CD: Where Are We Now?

Where are we now? Where are we now? That's what we're asking ourselves in light of pandemic uncertainty, geopolitical upheaval, and the images of women in Iran in the fall of 2022 taking to the streets for their rights. Images that particularly concern Atrin Madani, son of Iranian immigrants. Where are we now? This is also a question that every generation of jazz musicians must ask themselves anew. Madani, born in 1998, has found an answer for himself that is as clear and precise as his singing: What we need most right now is honesty. Humility. And quality. All of this can be found in abundance on the debut album of the Berliner without East or West in front of it, without walls and borders in his head, as the actor Hans-Jürgen Schatz once wrote about the singer.

Madani's debut album "Where Are We Now?" is one big declaration of love. To the magic that arises when words and melodies form narratives that you just can't get out of your head. these structures are commonly called "songs". But when Madani sings them with his fabulous quartet, they become cinematic panoramas of the soul.

One can definitely hear the Schöneberger's intense preoccupation with predecessors like Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé, Andy Williams or Tony Bennett. However, he honors the masters by not copying them, but by self-confidently going his own way. And this path does not lead through the leftover ramps of the Great American Songbook or through the pop charts of the recent past, which are covered with a cramped post-modern wink. Based on the sound aesthetics of a Norah Jones, a Diana Krall or a Till Brönner, Madani dedicates himself to a hand-picked selection of songs that have remained largely unsung in jazz.

We are talking about the exquisite products of the sophisticated singer / songwriter art of the 1970s, which celebrated an astonishing comeback in the clubs under the signum "Yacht-Rock" in recent times with compilation series like "Too Slow to Disco". Songs that are made for Madani. Because similar to Michael Franks or Donald Fagen, the two pillar saints of sophisticated Seventies pop rock, the young Berliner has the rare gift of making the enormously complex sound as light as a feather. But the story of "Where Are We Now?" also includes the deeply personal connection the Millennial has to the songs of the Boomers - and in the process makes the supposedly insurmountable front lines between the generations seem obsolete.

"Everybody's Talkin'," for instance, has haunted Madani since childhood. "My dad is a total music freak, the song was always playing in our house in Harry Nilsson's version with that weird nasal country voice," the singer says with a laugh. For their reading of the song made famous by the movie "Midnight Cowboy," Madani, pianist Christian von der Goltz, guitarist Alexander Ruess, bassist Olaf Casimir and drummer Tobias Backhaus were inspired by the hypnotic calypso groove that Ahmad Jamal had added to his 1958 hit "Poinciana" on the recording "Live at The Pershing."

"Tempted," originally by the British rock band Squeeze, once happened to cross Madani's path in a rather obscure version by the Dutch Metropole Orchestra featuring jazz vocal luminary Kurt Elling. Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)," on the other hand, he always thought was an upbeat number, the singer reveals. "Until I listened more closely to the incredibly sad lyrics." His arrangement, enhanced by Billy Petry's comforting trumpet, creates lyrically adequate goosebumps. The same is true of Nick Drake's "Things behind the Sun," which Madani and his cohorts make enter into a delightful dialogue with the sound world of a Sting. "Maxine" and "Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)" from the Steely Dan and Donald Fagen cosmos also have a strong biographical component for the vocalist, who, according to his parents, was singing before he could even speak. On one of his regular visits to Canada, where his mother lives, he befriended a singing retired couple at a jam session in Toronto. The couple saw it as their sacred duty to introduce the talented German singer to the world of Fagen & Co. With success. "On the flight back, all I heard was Donald Fagen," Madani recalls. Finally, the arrangements to the Beatles song "Fool On the Hill" and Coldplay's "Yellow" are based on the singer's involvement with the pieces during his jazz studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden and the Jazz Institute in Berlin.

Of particular importance to the Berliner, who has performed as part of Germany's elite up-and-coming big band BuJazzO in New York, Chicago, Israel and the Balkans, among other places, is undoubtedly David Bowie's 2013 release "Where Are We Now?" Madani lends an uncommonly delicate vocal shape to the Brit's emotional emotion about Berlin's transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Unlike the protagonist in Bowie's original, however, he is not a "man lost in time." Indeed, Madani, whose enormous passion for good sung stories also manifests itself in an all-German song program from Brahms to Wir sind Helden, with which he repeatedly performs at Berlin's Bar jeder Vernunft, is acutely aware of time, space and responsibility. "In Germany and in Europe, we often have the problem in jazz that we want to make far too much art. And don't see the art in touching other people," says the singer.

With "Where Are We Now?" Atrin Madani succeeds in doing just that: getting close to the listeners and taking them on a journey. Into yesterday and tomorrow. Into the here and now. Where jazz has always been at its best.