A review by Gian Paolo Galasi (london_resonance):

"[...] Last gig is provided by the Haman Quintet, currently touring through London before coming back in Berlin. Altoist Anna Kaluza, violinist Alison Blunt, sopranist Manuel Miethe, pianist Nikolai Meinhold and bassist Horst Nonnenmacher gifted the audience with a continuous flowing of particles of sound. Their set is the most dense and close-grained tonight.

Nonnenmacher, collaborator of Alex Von Schlippenbach, Sam Rivers and Jim Black, but also composer and arranger and part with Miethe of the Levitation: Trio, plunges into his bass digging out a deep and vivid groove. Miethe and Kaluza horn lines are usually lateral and atonal, so to speak. A colleague claimed for the quintet such references as Ligeti, Lachenmann, Nono and Scelsi, but what's more on the foreground is the fluid interplay and the players palettes and tools matching together with sophisticated coherence.

Meinhold - who studied piano with Aki Takase and workshopped with the likes of John Taylor, Ken Vandermark and Ray Anderson - uses a voluntarily minimal approach to piano, chalking up an upper note after the other in order to build short, chiming and jingling phrases, while his plucking on the strings enters perfectly in touch with the flurrying of the music."

An enthusiastic review of the last Berlin gig in June 2011:

“I heard the band the first time at Fincan and I was amazed by the expressive but fine developed music. At first it appears to be introverted to a certain point. It is somewhat different to 'normal' free jazz. Fine lines maybe inspired from composers like Nono or Scelsi merge into delicate soundscapes with the subtle use of a large vocabulary of extended techniques a la Lachenmann or Ligeti. But the sound ideal is not at all limited to music of the 20th century, their sound is both playful and sophisticated. The communication is on a high level due to quick reactions, good empathy and a similar understanding of taste in the band. But then again it might happen, that Niko bangs a rude cluster on the toypiano..

I have never heard a better ensemble at Fincan!”

Peer Weikel

Contact us for further info: 

info@alisonblunt.com
nikomeinhold@googlemail.com
manuel.miethe@web.de
annakaluza@web.de
horst.nonnenmacher@freenet.de