Klaus Lenz Jazz & Rock Machine - Sleepless Nights (DDR 1980)

Line-Up:

Trumpet, Flugelhorn – Charles Green, Klaus Lenz

Trombone – Bertl "Harisharan" Strandberg, Meinolf Humpert

Tenor Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone – Norbert Stein

Alto Saxophone, Sopranino Saxophone – Zbigniew Namyslowski

Electric Bass – Jochen Schmidt

Guitar – Stefan Diez

Piano, Synthesizer [Arp], Electric Piano [Fender] – Mike Herting

Drums – Stefan Krämer

Looking at the lineup above, it's hard not to think we're going in circles.  First of all Klaus Lenz was featured here with Fusion and earlier with Modern Soul Band, twice.  His two 1970s fusion albums are masterpieces, I put them here (Aufbruch und Wiegenlied).
Then, sax player Namyslowski was featured here with Jasmine Lady.
Norbert Stein was in the remarkable EP I ripped called No Nett back here, which I still love dearly.
The amazing Jochen Schmidt made a beautiful, just beautiful album in 1986 called New York Evenings posted there at that link, earlier.
Finally Mike Herting made the album about the amazon (the rainforest, not Jeff Bezos' empire) and Brazil here. 
Something like a dozen albums related by musician to this post in total.
Stefan Diez, btw, made a great fusion album called Mirrors (in 1978) which I should've posted here but didn't and I'm hoping you all have that one already and are well familiar with it.

With this true all-star band you expect miracles, and it's close to a miracle indeed.  Consider the track called Unit which opens up the second side, with its big band arrangement that moves through such great sounds and riffs, btw this is a Klaus Lenz chart:





And the beauty of this record is that it's full of great ideas and compositions, perhaps because many contributors provided material.  The title track for ex. is by Namyslowski:





I'll let you discover the rest yourselves.

More Klaus Lenz with 1978's Fusion, Here called the Jazz and Rock Machine

We heard Fusion before in another post, though this seems to be different.
Here, the track called Equinox is remarkable:





Information here.  All in all this is not as strong as the chronologically just preceding albums which I first posted long ago, with a slight deterioration in progressive composition.  I refer of course to these two.  Nonetheless, curiosity had us collapse Schrodinger's Cat in this case, could it be a good or a bad album?  Well, turns out to be a superposition of both.  The edgy creative energy seems to be missing from the engine of this machine.  Sigh-- the masterpieces cannot be too many...

(Klaus Lenz) Modern Soul (Big) Band in 1974 and 1976

Not surprisingly, the earlier 1974 album is the better of the two, with Lenz still involved as leader.  Curiously, and to their detriment in my opinion, both of these are live albums.

But the track Fusion is magnificent, with its classical compositional intro developing the theme:

Oddly enough this track or at least its name reappears in a 1978 album by the same name when the band is rechristened the Jazz and Rock Machine (like Dauner's United Jazz and Rock Ensemble, though Machine is definitely much punchier).  I couldn't tell if it's the same song or a different one.

For the 1976 album there is no sample, and that says it all.

Meeting with GDR's Modern Soul Band (1979)

OK, here we go with more large German soul-rock bands with one foot in the fusion scene, the other in a commercial cesspooled septic tank.

This is an offshoot of the Klaus Lenz project Modern Soul Big Band...  Klaus Lenz was presented here earlier as a master of GDR fusion with his two big mid-seventies masterpieces, and accompanying Uschi on a 1974 record that proved slightly disappointing.  I presented his bio in that earlier, earliest post and won't repeat it here.

On this record there is a Klaus, but it's a Nowodworski (specifically, on vocals), not a Lenz.  Note also that arranging credits are ascribed to one Gerhard Laartz and compositional credits to a number of musicians: Gerhard Laartz, Joachim Schmauch, and Wolfgang Nicklisch.  So Lenz no more.  However, they did have an ST release 3 years before which seems to have involved him.  I'm not so sure, since his presence usually brings more creativity, of which that ST is lacking.

But the stunning closing instrumental Meeting hits all the right notes both musically and fusionally:



To summarize or perhaps to clarify from the above random notes, there are two related albums, the ST Modern Soul Band from 1976 and the original from 1974, which was called Klaus Lenz' Modern Soul Big Band (the better album).  Both I have and can post on request.

Klaus Lenz (Big) Band's Aufbruch (1976) and Wiegenlied (1977)

Back to the baby we saw earlier this month, now digging some red-hot fusion on big-ass headphones.  This GDR band appeared before of course with Uschi way back when.

The Igor song is gorgeously and progressively out of this world, with its chromatic hammond opener that could have come from any of the classic French fusion masterpieces, like Vortex:





The following album did not quite hit the same heights of compositional progressiveness however, the title track being a good example of what is missing and what is still to be found here in this music:

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: