The busy Berlin pianist and composer has become an integral part of the German jazz scene. She has been playing her compositions, which are often based on lyrical works, with the award-winning Julia Hülsmann Trio for almost 30 years. She also enjoys inviting international guests to join her. Her album Scattering Poems (2003, ACT Music) with Norwegian singer Rebekka Bakken remained in the German jazz top ten for several weeks and received the German Jazz Award in Gold. The musician has since expanded her trio to form the Julia Hülsman Quartet. Their debut album Not Far from Here (2019, ECM Records) was honored with the German Jazz Award in 2021. Her last quartet release The Next Door was also released on ECM, to which stereoplay attested "a world of musical intimacy" in October 2022, while Fono Forum found it "beautiful and almost out of this world" in November of the same year.
For her new release Under The Surface, once again on ECM, Julia Hülsmann has brought a special guest into the studio alongside her now regular quartet: Norwegian trumpeter and goat horn player Hildegund Øiseth, who recently added an exciting new addition to our record collection with her own Garden On The Roof. Hülsmann's quartet with Uli Kempendorff on tenor saxophone, Marc Muellbauer on bass and Heinrich Köbberling on drums is joined here by Øiseth on five of the ten new pieces - adding a colorful fifth dimension to the already dazzling four-piece sound, even when the quartet plays alone.
The opening Hülsmann composition "They Stumble, They Walk" draws you deep into its almost magical worlds: Not only does something enchanting rise above a discreetly nervous ground - the will to go deeper, as the album title suggests, can always be felt, until the constantly swelling whole pours into a stream that only trickles away in Kempendorff's hoarse saxophone tone. The magical, noise-spreading intro to "May Song", on the other hand, ends in a flattering slow jam, reminiscent of times long past, elegant, but not without a certain tragedy, like a romance that, due to its unreality (or brevity), you can't be quite sure whether you haven't just dreamed it.
The light dissonance rubs of Muellbauer's "Second Thoughts" are also caught up in dreamlike atmospheres - and the two wind instruments also rub themselves enough in the unison passages of "Bubbles", but not too heavily. The beauty of the gently dissonant is counteracted here, not to say intercepted and absorbed by Hülsmann's full playing, which has the effect of a wide embrace into which the players can let themselves fall with confidence. Well protected in this way, the great - and on this record unique - appearance of the goat's horn unfolds its uplifting pull, which immediately transports the listener to another cosmos.
