Rolf Kühn, the gifted clarinettist, loves the cinema. What can be more obvious than a big band recording of his favourite film tunes on 'Smile'.

Tribute to Hollywood
Rolf Kühn, the gifted clarinettist, loves the cinema. What can be more obvious than a big band recording of his favourite film tunes on 'Smile'. With Max Raabe who contributes an impressive intro, with the miraculous Cologne Voices and with the wonderfully balanced RIAS Big Band who, as to the sound, moves between velvety wind instruments or inter-vening chord cascades. A top-class mix of musicians!
Such a venture stands or falls with the arrangements. Eight of them have been contributed by the conductor Jörg Achim Keller alone. 'He writes such arrangements like a letter. If you call him today, you'll get it tomorrow in the afternoon,' says Rolf Kühn admiringly, thus pointing to the professionalism of this often underestimated musical handicraft. But Keller's arrangements (as well as the two Streisand arrangements by Ralf Schmid) are also charac-terized by subtlety and the element of surprise. They keep the album from being merely nos-talgic, merely pleasant. Thus, the well-known tunes are newly illuminated and examined with regard to harmony and timbre.
Even with 'Out of Africa', Sidney Pollack's successful melodrama from the 80s after the book by Tania Blixen, the musical heart of which is the Adagio from the clarinet concerto by Mozart, said Adagio has not only been skilfully reorchestrated but more or less improvisationally extended, without degenerating into a cheap 'Classic Goes Jazz' number.
'The Windmills of Your Mind' from Michel Legrand's Oscar-winning score to the film about the cool bank robber Thomas Crown with Steve McQueen & Faye Dunaway, on the other hand, has become a rhythmically sophisticated suspense thriller in miniature.
'Smile', the title piece from 'Modern Times' of Charlie Chaplin, with its modest ac-companiment, has become a nocturnal ballad with a wink for clarinet and choir, which 'seems to exude a smile, like the ingenious comedian', writes Siegfried Schmidt-Joos in his sensitive and well-informed liner notes.

Track Listing

• When you wish upon a star
• Singin' in the rain
• Smile
• Sonny boy
• The windmills of your mind
• Flintstones
• Out of Africa
• You are my lucky star
• People
• On a clear day you can see forever
• As time goes by

Additional Details

Label: Intuition

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 62:20 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 05/09/25

UPC: 750447334229