Pär Lammers Trio - Komm doch vorbei ( Come on over )
Music can be so many things, but intentionally or unconsciously, it is most certainly an expression of lifestyle. It seems to be young jazz musicians in particular who tend to express a lifestyle in their music that they haven’t really lived yet, one that they hope to attain in the long run. Acknowledging the lessons you learn from life is a question of maturity. The Pär Lammers Trio creates with zeal, tapping into life itself, in all its colors and all its fullness. With their first two albums „All die bunten Schafe“ („All the Speckled Sheep“ 2007) and „Hinten rechts, der Regen“ („The Rain is Right Behind You“ 2008) the three young musicians already delivered two amazingly sovereign statements, covering a unique cosmos between contemporary pop experience, classical clarity and the imaginative freedom of jazz. With the third CD „Komm doch vorbei“, a new chapter in the trio’s story has begun.
Pianist Pär Lammers, bassist Marcel Krömker and drummer Benni Wellenbeck have been working together for five years already. If their first two records were an expression of an extensive convergency, a long getting-to-know-you phase aimed at reaching the highest possible standard, they have surely hit the mark with „Komm doch vorbei“. The Pär Lammers Trio is now right where it’s always wanted to be. With every single note, you sense just how good these three musicians feel with their CD, just how much they identify with their music. Programmatic parameters were already set on the last two albums, but here, their elegantly playful aspiration is even more convincingly laced with a charming urban casualness which is clearly developing into the Pär Lammers Trio trademark. The music has an unbeatable suitability for everyday use. „That’s because,“ confirms Lammers, „we didn’t worry so much any more about the final form, and reduced the pressure we used to put on ourselves considerably. We could allow ourselves to see unexpected developments as a source of inspiration instead of as mistakes to be dismissed. And in our private lives a lot has happened that required clear decisions and commitments. This clarity transferred itself to our music without having to be discussed much. We took more time in the studio and let things happen that put more spontaneity on the album.“
The positive vibe here transfers easily to the listener. The trio could simply let go and be themselves. There were absolutely no „musts“. Some things happened spontaneously in the studio, others had already often been played. A healthy mixture of the familiar and the unknown is what gives the CD its human component. There does seem to be a paradox however, in that the trio’s obvious maturation process and flowering sophistication seem to go hand in hand with an increasingly devil-may-care approach to its own world of sound. Lammers and his cohorts are throwing away all kinds of baggage. The music doesn’t have to be anything any more, it just stands for itself. „We just don’t ask those questions like what style we have to follow and what we should do to be good any more“, reflects the pianist. As a musician, you sometimes place too much importance on trying to fulfill certain external criteria, and neglect your own musical needs. But this time we could quite cheerfully throw all these questions overboard and enjoy what was happening. We got along just fine without any kind of programm.“
So what’s left at the end of the day? Does the music of the Pär Lammers Trio need more description? Surely the sound, the framework, and the instrumentation inevitably fall into a jazz context. An improvising piano trio. What’s that supposed to be, if not jazz? And yet this young trio has managed to make a CD that meets all the usual jazz requirements, but works in a completely different way. You can easily play these songs between current rock or pop albums and hardly anyone would notice a change in the musical range. Maybe this is exactly the forté of young jazz pioneers like Lammer, who want to change things, but don’t have to push the „destroy“ button right away? „We don’t want people to perceive us as a jazz trio, we want them to think oh, what a beautiful song. Sure, it plays a role that we play in an instrumental trio, we chose this context ourselves, but our aim was much more universal from the very beginning. The reason this is panning out now is that we stopped formulating this aim so drastically.
The songs are actually the real strength of this album. Pär Lammers is a songwriter who can easily do without the allegedly indispensable singer. The way he sings on the piano sounds completely new and unused. He himself stays grounded, knowing well the accomplishments of the Brad Mehldau Trio, The Bad Plus and e.s.t. „We are not the first band with the aspiration of reaching a wider audience than just jazz fans. But in the end we didn’t think about this aspect any more. The question of who we could reach and how gave way to solving the problem of how we could realize our music in a way we liked. This is naturally a question of taste. We feel we’ve stayed true to ourselves as far as taste goes on the new album, because it reflects what we ourselves like.“
To give the album even more intensity, the trio worked with horns on several tracks. That has nothing at all to do with being inadequate as a threesome. On the contrary, Lammers was looking for contrasts to sharpen the trio’s spectrum of expression. He himself speaks of „The contrast of these pompous archaic sounds to the little introverted piano arrangements. It was just supposed to start roaring. Maybe that rubbed off on the way we play as a trio?“
A pop album in jazz clothing or a jazz album wrapped as pop? Maybe both at the same time, possibly neither of the two. Pär Lammers and his trio have grown beyond themselves. What each individual listener makes of this no longer lies in their hands. In the end „Komm doch vorbei“ is just as good for focussed high-quality enjoyment under headphones, as it is for cozy evenings for two or more, as a soundtrack for a leisurely stroll, or as a trusted companion for any and every phase of life.