Sebastian Sternal & hr-Bigband - Turning Point

Three-time ECHO Jazz Award winner Sebastian Sternal has come full circle with his new recording "Turning Point". At the same time, the pianist is once again breaking new ground as composer and arranger of the first-rate Frankfurt Radio Big Band for this latest project. He leads the ensemble from the piano, allows the band's outstanding soloists to have their say - and has practically tailor-made the new compositions for them.
He has a tradition of constantly exploring finely tuned twists and turns in his compositional language. For more than two decades, the musician, who trained in Cologne and Paris, has been presenting a self-contained oeuvre full of contrasts. His first trio albums (from 2009) were followed by his award-winning ‘Symphonic Society’ (from 2012), with almost orchestral excursions of the length of a record, before returning to the smallest possible form of music creation with an intensive solo album (2022). "Turning Point" undoubtedly concentrates this diversity structurally and conceptually to form the pinnacle of his work to date.
At the age of 14, the jazz enthusiast wrote his first big band arrangement. By chance, Peter Herbolzheimer studied the young arranger's sheets of music. Herbolzheimer promptly issued an invitation to him to take part in the next phase of work with the German National Youth Jazz Orchestra at short notice. Sternal not only was able to hear his arrangement played live, but also benefited from many tips from the experienced band leader afterwards. For many years, the subject of big-band music has stuck with him - and has now culminated in the album "Turning Point".
Sternal is enthusiastic about the two major traditional big-band styles, both the gripping, bluesy sound of Count Basie or Thad Jones and the orchestral richness of Duke Ellington or Gil Evans. Basie's spirit promptly beckons with friendly approval in the opening piece "Play". The number is cleverly placed as an entrée to "Turning Point". The interplay between the musicians of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band and Sternal introduces with palpable enthusiasm the ensemble that defines the programme for the following 55 minutes.
The liveliness takes on a changeable form in the following composition "Elegy". Its beginning is characterized only by delicate piano and percussion sounds. Immediately afterwards, the band taps into their full potential, including freely improvised passages, before dropping back to pianissimo. Their playing with dynamics breaks up forms, tonal colours are first explored and then subtly blended. A pianist by training, Sternal naturally keeps an eye on the big band from the rhythm section. As Sternal also studied saxophone, he also opens up many spaces within the compositions for the reed specialists of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band. However, he wrote large parts of the "Turning Point" pieces primarily for core-defining brass instruments, i.e. trombones and trumpets, whose gripping sound fascinates him.
"Friedkin" (dedicated to the director William Friedkin) starts out on a driving, grooving bass line before baritone sax, trombone, alto sax, and percussion expand the opening motif in a soloistic manner. The flow of this music sounds natural - improvisation and composition intertwine organically.
The Frankfurt Radio Big Band proves to be a perfect ensemble of unbelievable intensity and great enthusiasm from its soloists. The one-hour album was rehearsed and recorded live in the studio at Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt, taking into account all the nuances and sound details. Sternal and sound engineer Christian Heck then mixed the material in Cologne before the mastering took place in New York under the direction of Randy Merrill, who had already mastered the last albums of big-band specialist Darcy James Argue and pop musician Taylor Swift.
The amount of heart and soul put into this album pays off in terms of the record's accessible narrative thread. "Turning Point" follows the overriding idea of a turning point in many respects - personally, socially, politically. Sometimes ‘Turning Point’ means looking back at something that has already happened, the loss of a person or social structures that were thought to be stable ("Elegy" or "Lament" - a tribute to Buxtehude's famous ‘Klag-Lied’). Then again, the music figuratively directs the focus straight ahead into ‘Tomorrowland’. Or it is in the here and now, celebrating the moment ("Play", "Red Beat").
In "Turning Point", Sebastian Sternal aptly summarizes his fundamental self-conception as a musician and composer. He closes a circle and opens a new one at the same time.