Mild Maniac (Gate)

The ingredients of a Kriegel style jazz rock are as simple as they are complex: an often pumping rock bass, whose stoic groove Eberhard Weber leaves behind in wide arcs on his corpus-less electro contrabass, and a drumset drumming crisply dry to the beat by Joe Nay, which is put under tension time and again by Peter Giger's shimmering percussions. Rainer Brüninghaus's flat-oscillating chord playing on the e-piano, which he breaks open with long, eloquently phrased garlands, and Kriegel's wide, slightly distorted legato bows on the semi-acoustic guitar. This is Kriegel's creative cosmos, so he sounds: The rudeness of rock and the suppleness of jazz go hand in hand with the melancholy of blues and the emotionality of soul. The five bonus tracks following the six "Mild Maniac" tracks on the original album are interesting for the re-release of this Kriegel recording, which has often been praised as a legendary recording. Kriegel played the last four numbers with his Mild Maniac Orchestra at the 1977 Schlossfestspiele in Idstein. But only in the last title, in Kriegel's long "Schnellhörspiel", is the whole band with all the musical set pieces described above present