CD review: Christoph Gallio – Day & Taxi 2022: Video, CD cover

Darkness is imminent. But while apocalyptists fish in troubled waters, others – Thorsten Krämer in Wuppertal, for example – fish with sweaters or camels as bait for the Leviathan. Or after a little stupid poem.

Against hysteria and displeasure, Christoph Gallio with soprano, alto & C-melody saxophones and again Silvan Jeger in a grandiose manner on the double bass and Gerry Hemingway on the drums calls on a round of emergency helpers: Kip Hanrahan (‘Casual Song’), Robert Filliou (‘RF’), Jack Bruce (‘Infinite Sadness’), the painter Corinne Güdemann in Zurich (‘Corinne’), Jean-Luc Godard (‘Godard’s Memory’), the composer Walter Zimmermann (‘Ein Ort und Alles ‘), the Viennese ‘daydream worker’ Dominik Steiger (‘Abra Palavra’).

They close the door with Steve Delachinsky when it gets too thick, or leave it open, drunk, in order to continue hoping against Gloom and Darkness with Markus Stegmann (“Sell Rims”, “Nonaspe”) and meager words against the growing desert and sow long shadows of the Anthopocene. Like Werner Lutz (“The walls are on the way”), they value small thoughts and a little laugh, but they also know the torment of light, like Renato P. Arlati, the mysterious fifth of the handful of poets here, whom Jeger called on in a chant Poetry increases the possibility of ‘Abstract Love or Different Tomorrows’.

What is always needed when ‘Too Much Nothing’ threatens is an ‘Ego Killer’ or at least ‘Another F… Melody’. Ultimately, the future is indefinite and the way there, which leads over slippery, brittle ice, is a little easier to master in community of opinion with artistic spirits and contemporaries, as Gallio specifically associates them and constantly expands on them. And by not letting the laughter and all that jazz go away, as Day & Taxi sing it, sophisticated like Lacy & Aebi, bittersweet introspective, full of inner embers or heartily swinging, crowing, sawing, pounding.

Does the jazz world have any idea what a treasure they have in Gallio?

By Rigobert Dittmann