The 25th birthday celebrations of Munich’s widely respected ACT record label came to the boil with a spectacular party gig in Berlin this month. This 13-track compilation similarly reflects the label’s diversity, and founder Siggi Loch’s fondness for cutting-edge players who don’t recoil from the word entertainment. The tracks here are mostly post-2013, from artists including vocalist/trombonist Nils Landgren, prodigious cross-genre pianists Michael Wollny and Iiro Rantala, and French free-sax firebrand Émile Parisien. Of the earlier pieces, the late Esbjorn Svensson’s 2005 Prelude in D Minor is a spacious, silver-toned glimpse of a path he never got a chance to follow; South Korean singer Youn Sun Nah’s Bitter Ballad with trumpeter Mathias Eick’s trembling slurs pursuing her is an eerie highlight; and so is drummer Wolfgang Haffner’s rambunctious reinvention of Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing as Swing Swing Swing, with a scintillating Wollny on keys. This set is less a marketing tool, more a powerful set of musical statements by some of Europe’s most fearlessly eager contemporary musicians.
