"Ringen mit Schatten" by Neue Salonmusik Berlin

Original Liner Notes for Wilde Nacht

When Berlin vocalist Greta Lind first discovered Wild Nights, the long-forgotten 1950s album by American singer Ronnie Saint Clair, she was instantly captivated. There was something timeless in Saint Clair’s smooth crooner’s voice, something both intimate and expansive, suspended between the glamour of a big band ballroom and the stillness of a poem. The songs, arranged in lush late-fifties style by Jack Templeton, set the words of Emily Dickinson with an unexpected grace, as if the American poet’s quiet meditations had found a new voice in brass, strings, and smoke.

Lind played the record for her longtime colleague and duet partner Karl Brenner, another singer drawn to the twilight spaces where jazz and art song meet. Together they imagined what those same Dickinson texts might sound like in a Berlin of their own making, recast in German, refracted through modern harmony, and interpreted by the musicians of their ensemble, Neue Salonmusik Berlin.

Founded in 1978 by Lind and Brenner, Neue Salonmusik Berlin has always blurred the boundaries between cabaret, concert hall, and experimental salon. The ensemble’s new album, Wilde Nacht, takes its name from Saint Clair’s title track, yet every piece here has been reimagined. Lind translated Dickinson’s poems into supple, lyrical German, and the members of the ensemble contributed fresh arrangements that reflect their shared lineage, combining Weimar expressionism, cool jazz restraint, and contemporary chamber precision.

The result is a musical conversation that stretches across decades and continents. “Garten der Rosen (Garden of Roses)” sways with late-night melancholy, “Maskenspiel der Heiterkeit (Merriment’s Mask)” glints with brittle humor, and “Ringen mit Schatten (Wrestling With Shadows)” moves with quiet gravity. “Wilde Nächte (Wild Nights),” the album’s centerpiece, shimmers with longing and release, while “Die plötzliche Tür (The Sudden Door)” and “Eine Uhr blieb stehen (A Clock Stopped)” reveal Neue Salonmusik’s gift for contrast, where a single breath of stillness can carry the weight of an entire orchestra.

In Wilde Nacht, Lind and Brenner do more than pay homage to Ronnie Saint Clair. They have transformed his vision of a jazz-poetic synthesis into something unmistakably their own, a sound poised between eras, between languages, between the steady beat of the heart and the unpredictable rhythm of art.