April is the ECM debut of the Swiss singer Susanne Abbuehl, an album built on poetry. She sets poems by E. E. Cummings to her own music and writes her own lyrics to pieces by Carla Bley. Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight is reduced to voice and harmonium, and the album ends with a piece from the Hindustani vocal repertoire. Her teachers included the jazz singer Jeanne Lee and the Indian classical vocalist Prabha Atre, and both lines of study can be heard here.
Abbuehl, who lives in the Netherlands and also holds Dutch nationality, recorded with her own trio. Brederode and May had worked with her for several years, Rohrer for two. Wolfert Brederode plays piano, harmonium and melodica, Christof May clarinet and bass clarinet, and Samuel Rohrer drums and percussion. The album was recorded in November 2000 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher. It followed I Am Rose, an independent release issued in Switzerland and the Netherlands in 1997.
The opener, yes is a pleasant country, unfolds slowly over tuned drums before Brederode's piano and the voice enter. On Ida Lupino Abbuehl sings her own words to Bley's melody, while Brederode's piano slips into something close to an Indian alap. A.I.R. (All India Radio), from Bley's Escalator over the Hill, is sung without words. The closing Mane na, by Prabha Atre, is a midnight raga over harmonium, with muted drums and clarinet.
In The Independent, Phil Johnson wrote that Abbuehl had learned from Lee "to respect the natural cadence of a lyric and the importance of preserving a sense of space". Marshall Bowden, writing in PopMatters in 2002, heard in the harmonium-only 'Round Midnight "a feeling of nearly unbearable loneliness and sadness". In the Swiss Jazz'n'more, Hanspeter Vetsch observed that the band does not simply accompany the singer but merges with her voice into a single sound. Looking back in 2013 for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called it "an auspicious label debut".
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1766, with eleven tracks. It was first released by ECM on 1 October 2001.
