Heinz Sauer & Michael Wollny - Don't Explain: Live in Concert (2012)

With If (Blue) Then (Blue) in 2010, German saxophone legend Heinz Sauer brought his remarkable relationship with pianist Michael Wollny – his junior by at least half a century – to a new high. All Blues (from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue) reappears on this live account, opening the set with hissing tenor-sax exhalations that thicken to mournful hoots and occasional startled cries, as if tracing the emotional shifts of the tune with hardly any of the original notes. The 80-year-old Sauer also plays breathily but more lyrically on the Prince-penned Nothing Compares 2 U, as Wollny shifts between grooving on the chords and urgently plucking the piano strings. The Billie Holiday title track is assembled from high squawks and bleary low tones, but – perhaps revealingly – Sauer gets closest to cleanly pitched sounds on his own pieces: the softly modulating Wenn der Pastor Im Grunen Hemd and the thumping Open Fields. Wollny makes a beautiful ballad exposition of Dylan's Make You Feel My Love, and if the album isn't quite as surefooted in its adventures as If (Blue) Then (Blue), it still persuasively represents one of the great cross-generational jazz partnerships.

Tracklist:

1. All Blues
2. Nothing Compares 2 U
3. Don't Explain
4. Wenn der Pastor im grünen Hemd…
5. Open Fields
6. There Again
7. Make You Feel My Love
8. Believe Beleft Below
9. Space Cake
10. Kind of Blues

Personnel:

Heinz Sauer - tenor saxophone;
Michael Wollny - piano.