert |
2:43 |
Companies, etc.
- Recorded At – C.M.O.S.
Credits
- Bass – Henrik Hove
- Cover – Clovis Gauguin
- Drums – Ole Streenberg
- Photography By – Kirsten Weinoldt
- Piano – Ole Matthiessen
- Tenor Saxophone – Carsten Meinert
Notes
Second release on Spectator Records S 1001 in 1969 with a blue label. Same cover as the M.S. edition but with "Spectator" printed instead of "M.S. Records" bottom right hand corner of front cover and also on back cover. Back cover of Spectator edition also features notes (in Danish) by Birger Jørgensen, Aarhus Stiftstidende, and Jens Jørn Gjedsted.
Carsten Meinert Kvartet – To You
Pistas Ocultar Créditos
| 1 | NaimaSongwriter – John Coltrane |
7:20 |
| 2 | One For AliceSongwriter – Carsten Meinert |
2:22 |
| 3 | Blues To SomeoneSongwriter – Carsten Meinert |
4:30 |
| 4 | To You (Susanne)Songwriter – Carsten Meinert |
4:16 |
| 5 | DanseviseSongwriter – Otto Francker |
12:30 |
| 6 | Requiem For Martin Luther KingSongwriter – Ole Matthiessen |
4:07 |
| 7 | Before Sunrise (Nætter På Vallekilde)Songwriter – Carsten Meinert |
2:43 |
| 8 | This TimeSongwriter – Carsten Meinert |
8:55 |
| 9 | Dansevise (Live)Songwriter – Otto Francker |
7:43 |
| 10 | To TraneSongwriter – Ole Matthiessen |
6:55 |
| 11 | The PromiseSongwriter – John Coltrane |
5:50 |
Créditos
- Art Direction – Josh Dunn
- Artwork – Clovis Gauguin
- Bass – Henrik Hove
- Drums – Ole Streenberg
- Engineer – Ole Streenberg
- Liner Notes – Andreas Vingaard, Søren Lyhne Skov
- Photography – Kirsten Weinoldt
- Piano – Ole Matthiessen
- Reissue Producer – Andreas Vingaard, Søren Lyhne Skov
- Remastered By – Michael McDonald (2)
- Tenor Saxophone – Carsten Meinert
Notas
In collecting some thoughts about jazz in Japan for a future post, I got to thinking about other outposts of jazz during its most restless period that have only recently become accessible to outsiders.
Until just a couple of years ago, Carsten Meinert seems to have been known outside his native Denmark only for a type of saxophone neck strap that bears his name. I gather it’s a leather strap with a soft brass clasp, easy on the neck and easy on the horn — earthy and elegant, an unassuming if enduring legacy.
So it is with Carsten Meinert the musician. Mainly a tenorist, he jobbed around Europe during the ’60s, gaining some notice and leading his own groups. In the ’70s he played with a couple of Danish acts chiefly notable for terrible cover art, such as Skunk Funk. I have no idea whether they had much success. Afterwards I think he drifted into education, working out of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, though at 73 he is no longer listed among their staff.
Between his emergence on the scene in the mid-’60s and his later career, Meinert recorded — and self-released, on his own M.S. and Spectator imprints — two albums. The second, CM Musictrain from 1970, still languishes in obscurity, and I’d like to hear it someday. The other, 1968’s To You, is another story.
With its charmingly naive cover art, variously hand-colored on certain copies by a friend of Meinert’s, and a sweet photo (seemingly taken in a university quadrangle) of a 23-year-old Meinert and the young lady I’d like to think he is still married to, To You received an initial pressing of 500 copies that expanded to perhaps a thousand on a subsequent reissue.
Over the decades, a cult grew around the record, owing partly to its sheer rarity and partly to a reputation among the few who heard it as Denmark’s answer to the post-Coltrane “spiritual jazz” typical of artists on the Impulse! label in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Coltrane lineage is certainly obvious from the group’s material. The album begins with a storming version of “Naima,” and progresses through “One for Alice” (Coltrane, presumably) and an adaptation of “Spiritual” (“Blues to Someone”); the group also worked on Trane’s “The Promise” during this period, and originals such as “This Time” that are reminiscent of any number of Coltrane compositions. In what might have been an expression of national pride, Meinert and his countrymen also whipped up a version of Denmark’s 1963 Eurovision Song Contest winner, the waltzing “Dansevise,” in an arrangement unmistakably reminiscent of Coltrane’s take on “My Favorite Things.”
