“..in case you’re getting too familiar with the term “extended technique”, too often applied to players who have the technique, but nothing to say with it, and though they may produce fine and unusual sounds there’s no sense of a human being having generated them in the first place. Henkel conversely is a warm human organism with plenty of juice in his lips and air in his lungs, the same air passing through the tubes of his instrument and arriving on the airwaves in unusual mutated forms.”
Eyal Hareuveni reviews Brad Henkel’s solo album, “Croon” in Salt Peanuts *
American, Berlin-based experimental trumpeter Brad Henkel’s primary focus is on improvisation, using a broad color palette of pitched and unpitched sounds. He creates music that is rooted in modern jazz, contemporary classical, and reductionist Echtzeitmusik traditions. Croon is his debut solo album, recorded at Blackbird Music Studio in Berlin in December 2021, and presents his explorative and idiosyncratic language as well as his unique take on the trumpet and inventiveness as an improviser.
The eight pieces are an eclectic and often even eccentric collection of acoustic trumpet textures, but a few pieces sound as borrowing the syntax and timbres of electronic and noise music. Obviously, Henkel has cultivated over the years by refining an array of extended techniques and personal approaches to the instrument. His imaginative sonic vision allows him to transform the trumpet into an instrument that makes sounds that express breathing and not only a musical instrument to make sounds with breathing, using the observation of the great, late Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. But Henkel also plays free-associative, lyrical melodies as in the title piece, stressing his jazz background, producing a series of meditative multiphonics in the drone «Chant» and investing a twisted folk song in «Mope».
from Vital Weekly
‘Croon’ is a short and sweet release on Neither/Nor records, based in New York. Brad Henkel is a trumpet player from the United States and is currently based in Berlin. He makes the trumpet sound not like a trumpet but as a source of sound. ‘Croon’, the title track, features a jazzy melody, hence the name. ‘Clamor’ also has tones, but others, ‘Bay’, for example, sound as if the sound is made electronically, save for the audible breath-taking. Henkel has the technical skills to make all these pieces sound so easy. Chant is a low murmur and throat singing coupled with high trumpet overtones. An exquisite piece to listen to. I won’t spoil anything further here. Just listen and be surprised.
Peter Margasak reviews Brad Henkel’s solo album, “Croon” on his blog Nowhere Street.
Trumpeter Brad Henkel is one of the more elusive figures on Berlin’s improvised music scene, a New Yorker who works in various jazz-oriented ensembles while digging into more experimental explorations of pure sound. He’s not especially prolific when it comes to recordings, and since moving to Berlin in 2017 there have only been a handful of albums documenting his work here. And most of them, such as his terrific 2020 duo album with fellow trumpeter Jacob Wick, weren’t even made with musicians based in the city. I haven’t heard a recent trio album he made with Berlin-based drummer Sam Hall and New York guitarist Dustin Carlson called Recoil (Aut) He’s a friendly fellow who doesn’t seem especially solitary, although that’s the context of his recent album Croon (Neither Nor), which dropped in late March.
The album’s credits are sparse, so I can’t say exactly what he’s doing on the acerbic opener “Bay,” which features a pair of overdubbed lines using what sounds like a saxophone reed attached to his horn, but he digs deep, unleashing a decidedly harsh dialogue of extended techniques. Check it out for yourself, below. Other pieces evoke a more familiar experimental trumpet language one might associate with locals as disparate as Axel Dörner, Liz Allbee, and Mazen Kerbaj. “Whir” is built around unpitched breaths and puckered extreme upper register cries, but Henkel spontaneously assembles them cogently and dramatically, toggling between polarities with rhythmic disruption and forceful execution. On the gorgeous title track he reveals a purer, more jazz-oriented focus, applying his creamy tone within a fluid series of melodic elaborations marked by post-bop swoops and agile flurries, while I love the fragile whistling that careens with guttural low-end, percussive valve clacking and popping, and spittle-flecked drones on “Chant.”
Henkel plays solo twice in the coming week. On Thursday, May 11 he plays an opening set at KM28, followed by the local new music group Apparat (which in this instance is Weston Olencki on trombone and electronics, tackling “Bury Me Deep” by British composer and Distractfold member Sam Salem. He’ll play solo again on Sunday, May 14 at Kapelle am Urban, beginning at 7:45 PM sharp. It’s part of a double bill, in which he’ll also play amplified trumpet in a duo with Miako Klein on amplified recorders.
Read the review
“Brad Henkel, Dustin Carlson and Samuel Hall set out and succeeded in making a freeform record that’s not just uncommon, but uncommonly good.”
Last Ocotober a new trio with Dan Peter Sundland and Fabian Jung made a series of video recordings at Mahalla in Berlin. The first one was published yesterday here: Friends with Counterfeits
To celebrate release of Swarm by Warble.
9 September 2021, 20:00
Live in Berlin and streaming on the WWW
Warble || Superimpose & Elisabeth Coudoux | exploratorium berlin (exploratorium-berlin.de)
Footage by berta.berlin from a gig this summer with Liz Kosack, Jan Roder and Dag Magnus Narvesen.
Henkel / Kosak / Roder / Narvesten – berta.berlin
This November KIM Colelctive and guests presented De-Isolation at Jazzfest Berlin. The event was livestreamed on ArteTV. This and every concert at Jazzfest Berlin is now available for one year in Arte’s archives.
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/100319-030-A/de-isolation/
“… what makes this music magnetic after the novelty wears off is the attunement between two instant composers whose organising instincts are very much in sync.” review by Bill Meyer in The Wire, Ocotbober issue
Short mention of Brad Henkel solo concert at Sowieso in Die Zeit Magazin article about Jazz in Germany
Jenes Schweben der Seele by Ulrich Stock