On their new album with a Norwegian horn player in tow the Julia Hülsmann Quartet always seem to be tumbling headlong, as the ten songs of Under the Surface tend to carry a propulsive momentum, even when there’s something creeping underfoot or a real nip in the air, like on ‘Bubbles’ with its windchill as gusts buffet everything from the high hills to valleys, riverbanks and canyons. Instead of hunkering down the ensemble opt for short respites before moving again, as the bandleader Hülsmann sometimes takes the lead but just as often uses her deft piano keys as a kind of halter or stay, putting the briefest of holds on her fellow musicians so that they can tug forward with a certain gushing force or briskness of feeling.
The sound of the ensemble is rich, shapely and even voluptuous with a velvety fuzz beneath many of the tracks thanks to the twin horns of the tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff and Hildegunn Øiseth, who sits in on precisely half of the compositions with her trumpet and bukkehorn, an ancient Scandinavian instrument which is sometimes referred to as a billy goat horn in English.
All of the members of the quartet – with the double bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling rounding out the group – contribute music to Under the Surface with Köbberling adding the somewhat wistful, winding and reedy ‘May Song’ and ‘Bubbles’, the latter of which ends with a worldly jaunt or a kind of spring in its step following that exposed and blustery middle section, while Muellbauer offers up the elegant ‘Second Thoughts’ and bouncy ‘Nevergreen’, which is characterised as much as anything by his bounding bass, as Hülsmann leads us out through ‘They Stumble, They Walk’ whose easy swing and tripping energy serves to swiftly define the contours of the record.
Hülsmann, Muellbauer and Köbberling have been performing as a trio since 2003, when Köbberling joined and then superseded Rainer Winch behind the drum kit. They made their debut on ECM Records with The End of a Summer in 2008, as Hülsmann’s early setting of poems by such modern spirits as Emily Dickinson and e e cummings gave way to the graceful melodies and subtle harmonies of her original compositions.
The following year they joined up with a Marc Sinan trio for Fasil, an Ottoman suite inspired by the life of Aisha, the youngest wife of the prophet Muhammad, and they subsequently released a couple of albums as a quartet with the trumpeter and flugelhorn player Tom Arthurs, with A Clear Midnight in 2015 also featuring the vocalist Theo Bleckmann as he and Hülsmann uncorked some of the lesser-known works of Kurt Weill between fond renditions of classics like ‘Mack the Knife’ and ‘Alabama Song’. The reedman Kempendorff joined the original trio in 2019 for Hülsmann’s seventh ECM session Not Far From Here, a relationship which was elaborated in the late summer of 2022 as The Next Door offered a buoyant yet intimate take on the post-bop and modal jazz of the sixties.
Compositions like ‘Anti Fragile’ and ‘Trick’ on the back side of Under the Surface embrace the angularity of modern jazz and are even more brisk, as they slough off some of the more temperate and classical airs which framed the first half of the record, before the album closer and title track slinks surreptitiously into view like the spindly fingers of a hand working its way between the bedsheets, developing a creepy aura which gives way to a few muted horn fanfares plus some hurdling bass and wire-brushed drums in the middle section, now more languorous but still probing as the ensemble build steadily towards a climax.
