Gerd Dudek
’Smatter / Day and Night
(psi 02.01) / (psi 12.05)

IN HIS brief sleeve narrative to ’Smatter, Gerd Dudek’s first record under his own name, Evan Parker, a luminous fellow saxophonist, expresses a sense of incongruity that his is indeed Dudek’s recorded leadership debut.

The album’s label, psi, is Parker’s label, so the Bristolian’s admiration goes much futher than words. But ’Smatter is indeed a deeply beautiful record, cut by Dudek in 1998 when he was 60 with bandmates familiar enough on the British jazz sene: Chris Laurence on bass, John Parricelli on guitar and the late arch-drummer of many a historic British session, the wondrous Tony Levin.

Dudek, a German who was born in Gross-Dobern (now part of Poland) in 1938, is one of the true fulcrums of European free jazz, but ’Smatter finds him playing in a much broader context: eclectic, melodious, storming, ever-innovative, angelic.

No wonder that Parker wrote of him: “Gerd is a holy one. Music incarnate, an Adolphian centaur — impossible to say where the body and the saxophone separate.” Hearing ’Smatter, you know that the formidable Adolphe Sax would have been well impressed.

Dudek’s free jazz credentials stretch back a long way. In the early sixties he was blowing with the Kurt Edelhagen Big Band, then joined the ManfredSchoof Quintet and toured Asia and South America with trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff’s All stars.

He was there in 1967 for the first recorded sessions of Alex von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra, toured with George Russell and Don Cherry and played a key role in both Berlin Contemporary Orchestra and the European Jazz Ensemble.

But suddenly, in a more exposed quartet setting, his sheer artistry flows for a full hour. The first three tracks of ’Smatter are compositions by the Toronto-born trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. The opener, Phrase Three, has riverine lucidity, and Dudek’s current of ideas and stream of grace is paralleled by solos by Parricelli and Laurence. Ma Bel follows, with Laurence’s bowed beginning prefacing the glory of Dudek’s tenor. Laurence returns plucking, his strings dancing and Dudek’s notes paint the humanity of their subject: warm, poised and proud.

Since 1939, when the great pioneer tenorist Coleman Hawkins recorded his definitive version of Body and Soul, the ballad has always been seen as a every tenor saxophonist’s test piece. Dudek gives us a 17-minute version, playing on the edge of the melody, his improvising genius blowing everywhere alongside the empathy of his confreres. And as the tunes arrives, the pace quickens and Dudek’s notes saunter and skip. Levin’s drums are miraculous throughout, so much in brotherhood with Dudek’s horn, and after the hornman’s long, serpentine coda, Levin returns, his skins palpitating, his cymbals splashing sparks, in a colloquy of immense power and beauty.

The quartet gushes into By George, written by another great reed veteran, the Memphis-born George Coleman, and “Big George” has found a German sibling in “Big Gerd,” rumbustious, hugely spirited and full of fire — and Parricelli’s solo is ripe virtuosity.

Dudek was in London in January 2012, playing at the Vortex in Dalston with his compatriot, the pianist Hans Koller, Gene Calderazzo on drums and the ex-bassist of Gilad Atzmon’s Orient House Ensamble, Oli Hayhurst. The foursome travelled to Ardingley, in the West Sussex countryside the next day to record another psi album Day and Night.

The tunes leap between Coltrane, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, Wheeler again and back to Bach. Ornette’s stop-time Congeniality is racked with surprise, sudden rises and falls and Dudek’s sound is so sinewy yet animated, that when Koller suddenly breaks into a bluesy, slower passage, you wonder how far ahead the hornman has travelled from his three much younger confreres.

Yet together they are an amalgam defying age and generations. Hear them surge inside Wayne Shorter’s Blues a la Carte and savour the sumptuous melody of Mingus’s Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love before they gallop through Coltrane’s Blues to You, spurred on by Hayhurst’s pinging bass.

It’s not so strange that an album of Dudek’s and Koller’s favourite tunes should close with Koller’s arrangement of Bach’s Der Tag Mit Seinum Lichte. At least to Germans playing another German, another improvising genius too, with Dudek’s singing soprano saxophone winging over Calderazzo’s rustling brushing. Sheer serenity and a moving farewell to a prime album.