Der Hitze fern auf Langeoog
Kurzentschlossen, fuhr ich vier Stunden zur Fähre, setzte über, und quartierte mich in einem kleinen Appartment ein. Nur ein richtig heisser Tag in sieben langen Tagen, „Spring Hill Fair“ auf einem alten Walkman, Steve Swallows „kleine Wintermusik“, und Erinnerungen an den „den letzten Bus nach Woodstock“ – ich fühlte mich seltsam jung und sprang erst mal ins Meer, mit Blick zur roten Sonne, die bald ins kühle Nass eintauchen würde. Diesmal all alone, seltsam beschwingt, das Echo dunkler Wochen fast schon, aber nicht wirklich, lange her! „you think I’m young I’m not half those things / why did it rain? / the days ran away from us / heaven never knew / the chances that it left for us / fast and slow, breeze to wind…“
Die Romane, die ich gerade lese, nehmen einen Faden der Jugendzeit auf, meine Lust an rororo-Krimis, deren Cover ewig schwarzweiss waren (die neueren reprints dann auch mal in Farbe), und zu deren führenden Vertretern damals Colon Dexter zählte, mit seinen Inspektor Morse-Romanen. Der Ort: Oxford und Umgebung. Als ich vor Woche Simon Masons „Mord im November“ entdeckte, gab es kein Halten mehr, und einmal mehr tauchte ich in das alte, neue Oxford ein, das uns in der Regel bekannt ist, etwa aus ruhig inszenierten, aber auch fesselnden Verflilmungen mit dem alten, aber auch dem jungen Inspektor Morse.
Simon Mason hat ein spannendes Ermittlerduo eingeführt mit den „chalk-and-cheese cops“ DI Ryan und DI Ray Wilkins, die keineswegs miteinander verwandt sind und aus fast absurd gegensätzlichen Lebenswelten stammen. Der Glücksfall ist, dass Simon Mason grossartig schreibt, das Erbe von Colin Dexter in ein heutiges Oxford transportiert – hervorragend geplottet, humorvoll, und dunkel über alle Seitenränder hinaus. Die ersten beiden Romane (von mittlerweile fünfen) liegen in gelungener Übersetzung vor, und ich bin gerade mittendrin im dritten, „Lost And Never Found“. Ein umwerfender Sprachfluss ist diesen Romanen zueigen, in die Tiefe gehende Geschichten, allerbester Stoff zum Versinken!
Jetzt, der Hitze entkommen, liest sich das alles noch rasanter, die ersten Cafés öffnen, einen „morning swim“ habe ich schon hinter mir, es dauert seit meiner Kindheit immer um die eine Minute, bis mir im Meer warm wird. Die Wellen helfen! Ein Strandkorb ist angemietet. Der Geruch von Sonnenmilch versprüht einen Zauber wie eh und je. Mit dem E-Bike fahre ich die alten Runden, durch den Wald, „Waldbaden“ inclusive , zum Fährhafen mit seiner Fischstube am Deich entlang, und auch mal wieder vorbei an dem Hotel, in dem ich mich einst mit sieben Jahren in die Hotelmanagerin verknallte, „Haus Westfalen“ hiess es damals, in der Zeit, als Hoppy Kurrat noch für den BVB kickte, und die gebundene Ochsenschanzsuppe ein Klassiker war auf kurzen Überfahrten. Ein Hauch von Wehmut mischt sich in jeden Taumel kleiner Glücksschübe.
2 Kommentare
flowworker
„As Long As That“
flowworker
In the words of Steve Noble:
Steve Swallow has been a remarkably consistent composer in that his music seems always to be about the same thing, always circling, strangely lop-sided like a clockwork toy that infinitely outpaces the slick efficiency of digital animation. The first track, “One”, seems to be moving forward before ruminating on the final bars of its sequence. It seems to never end, like Miles Davis on the tail end of “All Of You”, but then suddenly we realise…we are moving, these are the chords from the opening. And without a melody to hang on to, we are somehow adrift, caught in a dream. And so to track number two, “Two”. And so on.
Steve Swallow’s music is a wonder and has transfixed me since the day I first found it. There’s a sense that he’s exploring things in a greater depth than is usual, like looking at something in front of you for so long that it starts to move, to change. For him that thing is what’s called “functional harmony”, part of the raw material of Tin Pan Alley and its jazz offshoots. Swallow, though, makes eternal, Escher – like staircases out of what might seem like a simple walk with a beginning and end, and so maintains a kind of disorientation in tandem with the comfortable familiarity of the music’s sound. That band sound has been through some transformations over the years, like his bass, perhaps a little “snarly’ in the seventies, slick and soulful in the eighties and nineties, wondrous, deep and mellow in recent years, like Daddy Bear to Jim Hall’s Baby Bear. But it’s always had a kind of generosity to it.
Tunes appear and recede like road signs in the mist, circling around short motifs that threaten to expand into a song yet never quite make it. There’s a poignancy to these themes, a kind of graceful awkwardness that for me recalls the childlike qualities of Monk. But also, “Winter Songs” feels like an album about grief, what Swallow refers to in the liner notes as “the need to do something to fill each long day.” And whilst music can be a process of discovery as much as creation, here he notes that “music rushed forward to sustain me.” It’s as if he just had to be there to receive it.
The band play with a fabulous combination of tenderness and humour. “Four” is built around a constant reharmonising of a single note, and again like Monk the deceptive quirkiness allows some kind of melancholy to seep out too. “Three” feels like a painting, an old master reflected through ever spiralling mirror images that somehow, through the late appearance of its labyrinthine melody, manages to resolve. Pianist Gil Goldstein pulls lines out of nowhere, and like Swallow’s frequent collaborator Steve Kühn, seems to make familiar shapes fresh again. “Six” swings hard, both Chris Cheek and Mike Rodriguez dig in but are careful not wake the neighbours. Adam Nussbaum and Swallow make four crotchets sound like the best thing in the world, and Steve Cardenas here sounds like he’s happy in a Freddie Green hat. On “Seven”, guitar and piano seem to wander around the chords without worrying about each other…but that’s deceptive. There are big ears at work.
I could go on, detailing “what happens” in each piece, but it seems wrong to do so. Because the effect of listening to this album in one sitting is akin to sitting on a beach watching water running over sand. It’s constantly similar, yet endlessly fascinating. Nothing is ever predictable, and the separate tunes run into each other as one wave to another, one solo to another.
These kinds of chord progressions, in the more orthodox context of “standards”, are required learning at music college and, perhaps because of that, are seldom loved. Steve Swallow really loves this language, both its logic and its feeling, and here the two qualities seem to join hands, reacquainting us with the charm and power of simple things.
Sometimes when I’m teaching small kids and playing the chords under their melody, we’ll make it all the way to the end of a piece and there’s a moment where it all comes together and music seems beautiful again. Swallow somehow captures that for me, brings those chords into gently meandering structures where we feel lost and are, for a moment, early learners once more. Lost but happy.
Release date 26 June 2026