Duo Eberhard/Gumpert

Blues In The Closet

Thomas Fitterling , 29.03.2014, RONDO Issue 2 / 2014

A gender and generation-crossing duo charmingly conquers its audience as a typical Berlin East-West relationship.

During a cheerful conversation in Berlin with the 41-year-old alto saxophonist Silke Eberhard and the 69-year-old pianist Uli Gumpert, Oscar Pettiford’s often misunderstood title from The Blues in the Closet comes to mind.

For Silke Eberhard, the blues was once an object of desire in the form of her father’s tenor saxophone in the closet. In the Swabian Ostalb region, little Silke played the clarinet in the traditional costume band under the direction of her father. In contrast to the clarinet, the saxophone in the closet represented jazz and freedom. She practiced it for hours in secret; when it came out, her father gave her an alto saxophone. This led to her coming to Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall as a jazz student. She experienced the exuberant activities and the immense openness there as a great opportunity for education and self-discovery.

Uli Gumpert also grew up in a village where his father was the dominant musical figure. A revered art teacher, who had stepped in as a performing musician for the absent music teacher, introduced young Uli to jazz in the Thuringian province and encouraged him to go to college in Weimar. There was no place to study piano; however, the horn player in charge decided that Gumpert had a horn player’s mouth. So the pianist became a horn student. He played Dixieland on the side, heard Charles Mingus and was infected with free and open music from then on. Poor performance in Marxism-Leninism catapulted him out of college – but he became the leading pianist of free jazz in the GDR.

Gumpert experienced the time of reunification far away from the scene in the comfort zone of a successful television series and film composer. When this field of activity disappeared in the mid-90s, he only realized what had happened. Michael Griener, the drummer of his newly formed Workshop Band, dragged him to the free jazz jam session for Silke Eberhard’s birthday in 1998.

Three years later, Eberhard became the congenial wind player for Gumpert’s B3 project. He fulfilled a dream and bought a Hammond organ to play “soulful, bluesy stuff”. In the same year, the two performed a freely improvised club performance as part of a quintet, of which both said: “That was amazing”. At one point, producer Ulli Blobel asked the pianist why Eberhard didn’t play in the Workshop Band, and since all the spots were already filled, they should play together as a duo. This was enthusiastically implemented and ultimately resulted in the CD “Peanuts & Vanities”.

“We both know what good jazz is,” says Gumpert; Mingus, Monk, Dolphy and Ornette Coleman are sources that the musical father-daughter alliance draws on. With the spontaneous, humorous Peanuts miniatures, they are now conquering their audience live. At the same time, they are hoping for a vinyl release of the B3 project to free the deep black blues from the closet.

(c) Herbert Weisrock