So, to some extent, the project is an early example of a Coltrane tribute; though Archie Shepp’s Four for Trane and (in a more limited way) Elvin Jones’s fine Dear John C. with Charlie Mariano had already seen release in America, To You must have been one of the first posthumous ones. Many, many more would follow, and (as I’ve noted here before), the subgenre gradually acquired its own ceremonial conventions, some of which are present even at this early date.
Still, the first encounter with Meinert and his “Kvartet” is bracing. For one thing, Meinert’s tenor sound — immediately displayed on “Naima” — is nothing like Coltrane’s. Though he borrows Coltrane’s dramatic approach to harmonics, and composes some rubato ballads with folky themes reminiscent of the later Trane, his playing seldom displays the searching vulnerability that I associate with the Coltrane sound. In what I think is a reflection of an older tenor tradition that had a longer tail in Europe than at home, Meinert flaunts a huge tone and massive vibrato perhaps pieced together from components of Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lockjaw Davis, Dexter Gordon, and Don Byas. In the process, though, Meinert’s tone ends up lining up nicely with the woolly-mammoth sound of contemporary post-Coltrane standard-bearers such as Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp. But still, Carsten was clearly no copyist. His sound is genuinely hard to place. My reconstruction above is speculative and unsatisfactory. His sound is, in other words, and as far as I can tell, original.
The young group, with pianist Ole Matthiessen working in an adaptation of McCoy Tyner’s idiom and drummer Ole Streenberg clearly trying to outdo his hero Elvin, may have had some limitations as improvisers, since solos are kept brief and only “Naima” and “Dansesvise” are allowed to crack the 4 1/2 minute barrier. But the result of this limitation (if it was one) is a refreshing emphasis on a collective sound that is atypical for jazz records of the era. The Kvartet doesn’t, for the most part, run chords. But they commit themselves to the elaboration of a group sound that had as its foundation the Coltrane quartet, of course, but which is distinguished by Meinert’s rich sound, the occasional pop gesture (such as the title track), and the sheer shattering physical force of Streenberg’s rhythms and accents. All of these elements converge on “Dansevise,” and the effect is ecstatic.
One might say they play a version of jazz made entirely of climaxes. It’s not really “free jazz,” and it’s not really bop or hard bop, and it’s certainly not soul-jazz or cool jazz or pop-jazz, but — like the hit Impulse discs of the period, such as Pharoah’s Karma — it’s in a sweet spot where those elements can interact joyfully and generously.
Still, hardly anyone outside of the most monastic parts of the jazz record-collecting community would have any idea of the pleasures of this music if not for the efforts of Andreas Vingaard, a Dane based in New York who founded Frederiksberg Records partly in a quest to get Meinert’s work suitably and respectfully reissued. The resultant labor of love, released in 2015, had spotty distribution and I had to send away to Dusty Groove in Chicago to get the CD — that’s my copy above, at the time of the photo still sealed, complete with price tag.
It is indeed a beautiful reissue, with four interesting bonus tracks (including Meinert’s version of “The Promise” and a live take of “Dansevise”) and many attractive photos of Meinert at work in the ’60s, including at a session (still unreleased) with Coltrane’s rhythm section, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison. There are also liner notes that tell the story of Meinert, and Danish jazz by extension, during the period with enthusiasm and compassion. The only thing that’s missing is the recording dates and personnel for the bonus tracks! (Apparently some of them feature Bjarne Rostvold, a major Danish jazz drummer, rather than Streenberg. This information comes from Andreas himself.)
In the couple of emails we exchanged in late 2016, Andreas admitted to me that the CD business wasn’t as brisk as he had hoped it would be when he started Frederiksberg in 2013, and that for business reasons he would be focusing on LPs and (more recently) downloads as a business strategy. There are ironies in this strategy that are characteristic of the music business today, but I won’t unpack them. I’ll simply reflect that it’s a pity people like Andreas can’t make money selling CDs, because this last-gasp-of-the-CD-era project is exemplary of the joys of the format.
I’m grateful to Andreas Vingaard, anyway, for bringing this music to my attention. It’s one of my favorite music discoveries of the last several years, the rare case where record-collector hyperbole about the greatness of an obscure album turns out not to be hyperbole at all. Although far removed from the urgency of the post-Coltrane school’s Civil Rights-era social and racial context (notwithstanding Matthiessen’s gentle tribute to MLK), in purely musical terms it really is as great as the best of Shepp, Sanders, and Alice. I can’t recommend the Carsten Meinert Kvartet highly enough to those as addicted to this sound as me. Put it on and dream along.
(In the meantime, this long, charming retrospective interview with Meinert is also worth hearing at least once.)
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