Essential New Music: Lina Allemano’s Ohrenschmaus’ “Flip Side”

Ohrenschmaus is a German word that signifies a feast for the ears, and the title of the latest album by Canadian trumpeter Lina Allemano’s Berlin-based trio promises a balanced diet. Half the record features electric bassist Dan Peter Sundland, drummer Michael Griener and Allemano playing mainly tunes that she wrote; the other half consists of music improvised by the trio and guest accordionist Andrea Parkins, a former New Yorker who currently resides in Berlin.

This mixed approach yields a program that alternates between pieces of music designed to project sharply delineated structures that deal with the fundamentals of trio dynamics and others that rustle and rumble as they will themselves into existence. Parkins’ electronically enhanced squeezebox broadens the tonal range, and the other musicians counter its bulky presence with quick gestures  that add up to a seething, continually morphing whole.

But in trio mode, the action often plays out like a continually renegotiated game of two on one. At some points during “The Line,” Griener reframes the other two musicians’ negotiations of the titular form, while at others, the bass and drums lock into a smoking rhythm while Allemano blazes through. On “Signal,” her rough-yet-tuneful growls weave through a sonic sparring match between multidimensional drumming and pugilistic bass flurries. On both unsentimental ballad “Heartstrings” and palpably tragic dirge “Stricken” (which was co-written with Sundland), percussion adds spare decoration and dramatic emphasis as trumpet and bass articulate stark melodies.

The multinational composition of this quartet deserves notice. Not because it’s unusual, since improvisers join up with fellow players from other parts of the world all the time. But in a time when so many people are goaded headlong into conflict by divisive appeals to difference, these musicians are showing that it doesn’t have to be that way. [Lumo]

—Bill Meyer