Uwe Gronau, Flight 14

Uwe Gronau is something else. This musician is all over the place with his music. On one album he does proggy stuff, a little light jazz, some new age, a dash of avant garde, quite a bit of solo piano (occasionally with faint synth backing), some all-synth pieces (with and without drums), the very-occasional vocal here-and-there, some cool sneaky-sinuous bass-lines you hardly notice the first time through, a little synth guitar, and a bunch of unusual synth sounds that make you feel you are being propelled on a new ride at some theme park.

All of this and more is on his latest album called Flight 14 (his 14th album, although the early ones were mostly just available in his German homeland). Now his recordings can be bought all over the Internet (just use a search engine to find a sales site). You could just purchase a couple of tracks, of course, but one of the exciting aspects of Gronau’s music is getting into the whole album. It is not that they have a theme (although his last one, Visions, was all about Paris); it is just that the exploration of hearing what he will do next is exciting, AND this music will absolutely grow on you, so the pleasures continue to unfold as you keep putting the CD back on day after day.

The title tune is a fast-paced tune capturing movement in this modern-world we call home today, and “Market” does the same with the buy-buy-buy marketplace. With 20 (mostly-instrumental) tunes on this album, it is difficult to describe them all, but the solo piano piece dedicated to his music-teacher dad (“Father, I Miss You”) is stunning because everytime you think you know where he is going, he goes somewhere else (although there is a beautiful little melody buried in that eclecticism). The first and next-to-last tunes are forceful and full-bodied enough to be called non-vocal prog-rock, but there also are many soft and slow and sparse numbers too. He leaves some incredible space between notes and chords on “The Cleaning” (who was it who said the space between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves?). The album is dedicated to Uwe’s parents and he wrote a soft tune, “Elegy,” that may be a tribute to them (he says it is about loneliness). He says in his biography that the next piece, “Heaven,” is “the music I would like to take with me when I have to go someday and I would receive my friends from eternity with this song.”

For music lovers who are tired of the same old stuff spewing out of the current pop radio stations, I suggest you check this dude out. His name is unusual, his music is unusual and his albums do not disappoint.