Klaus Lenz Big Band With Uschi Brüning And Klaus Nowodworsky from 1974

Yes sure let's pull out our trumpet when we're at the beach on a summer's day and play some jazz-- why not?

How can we go wrong with this lineup?  Of course I was searching through that Uschi Brüning discography again for some more magic or chemistry like what happened with Günther Fischer back in 1973.  Here on a Polish release she sings on tracks A1 and A3 with Klaus Lenz who made some really gorgeous big band / fusion records in the seventies, along the lines of Noctett, Wolfgang Dauner's United Jazz + Rock Ensemble, all of whose records are worth hearing (and I think are easily available nowadays, having been mostly rereleased to CD) and so many other high-powered fusion or progressive big band artists back then.

In overall flavour this leans more towards the big band sound rather than fusion and rock, but the compositions are as progressive and far from the 'swinging American jazz' I hate so much as you can get, full of the education of modern European music.

A bit of translated bio of Klaus, courtesy Wikipedia, and Google Translate (I love that reference to Nestor!)

"Klaus Lenz (* March 22 1940 in Berlin ) is a German jazz musician , bandleader and composer, especially in the styles modern jazz . He lived until 1977 in the GDR and is considered Nestor the GDR jazz scene. [1] Many well-known artists such as Manfred Krug , Günther Fischer , Reinhard Lakomy , Henning Protzmann ( carat ), Günter Baby Sommer and Ulrich Gumpert learned with him the musical craft and played with him a successful albums. Klaus Lenz played with constantly changing line-ups, a testimony to his constant search for new forms of musical expression. With every formation he reached a high standard. In addition to his commitment as a jazz musician, he composed in the pop field, he arranged for renowned orchestra and wrote film and theater music, among other things, for the DEFA films wedding night in the rain (1967), Käuzchenkuhle (1968), With me not, madam! ( 1969), Sleeping Beauty (1970), Hey, You! (1970) and Stülpner Legend (1972/1973)."

How interesting it is to me that cognitive and computer scientists feel we are very close to approaching artificial intelligence, given that the above translation is so hilarious.  Of course, this statement has been issued as a prediction for many decades now and it will continue on for many decades before a realistic appraisal of human intelligence comes about.  A very interesting new approach involves 'mapping neurons' which, surprisingly, is almost completely possible in the case of for example the mouse brain, though likely to take several years.  It will be interesting to see if such a map of connections will bring us closer to understanding the brain or simply create more confusion because of the missing information, for example, regarding synaptic neurotransmitters and how they communicate, the hormonal signals, or some physiology inside the neurons that changes during thinking.  But I do know this, no one will be able to ever explain to me why I love music so deeply and passionately and how that works in my brain, why it takes me straight to heaven when I hear something as beautiful as the opening to B1 "Permutation" with its shockingly angular riff: