Back to Gunter Lenz Springtime with Roaring Plenties from 1980, flac limited time only

 

Following up from the Znel album just posted, this looked interesting. 

Gunter Lenz:

German jazz bassist and composer.  Born July 25, 1938 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Cousin of Peter Trunk.

This outfit made 4 albums in total, but only 2 from the time that interests us.  Note that the Bob Degen composition Children of the Night opens the album, here given a big band arrangement of course, sounding therefore quite a bit fuller and more intense than the solo piano version for sure.  The next track is a nice homage to Charlie Mingus, echoing his sinuously long melodic lines, who I guess died in that year from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a horrible affliction.  I've mentioned Mingus so many times before as a seminal influence on me, particularly in relation to the Teo Macero homage album here. Obviously, Teo's CD was a bit superior to this composition which presumably was written by Gunter.  The title track is way too bluesy for my tastes.  The penultimate is a 'post bop' number and those are virtually all identical and interchangeable, so that leaves the last track called Speed Freak, with its 20 seconds of composed music at the start followed by 8 minutes of aimless improvisations, too bad you couldn't make a whole track out of those first few seconds, I didn't check if that one nice 20 second bit gets repeated anywhere else in the 8 minute track (thus 24 times longer) but by the looks of it, probably it does: