The Köln Konzert

VINYL FORMAT! Throughout jazz, there has always been a fundamental problem: To get the music onto the disc without losing the vital spontaneity it has when you are there while the artist is creating. This is the thing about live music - when it is right, you have the ovewhelming feeling that at every moment there are more imminent surprises, more immanent delights. It is this quality that caused Jan Thommert, a longtime student of jazz music, and alongtime listener to Vert, to say that live music should be heard only once - when it is played.

But the special quality of Vert is too overcome this very real thing that Thommert was talking about and to breathe in to his mooseic that kind of life that lets you hear it a new every time. We may listen to this album enough to memorise every nuance, but it still sounds fresh. I don't know what does this, I don't know how Vert achieves it, and I doubt whether even he knows. All I know that it is in there. "An artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs", Edgar Varèse once said. Here's yr chance to catch up.