Barbara Dennerlein Plays Blues, Jazz and a Whole Lot More at Trinity Church, NYC 7/10/08

Munich jazz organist Barbara Dennerlein not only played a spectacular show, she impressed even more with the brilliance of her compositions. It’s always a treat when someone who really knows the blues plays a church organ, and Dennerlein proved that she could definitely do that. But more so, she proved herself an extraordinarily perceptive, imaginative composer, equally adept at jazz and classical. Her axe is the Hammond B3 organ, and it was considerably ironic that the electronic “virtual organ” at Trinity Church can create just about any sound made by an organ or a synthesizer, but not a B3 (whose inventor designed it specifically for use in houses of worship). That didn’t stop Dennerlein. She opened with Ain’t Misbehaving, a long, playfully swinging version which she used to air out a whole slew of different organ settings and show off her signature style, making full use of the bass pedals for melody as well as groove. She followed with an original perhaps titled Spirit of Woman. It started somewhat stiffly, like a Rick Wakeman Olympic theme but got good in a hurry, driven by an endlessly permutating, insistent four-note figure low on the scale, which Dennerlein interestingly played not on the pedals but in the left hand. It wound up on a roaring, seemingly vengeful note with all the stops out: hell hath no fury like the spirit of a woman. Like many of the guests artists who swing through here, she couldn’t resist ending the piece using the organ’s timpani and kettle drum patches (operated by the pedals), which sound as canned as they are but are obviously hard to stay away from.

 

Her next piece was a long, slow, thoughtful blues, a requiem for an absent friend, she said. Whoever this person might have been, he or she was a fascinatingly complex bon vivant given to bouts of melancholy, if the melody is to be taken at face value. There were echoes of nostalgia, a line or two from Georgia on My Mind here and there. Dennerlein used the slow, methodical pace as a springboard for all kinds of virtuosic, somewhat noisy, Jimmy Smith-inflected fills and swells. After taking off her coat – she’s a fireball of a live performer – she played one long, final suite, an original titled Impressions of New York. It was fascinating, beginning somewhat rapt (one doesn’t expect someone like Dennerlein to be easily impressed), then moving into a comfortably playful blues mode before she brought in the baroque. Coming up on the end, Dennerlein quoted liberally and amusingly from the Toccata in D, notably the fast descending progression that comes right before the final stop leading into the piece’s conclusion. When she reached the final crescendo, she played around with the gorgeous, final series of chords that Bach used, but eventually decided to go with her own. The audience, a surprising mix of nationalities and ages, was as rapt as the chords at the beginning of the piece. Then Dennerlein went off to the airport.

 

Trinity Church archives their organ concerts: if you missed the show, you can see it here. Dennerlein is hugely popular in Europe but strangely not as well-known here, although many of the cds in her deep and fascinating catalog are available at cdbaby.