4 Wheel Drive review – jolting AOR from jazz supergroup

In recent years, jazz musicians have started to lose their aversion to the contemporary pop song. The likes of Brad Mehldau, the Bad Plus and Robert Glasper have attempted to eke out new truths from songs by everyone from Abba to Nirvana, placing them alongside the interwar standards and show tunes from the great American songbook.

4 Wheel Drive is a pan-European supergroup – two Swedes, two Germans – who tackle a selection of AOR songs (by Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Sting, Paul McCartney) that are so hilariously unfashionable that they’re almost cool. The group’s de facto leader is Nils Landgren, who plays agile hard-bop trombone and sings in a nimble tenor with the tonal characteristics of a baritone. (His singing voice sounds oddly like a trombone, something he shares with other singing trombonists such as Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden.) He has an effective and beautifully bleak voice, but the vocal-led songs performed tonight often resemble the work of an upmarket cocktail-bar band, and this exceptional quartet only stamp their authority on these tunes when they play them as instrumentals.

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The Beatles’ Lady Madonna is re-set in the unorthodox time signature of
7/8, giving it a jolting, propulsive quality. It is the thrilling, rapturous highlight of this gig. That’s All by Genesis is transformed into a fugal piano meditation, with delicate washes of mallet drums and FX-laden trombone, to the point where it starts to sound like an Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd instrumental. Some of the original pieces – drummer Wolfgang Haffner’s calypso Lobito and bassist Lars Danielsson’s proggy 4 Wheel Drive – are also great vehicles for the band.

All four are excellent band leaders, but the star of this ensemble is its youngest member, 40-year-old German pianist Michael Wollny. He is known for appearing in more austere or cerebral contexts, but here he’s able to let rip, spraying out funky blues solos, thunderous heavy metal power chords and prepared-piano explorations, sounding like he is constantly teetering on the edge of chaos while remaining in complete control. Wollny is the wild card this sometimes polite ensemble needs.