Rolf Kühn - Smile

Tribute to Hollywood

'As Time Goes By', 'Singin’ in the Rain', 'The Windmills of Your Mind' –
now this is musical yearning – in the cinema – and that still means: Hollywood. Charlie Chap-lin, Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand. Even Disney's Pinocchio or the Flintstones.

Rolf Kühn, the gifted clarinettist, loves the cinema. What can be more obvious than a big band recording of his favourite film tunes on 'Smile', his fifth album under the label Intui-tion. With Max Raabe who contributes an impressive intro ('When You Wish Upon A Star' from 'Pinocchio'), with the miraculous Cologne Voices who sometimes sing vocal-ises full of flair in the background, sometimes lyrics with great subtlety of nuance, thus being often reminiscent of the legendary Singers Unlimited, and with the wonderfully balanced RIAS Big Band who, as to the sound, moves between velvety wind instruments or inter-vening chord cascades. Thus making us, once again, feel melancholic about having lost this band due to its disbandment. A top-class mix of musicians!
Such a venture stands or falls with the arrangements. Eight of them have been contributed by the conductor Jörg Achim Keller alone. 'He writes such arrangements like a letter. If you call him today, you'll get it tomorrow in the afternoon,' says Rolf Kühn admiringly, thus pointing to the professionalism of this often underestimated musical handicraft. But Keller's arrangements (as well as the two Streisand arrangements by Ralf Schmid) are also charac-terized by subtlety and the element of surprise. They keep the album from being merely nos-talgic, merely pleasant. Thus, the well-known tunes are newly illuminated and examined with regard to harmony and timbre.
Even with 'Out of Africa', Sidney Pollack's successful melodrama from the 1980s after the book by Tania Blixen, the musical heart of which is the Adagio from the clarinet concerto by Mozart (after all!), said Adagio has not only been skilfully reorchestrated but more or less improvisationally extended, without degenerating into a cheap 'Classic Goes Jazz' number.
'The Windmills of Your Mind' from Michel Legrand's Oscar-winning score to the film about the cool bank robber Thomas Crown with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, on the other hand, has become a rhythmically sophisticated suspense thriller in miniature.
'Smile', the title piece from 'Modern Times' of Charlie Chaplin (which, contrary to leg-end, was composed by Geoffrey Persons and not by Chaplin himself), with its modest ac-companiment, has become a nocturnal ballad with a wink for clarinet and choir, which 'seems to exude a smile, like the ingenious comedian', writes Siegfried Schmidt-Joos in his sensitive and well-informed liner notes.

In a word, the glamour that doubtlessly exists (and which actually is a must with Hollywood tunes) is getting subtler by the arrangements and the refined interpretation.
The glitter of 'Smile' is (to use a vogue word) sustainable and invites to listen to it again and again. For it remains full of surprises.

Here you can find sound samples and purchase tracks or the complete album as mp3.