Chasing Heisenberg

Anyone who chimes with the reflective side of the late, great Lyle Mays, longtime keyboard player with the Pat Metheny Group, will adore this album. Sounding as though entranced by his own powers of extemporization and creativity, Poetzsch takes physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a springboard for his own creative imagination. By turns dreamy and foot-tappingly propulsive, Poetzsch exalts in harmonic suspensions, pedal points, superimposed chords, and added-note harmonies. The result is a collection of time-suspending soundworlds set in motion by a series of eureka moments that can neither be predicted nor enforced. Poetzsch’s evocative commentary to Stilles Sehnen (“Longing for Silence”) could be taken as a metaphor for the entire album: “no boundary between sky and water, no horizon to be seen.”