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The Middle of Life

by Christian Artmann

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1.
2.
3.
Snow River 06:29
4.
If I Must Go 08:05
5.
6.
7.
Twenty Seven 04:54
8.
July 05:49
9.
10.
Last Words 07:45

about

24 bit / 44k

As the title of Christian Artmann’s new CD The Middle of Life suggests, he’s no ingénue. The German-born flutist, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area after living for more than 15 years in New York, is a seasoned composer with a small but acclaimed discography that’s contributed significantly to keeping the flute in the foreground of the contemporary jazz scene. As for many of us, the experience of the pandemic inspired deep reflection, and with his fourth album (and third for Sunnyside) Artmann takes stock of what matters most.

Part of what makes The Middle of Life a strikingly cohesive project is Artmann’s choice of ensemble. The album features Hungarian-born pianist Laszlo Gardony (also on Artmann’s previous release Our Story), as well as Gardony’s longtime collaborators, bassist John Lockwood and drummer Yoron Israel. Like Gardony, who’s been a creative force in the U.S. for four decades, Lockwood and Israel have spent many years on faculty at Berklee College of Music, where Artmann first connected with Gardony in the 1990s. Vocalist Elena McEntire, a conservatory-trained mezzo-soprano (New York City Opera, One World Symphony, Baz Luhmann’s La Bohème) who has recorded and performed with Artmann for the last decade, contributes on three of the album’s tracks.

Artmann’s original tunes beautifully balance composition and improvisation, and the quartet navigates the material with the kind of intuitive interplay that flows from rarefied chemistry. Even at the music’s most introspective, there’s an emotional buoyancy.

In a neat bit of symmetry, the seeds for the album were planted in Boston when Gardony invited Artmann to play with the trio as a special guest at a 2019 Berklee concert celebrating the group’s 20th anniversary. The performance was both a reunion and the start of a beautiful new friendship. “I just loved Yoron’s drumming and the connection between the three of them,” Artmann says. “It made communication so easy. Yoron, whatever he touches, it dances.”

The dance commences with “Turnaround,” a multilayered piece spun with seemingly effortless precision despite its intricate structure and metric modulations. Israel is the straw stirring the drink with his crisp cymbal work, while Lockwood’s resolute bass foreshadows the piece’s ratcheting intensity. Artmann’s brief, mournful, and disquieting “Lament for Ukraine” is a solo piece he improvised that evokes the sound of a tambin, a West African wooden flute.

Gardony opens “Snow River” with a series of icy bell-like notes, introducing a tune that starts out like a ballad but evolves into an almost prog-rock anthem. Playing the thicker-toned alto flute, Artmann evokes a live-wire current of angst that seems like a response to “Lament for Ukraine” and other tribulations foreign and domestic.

A well-traveled artist, Artmann knows that one surefire antidote to despair can be found in the miraculous music of Brazil, and his piece “If I Must Go” is a Milton Nascimento-inspired partido alto samba. McEntire makes her first appearance with a brief wordless vocal that underlines the song’s bittersweet sense of yearning, intertwining with Artmann’s haunting, whistled line.

In another bit of artful sequencing, Artmann follows his own Miltonian statement with the Lô Borges/Fernando Brant classic “Paisagem da Janela” from Borges’ epochal 1972 collaboration with Nascimento, Clube da Esquina. Delivered by McEntire with strength and directness, the lyric speaks to ignored warnings of a gathering storm, and Artmann’s arrangement leans into the growing threat with an extended coda that is dark and ominous.

The album’s title track and centerpiece, “The Middle of Life,” is a dauntingly complex tune and a prime example of the group’s mastery of flow and dynamics. With McEntire’s vocals weaving up, across, and below the quartet, the piece modulates between Gardony’s driving piano pattern and Artmann’s broken-field flute pulse. Along the way, beauty flashes into view, again and again, moments of bliss seized from the onrushing torrent of time.

Nothing accelerates time’s passage more than parenthood. Artmann wrote two of the tracks for his son: “July,” a tune inspired by choirs in southeastern Austria and Slovenia, as well as “Nine Years of Love,” a tender Gardony feature with Artmann on caressing alto flute. The album closes with “Last Words,” a piece he wrote in the early days of the pandemic shutdown. A melancholic but resolute ode to the end of time, it’s a sublime conclusion to an album that takes stock of life from the middle ground.

Born in Koblenz, Germany on May 12, 1975, Christian Artmann grew up immersed in European classical music. A prodigious young talent, he was invited to the prestigious Aspen Music Festival at the age of 15, where he performed under world-renowned conductors Claudio Scimone and Lawrence Foster and gave solo recitals of Debussy, Hindemith, and Bartók. At the same time, his father strongly discouraged Artmann’s pursuit of music, reminded that his own artist parents struggled to feed him in the devastation following World War II. “He told me, ‘Music destroys lives,’” Artmann recalls.

But Artmann had to play. He studied music on the down low, mastering the flute and pursuing his newfound love of composition and improvisation on his own, and “practicing six, seven, eight hours in secret every night in my late teens and early 20s and throughout my education.”

Artmann graduated from Princeton University in 1994 with a degree in international affairs, having spent much of his time playing with the university orchestra and studying chamber music and composition (including with Steven Mackey and a memorable masterclass with Yo-Yo Ma). He went on to Harvard Law School (J.D., 2002), during which time he studied composition and jazz performance at Berklee College of Music. It was during his Boston years that he connected with Gardony, who became an important mentor and friend. “Laszlo played this incredible concert combining Bartók and Coltrane,” Artmann says. “I called him up and I ended up showing him some of my writing and he opened his arms.”

While he listened closely to Hubert Laws, Artmann’s early influences were mostly guitarists like John McLaughlin and particularly Pat Metheny, “who’s an easy transition from classical music,” he says. “His melodic arc is so much more obvious than, say, bebop. Something about his sound really attracted me. I didn’t listen much to jazz flute players, but I did to a ton of pianists, and was more interested in improvising like a guitar, with long fluid lines.”

After a few years on the Vienna jazz scene, Artmann made the move to New York City in 2005. His 2011 self-released debut album Uneasy Dreams reflects his multifaceted influences—postbop, Brazilian rhythms and lyricism, as well as free improvisation. His follow-up, 2015’s Fields of Pannonia (Sunnyside), firmly established Artmann as one of the most exciting contemporary voices on flute. Featuring the masterly tandem of Johannes Weidenmueller and Jeff Hirshfield again, the quartet session with pianist Gregg Kallor drew inspiration from folk traditions of Central-Eastern Europe and impressionism. Weidenmueller and Hirshfield were on hand again for the 2018 Sunnyside album Our Story, which reunited Artmann with Gardony and included several contributions from McEntire.

With The Middle of Life, Artmann has responded to the joys and challenges of recent years, creating music brimming with emotion and defined by virtuosity and deep reflection. “In this time period for me, I find myself looking forward and backward,” Artmann says. “I’m very conscious of where I am, and of the value of life. I love this Japanese haiku that goes something like this: ‘The world of dew is just a world of dew. And yet… and yet.’”

credits

released June 2, 2023

Christian Artmann - flute, alto flute (3, 5, 7 & 9), tambin (2), whistle (4)
Laszlo Gardony - piano
Yoron Israel - drums
John Lockwood - bass
Elena McEntire - vocals (4-6)

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Christian Artmann New York, New York

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