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Heinz Sauer/Michael Wollny

Certain Beauty

ACT 9442-2

Heinz Sauer and Michael Wollny's first duo album, Melancholia, having won the 2005 German record reviewers' award, and pianist Wollny having garnered the Bavarian Art prize and a couple of rising star awards, much was expected of this follow-up recording, and it delivers in spades.

Sauer has one of the breathiest, pleasantly wheezy tenor sounds in the music, and he uses it to great effect throughout, but particularly on ballads such as 'I Loves You Porgy', the wonderfully languorous 'Blues for Pablo' and the two Strayhorn pieces, 'Chelsea Bridge' and 'Lush Life', but his is also clearly a keen musical mind, and the duo's visits to Monk pieces ('Evidence' and 'Ruby My Dear'), not to mention Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U', provide food for thought as well as immediate sensual gratification.

Wollny is as interested in texture and mood as in straightforward pianistic propulsiveness, and his playing ranges from the sparkling and lyrical through dark, left-hand rumblings and sudden inside-piano strums to mood-building keyboard work, all contributing to the extraordinary variety of timbres and emotions running through a fascinating album that draws on Esbjorn Svensson and Bjork as readily as it does on Bill Evans and Albert Mangelsdorff.