This album’s subtitle, “Kurt Weill and America”, might seem to promise a set of Weill’s songs in jazz-cabaret style, but it’s much more complicated than that.Theo Bleckmann certainly sings the songs - Mack the Knife, September Song, Speak Low, etc – but the recastings by pianist Julia Hülsmann and her quartet make for an experience rather like reading a novel with an unreliable narrator. The familiar tunes and lyrics are set adrift in strange and alien surroundings. It takes some getting used to if you know the originals, but after a while I found it curiously compelling.
