Photo: MISITUNES
With music and humor it’s difficult sometimes. A song that is essentially based on a joke only really works the first time. Telling a joke over and over again doesn’t make the punch line any better. Because a punchline always has to do with surprise and so on. If you exclude cabaret-like music (Rainald Grebe, Joint Venture), consciously humorous music has often made itself interesting with excessive musical complexity (Frank Zappa, Primus, also Tenacious D). There must be something beyond the gag that’s why you’re hearing this. And with Zappa and Primus it was deadly serious virtuoso fiddling.
The music that Jacques Palminger makes is also very beautiful because the humor in it doesn’t have to be complemented by something else in order for it to still work. The comic is everywhere and nowhere, so to speak. It dissolves into the music. In the case of “The Desire of the Stars,” the third album that Palminger recorded with the 440hz Trio, this music is “transcendental jazz music,” like the fluffy mini-chorus of the 440, which has grown into a quintet since the last album “Spanky and his Friends.” Hertz trio claims.
“The Longing of the Stars” sounds old, but not old in the way that 70s lounge jazz sounds old today. But very 90s. There was a brief period in which “Spex” and “Intro” readers took a serious interest in the music of James Last and Bert Kaempfert, and bands like the High Llamas Elevator Muzak and Cocktail Party Soundtracks with the music of the Beach Boys and connected to electronics.
Easy listening always worked when the ancestors were not made fun of, but rather celebrated with complete seriousness. And the 440hz trio clearly loves the music that is played here. Fluffy lounge jazz with a gentle organ and delicately rumbling bass. And really beautiful melodies that the choir sings about and about which Jacques Palminger speaks texts in such a broken emcee mode and makes all sorts of claims (“We wrote this song to show the whole world how beautiful it is to make music on the frequency of love”). The music sounds latently like James Last, but the lyrics want to go into the open, into space, with constant reference to everyday life (“We don’t believe in UFOs / We believe in Tartufos”). The combination of Federal Republican cosiness and melancholic swinger club sounds with the utopian and floating is very strange. BRD sadness meets Sun Ra: “Sun Ra has shown us a way / how we can escape gravity at any time / He says the possible has already failed / That’s why we’re trying the impossible.” The music is as beautiful as it is limited, but the lyrics celebrate the limitless: “We jump into a bottomless pit / that is open at the top / and also has no boundaries on the sides.” This is funny, but also very beautiful.
Jacques Palminger and 440 Hertz: The Longing of the Stars (Misitunes/Broken Silence)
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