It begins at the very bottom, in the mossy earth of the forest, where the deep sounds dwell. Bass flute, alto flute, baritone saxophone, above it the starlight in higher frequencies - the whole thing is a bit eerie, yet full of anticipation for the new day, for the light and clarity it may bring: "Before the Dawn," the album opener, already reveals a lot of the sophistication that Until Broad Daylight, the new album by Hamburg saxophonist and flautist Bettina Russmann, has to offer. In addition to the cleverly placed texture of the flute tones, the full-sounding baritone of singer Ken Norris brings a text by the bandleader, transposed into Elizabethan English, to a glow, making the nighttime shimmer between disorientation and awakening tangible. The stars and the light of the distant sun played over the boards offer orientation until daybreak.
Producing an album had been on Bettina Russmann's bucket list for a long time - but where to start when so much is imaginable? Born in Lübeck in 1968, her path into music was not predetermined. Even as a child she was fascinated by Beatles records, especially Abbey Road and the White Album. Later her musical taste meandered from David Bowie to Talking Heads and Frank Zappa to various styles of jazz. A live concert by Al Jarreau was certainly a seminal influence, which prompted her to search for more jazzy sounds on the NDR radio program and she found what she was looking for in the music of Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. Inspired by this, she picked up a tenor saxophone at the age of 17 - and stuck with it. After school she went to Berlin and played in various bands, until the Berlin Wall fell. She studied jazz for three years at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music and then another four years at the conservatory in Amsterdam/Hilversum. She then chose Hamburg as her home and has been working as a freelance musician ever since.
In 2010, Bettina Russmann founded her quartet, an exquisite working band with some of the most outstanding musicians on the scene, to realize her musical ideas. With only her own compass to explore the diverse sound worlds that interested her, she wrote pieces, composed, and arranged them. At some point, she gave in to her long-standing interest in language and text and began writing her own lyrics for her songs and compositions—poetic lyrics with a mysterious, elegiac coherence, in which one word intertwines with another.
The album "Until Broad Daylight" reaps the rewards of this work. Eight of the eleven compositions were written by Bettina Russmann, two were borrowed from David Bowie's repertoire, and another was written by Gavan Gravesen, a drummer colleague from her Berlin days. At the core of the music is the quartet, expanded by singer Ken Norris, with pianist Enno Dugnus, drummer Heinz Lichius, and double bassist Giorgi Kiknadze. The colorful array of this line-up is enriched in some songs by contributions from guitarists Johannes Wennrich and Daniel Hirth. In their version of Bowie's "Life on Mars," a bravura number for Ken Norris's voice, the Kaiser Quartet also provides the suspenseful, velvety sound of the strings. For all her self-confident eclecticism, which accepts her musical preferences as the sole conceptual framework for her album, the exploration and production of music remains Bettina Russmann's driving force.
