2006/04/17
Embryo in Trieste: creative jazz-rock
Trieste. Creative music between jazz, ethnic and pure rock, crafted with more than vivid imagination and great intellectual honesty: the long-established German group Embryo offered an exciting double set of more than two hours at the cozy Casa del Popolo on Via Ponziana, a bar-trattoria hangout in the city's working-class heart, in Trieste, nights ago, led by founder, composer and marimba player Christian Burchard. Embryo live to play and play to live, their cachet is of an even disarming honesty in an age when the first unknown to emerge in pop shoots you dizzying amounts of money. Their legend has been yesterday, today and tomorrow since as far back as 1969: their history is made up of thousands of concerts and dozens of self-recorded and self-produced albums (many live) and encounters with jazz and ethnic musicians. Among their unmissable gems are albums such as Opal from '70, Embryo's Rache from '71, Steig aus from 1973, and other admirable works, also made in Afghanistan and India in a long journey-tour in the late 1970s, from which a very valuable, more than just musically, documentary film was made: on that occasion the group played in Kabul, Calcutta and other cities with great local musicians. From Embryo, in the 1980s, Dissidenten was born. Jazz legends Mal Waldron, Charlie Mariano, Massimo Urbani and many others played with the group. Christian Burchard is a “boy” of almost sixty years, a free spirit and lucidly anarchic in the purest sense of the word, one who could, with his technical mastery, have become a billionaire playing standards: but the great musician has chosen to be rich at heart, seeking and finding every evening in the audience, two meters from him, not only spectators, but also friends with whom to share a musical creation: this was also the case in Trieste, with a concert full of beauty, strength and brilliance that began acoustically with ethnic instruments (but Embryo played this music long before such a denomination was invented) and then switched to a rock-jazz , enthralling, disruptive and full of pleasant iterations, never complicated for the listener because it gets right to the heart. Embryo are an open group: vocalist Quantius was not there, but, alongside Burchard (also on the Hackbrett, a kind of German dulcimer), the outstanding 20-year-old daughter Marja on trombone, electric piano, percussion and drums, (great daughter of art), the Spaniard David Drudis on oud and electric guitar, Valentin Altenberger on electric guitar and Darbouka, Lothar Stahl on drums and marimba and the excellent Jens Pollheide on flute, nay and pulsating electric bass. In the electric moments the group creates long and extraordinary prog-jazz suites, fresh, pulsating and not tied to the 70s as is the case with many groups back on the scene today. Embryo remain a kind of commune, a collective: they offer the world an exciting lesson in honesty, great music and genius. We will see them again in Italy in the fall, hopefully in these parts of the country as well.
Giuliano Almerigogna, Cultura - Spettacolo, 2006/04/23
(Translated from: https://web.archive.org/web/20060903230701/http://www.embryo.de/i_mela.htm)