Plenty of musicians have tried to fuse jazz and classical, from Bartók and Stravinsky's uneasy jazz-orchestra collaborations to Gunther Schuller's cerebral Third Stream. Most of these well-meaning attempts set out to solve a musical problem and stopped there, without reaching for anything beyond the music. On his third album, "There For You," Leipzig pianist and composer Keno Harriehausen works the other way around. He puts human experience ahead of theory and draws the listener into a sound world that stays personal despite its complex influences.
The album is dedicated to his newborn child, and it doubles as a thank-you to the people who were there for him and his family when they needed it. That gratitude runs through the writing, alongside humility and, in places, pure joy. For Harriehausen, improvisation and composition aren't opposites; here they collapse into the same thing, reaching back to something older than any jazz-classical crossover. "I don't see myself as a jazz musician who also dabbles in classical," he says. "I follow my own language, which develops logically between the two."
This isn't a Spotify quarry to pull single tracks from. Harriehausen opens with his most dramatic piece, "Nachtgewitter"; once you've come through that storm, everything after feels lighter, until the closing title track leaves you with something like release. And it's no piano album with a backing band: the cello of Maya Fridman, the saxophone of Kārlis Auziņš and the double bass of Thomas Kolarczyk sit on equal footing with the piano. The more you listen, the more it gives back.
— after Wolf Kampmann
