The Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio photograph via Melbourne Recital Hall.
Wolfgang Muthspiel is a guitarist with some curious affectations. A casual lick of the fingertips in between passages of play as if they were pages of a book. A quick brush of the sound hole as if clearing his throat. He isn’t alone. Brian Blade on drums inclines an ear and taps along as if he is listening to well-loved contemporary craft rhythms. Larry Grenadier on double-bass seems to dictate his bass line in real time, the way most people might hum something to themselves and then spend days trying to work out a way to extract the music from it. These three are masters of their instruments and their craft and to hear them play is to experience the removal of the barrier between thought and action.
It’s alchemic, it’s impressive but it’s not serious. These are not dour musical clinicians who have attained mastery through rigorous form until all error is eliminated and with it human warmth. These are musicians in total flow whose skill and pleasure are intertwined. Muthspiel may be the trio’s namesake but it’s Blade who most purely embodies this spirit. A sudden, loud drum roll or uptick in tempo feel like unrestrainable exuberance rather than an even partially-planned crescendo. Muthspiel and Grenadier dig on the surprise and join in adding something of their own before Blade takes it back and turns down the tempo to something more pensive; a raucous round of laughter that ebbs quickly into something more serious. Each take their turn to lead the conversation, but the laughter, the sly looks, the nods of mutual respect between the interlocutors are never absent for very long.
The Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio produces music of fantastic complexity and ingenuity. It’s like listening to someone speak in long sentence riddled with polysyllabic words you’ve never heard of. But such is the power of music that you don’t need to be familiar with the words themselves in order to be enraptured by what is being said. In this way words will always be at a disadvantage to music. You don’t need to understand what floccinaucinihilipilification (real word) means to know that it is the antithesis of the Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio.
They play as if their instruments were part of their bodies that required as much compulsion as a heart does to beat or legs to walk; perhaps dance. Together, Muthspiel, Grenadier and Blade are at the apex but they’re not content to rest on their laurels. Their music is filled with urgency and joy of people who have finally been given the keys to every draw in the workshop and are giddily enjoying the limitless potential to create.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio
Wolfgang Muthspiel guitar
Larry Grenadier double bass
Brian Blade drums
Melbourne Recital Centre
11 August 2016
