STEFFEN BASHO-JUNGHANS - Late Summer Morning

Placed right at the opening, the twenty-two minutes of the title-track would be enough on their own to make this record more than worth recommending. It's a deeply lyrical meditation on the magical dimension of nature as the seasons turn. Or, to be precise, on the last morning of summer, when melancholy overtakes us, a symptom of an inescapable future precisely because it's unknown. Meditative but never resigned, the fingerpicking here is wisely relaxed, letting the notes hold hands with one another, somewhere between echoes of good old Robbie and the lyrical scratches of bear-like John. The tempo builds gradually, until, in the finale, it brushes against a kind of manic round dance.

Paying due attention to a chiaroscuro palette like that of "In A Secret Garden", it will hardly come as a surprise that the German musician Steffen is also, among other things, a painter. These are faded colors, but not colors defeated by time. Rather, they're still conversing with the light of their own destiny. The glimmers and metallic droplets of "Woodland Orchestra" seem to mimic the disarming, impressionistic effect of dew settling everywhere, while the sun is still lazy and indolent. The complexity of the interweaving lines follows an ascending path, but the farewell is one of those that leaves peace in your heart.

The same peace lurking beneath the apparent disharmony of "Sky Dreamer's Gold", a sophisticated emotional mosaic of sensations, assembled with the mastery of someone who has, by now, a true sense of measure and recognizes its fundamental value in responding properly to the unfolding of mother nature. The almost obsessive repetitiveness of "Azure No. 3" points directly back to the crystalline structures of "Waters In Azure", which still echo, in fact, in the closing fantasy of "Northern Winds", close to the ecstatic raptures of Basho at his best (the Basho of "Venus In Cancer" or the unreachable "Song Of The Stallion", to be clear) and shot through with narrative, hypnotic flashes of light.

What's left, in the end, is a strange bewilderment of the heart, a sweet, magical sense of spiritual calm. In short, once again, music and the ineffable walking hand in hand.

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23/12/2006