Everybody Digs Wolfgang Dauner

[Guy Berger]

link

WD, piano, ring modulator, clavinet; Eberhard Weber, bass, cello, guitar; Fred Braceful, percussion, voice.

Wolfgang Dauner — not exactly a household name. So here are some fun facts about Mr. Dauner and his visionary 1970 electronic-jazz masterpiece Output.

#1: Hard to believe given its futuristic collision of aggresive electronic effects and heady jazz-rock instrumentation, but Output was one of the first releases on ECM [1006].

#2: Manfred Eicher served as producer, although this clearly predates the refinement of his trademark production sound - that crystalline and sometimes airless quality that has come to define the label. Perhaps, as some rumors allege, Eicher merely licensed this album from Dauner and added his credit after the fact. Or perhaps he played a key role in birthing in this forward-looking music.

#3: Like many of the early 1000 series of ECM releases - many of the label’s most interesting recordings - Output has never been issued on CD.

#4: The album found little traction among jazz fans upon release. The electronic treatments were too strange, the compositions too off-kilter. There’s the pinched compression, the spacey melodica sounds in “Nothing to Declare” that seem lifted from a reggae song years later, the Arabic tonalities in ‘Abraxas.” Not rock, not jazz, not even really fusion. The music was generally ignored.

#5: Dauner’s electronic-jazz combination predates Dr. Patrick Gleeson’s radical use of electronics on 1973’s Sextant. Two pioneers whose work was snubbed by most jazz cognoscenti.

#6: Dauner’s work was partially rediscovered and rechampioned thanks to those outside the jazz community. In this case, the primary movers were industrial pioneers Nurse With Wound. Dauner was included on the arcane but massively influential Nurse With Wound list, a grouping of sympatico artists that influenced the early sound and approach of NWW. Many of the musicians were virtually unknown at the time and their music has become quite influential. A few remain anonymous stars in that vast mysto-musical cosmology.

#7: Although the NWW list only includes artist names, Output is NWW mainstay Steve Stapleton’s favorite Wolfgang Dauner album.

#8: Output is also a favorite of Jim O’Rourke’s – varied solo artist, former Gatr Del Sol and Sonic Youth member, producer for Faust, Melt Banana, and Wilco, improviser with Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Red Krayola, experimental filmmaker, author of an incredibly informative essay about Japanese New Wave cinema, et cetera.

#9: Though Abraxas, the Santana album, was relased in Setember 1970, just as Output was being recorded, it is highly likely that Dauner was drawing on an entirely different tradition.

#10: Eberhard Weber: “I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted. I met an older German piano player named Wolfgang Dauner and he accepted my playing. We pretty quickly developed a German Bill Evans-style trio—similar to the one with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, without playing that well of course. [laughs] This was very different to what the other people who played in Germany were doing.”

#11: Since the early 1980s, Weber has regularly collaborated with the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, playing on four out of her last five studio albums (The Dreaming, 1982; Hounds of Love, 1985; The Sensual World, 1989; Aerial, 2005).

#12: Dauner later went on to stage multi-media theatrical events as part of his music.

#13: Is it just us, or does that cover art look exactly like it should be gracing the album of a New Wave band circa 1983?

#14: Dauner is not above a pun.

[clifford_thornton]

I have the one on Calig, but not this one. I can imagine it's pretty good. The LP has been pretty expensive (for an ECM, anyway) when I've seen it.

[Guest donald petersen]

i like it. i don't think you will like it.

i like dauner because he plays the clavinet a lot (also heard on robin kenyatta's ECM album).

there is a lot of spaciness on this album...not a lot of grooving moments.

but a ring modulated clavinet is a cool sound.

if you look online i am sure you can find a share blog that doesn't suck like destination out does (sorry, i hate that they just give you a taste...it's like their own dumb form of legal protection) and you could get the whole album.

[GA Russell]

Guy, I don't know the album you ask about, but I can recommend another Dauner recorded about the same time called Rischkas Soul on the Brain label. Good jazz rock.

[andybleaden]

Ia this the item you seek ? Here is the cover and a link to a Japanese ( maybe?) site about it

http://www.yogiga.com/yukie/11_review/02_F...02_Free-4-1.htm

Not heard it but seen it in the ECM sleeves of desire book I have

[Guest donald petersen]

guye, if you do happen to like "output" which i sort of doubt but maybe you will...fred braceful was also in the band exmagma which had a similar vibe to this dauner album. braceful was also on mal waldron's "the call" on ECM. he was another american black dude who decided to live in germany. he died pretty young (also played with marion brown a bit).

dauner has some MPS albums which you can find on CD but i personally think they are relatively disappointing. sort of a dave pike-ish MPS mode. not so deep.

i am listening to dauner on hans koller's "kunstkopfindianer" right now which is not a particularly good fusion album (on MPS) though dauner does some cool electric stuff.

http://curved-air.com/

this blog has the dauner in its entirety and also some exmagma if you are interested.

[andybleaden]

Got a copy of the ECM Output LP by Dauner and its ...well....ok!

Nothing too special for me but nice to hear after all these years

[mikeweil]

I had Output and saw that trio perform - nice and pretty wild for its time, but I grew tired of it. Dauer was at the very frontier of the music back then, one of the first to own a synth in Europe and experienting with all kinds of electronics.