Willem Breuker, Baal Brecht Breuker (side A)

1973's Baal Brecht Breuker documents Willem Breuker's collaboration with a theater group — he provided music for Bertolt Brecht's play Baal.  While the music clearly predates the more consistent style that he developed with his Kollektief only a few years later, it also often feels a bit too foreground to naturally fit a play.  The horn lines are often overtly melodic, and they also sometimes have a dance-y pulse.  On the album, at least, they're structured into pieces of several minute duration — it's unclear if these entire pieces were used for the play, or only excerpted.  In other places, the music breaks down to more incidental sections, with instruments like organ, mandolin, and glockenspiel moving to the foreground.  These parts feel more at home in a theatrical setting, and also even more atypical of Breuker's work.  The marquee talent in his surrounding cast is the surprising combination in the rhythm section:  Louis Andriessen, Maarten Altena, and Han Bennink.  The three talented musicians fit together nicely, despite their very different styles, and they form a solid underpinning for the rhythmic and vaguely jazzier sections.  The recording is oddly, and overly, bright and clear — it sounds more like it came from the late-70s.  The album originally came inside of a fitted sack, but when I acquired mine, it unfortunately lacked the sack and included only the standard sleeve from within.