The Berlin-based Insomnia Brass Band is actually a trio, featuring baritone sax player Almut Schlichting, trombonist Anke Lucks, and drummer Christian Marien. This miniature brass band was founded in 2017, has developed a highly energetic, irresistible contrapuntal attack of interlocking parts and with its voluminous sound succeeds to transcend its compact size and produce a collective, raucous sound one might expect from a much larger ensemble. The rhythmic interplay of the Insomnia Brass Band is rooted in jazz – in the most inclusive sense of the jazz legacy and encompasses New Orleans brass band traditions, blues, funk, free jazz with some nods to punk rock.

«Late Night Kitchen» – a perfect place for insomniacs to meet, is the debut album of the trio, recorded at Lowswing Recording Studio, Berlin in January 2020. Schlichting and Lucks wrote the nine compositions. The Insomnia Brass Band is a powerful trio, always in constant motion and always juggling with quicksilver harmonies, spontaneous accents, melodic conceits, and infectious grooves, delivered with unstoppable joy and with a sharp sense of humor that brings to mind the American quartet Sex Mob led by trumpeter Steven Bernstein.

Just check the «Fitting Clothes», where all three musicians enjoy colliding with each other while expanding the rhythmic layers, or the soulful funk of «Gingerbread Resistance Song», «Nein – Doch» and «In My Name» that forces you to move your limbs. But this trio enjoy also looser and less energetic modes as on the moving ballads «Wiegenlied», played as a duet by Schlichting and Lucks, and «Rimdir», both still radiate Insomnia Brass Band fun spirit.

As Peter Margasak wrote in his liner notes, Insomnia Brass Band never allows its heady ideas to get in the way of a good time.

Eyal Hareuveni   

Anke Lucks (tb), Almut Schlichting (bs), Christian Marien (dr)