'...once
you have seen "Eggs & Sausage", maybe you really
understood the music of Tom Waits' for the first time...
... and so Claus Dethleff sings with the voice of a beaten
dog barking for one last time before he falls. With the delicate
piano accompaniment of Markus Zimmermann, Claus Dethleff creates,
for the song "Burma Shave", a suggestive mood, in
which romance and despair, drama and hopelessness can be heard
at the same time. In doing so, Claus Dethleff is clever enough
to remain himselff totally between the songs. Instead of lapsing
into an impelled role, he uses the time for background infor-mations…
... Claus Dethleff... gives the drama an appearance, that
Tom Waits set to music in his ballad "Alice". All
the more you suffer with every word Claus Dethleff sings...
...As Dethleff and Zimmermann do not have a complete band
on stage, they wrap the well known songs into totally new
arrangements. And in doing so, many knots the master himself
could not untangle, burst. "Downtown Train", for
instance, loses all its clumsy ballast, dashes forward, hungry
and sateless…
...with stunning humor, Claus Dethleff slips into the role
of the lurching gutter poet, sings about bars, where „you
can’t find your waitress, even with a geiger counter“
and where “the owner is a mental midget with the IQ
of a fencepost”. Claus Dethleff and Markus Zimmermann
managed to work out a program which can be watched magnitised
as well by the Tom Waits fancier as by the casual spectator
with avail...'
(Südkurier, November 9th, 2004)
* * *
'Gripping
stories, wrapped musically...
...from the beginning, which was opened by pianoplayer
Markus Zimmermann with simple, but captivating percussion
and dark piano sounds, the two musicians created a blissful-
gruesome atmosphere. The small stories, that Claus Dethleff
told around the songs, were the main thing at this evening…
...and the songs themselves are stories as well. And Claus
Dethleff had the celestial talent to tell small, often
even „unimportant“ things in such a captivating
way - you could listen to him for hours. His art of story
telling is a gift...
... Dethleff’s second gift is his voice. Similarly
husky and very close to Wait’s timbre, godgiven
songs like "In the neighbourhood" or the wonderful
"The piano has been drinking, not me" gave the
audience a collective goose-flesh. This was as well surely
because of the brilliant, partly classical, partly jazzy
style piano playing of Markus Zimmermann.
More highlights were the electrifying "Time"
(with matching stage background) and the immortal "Downtown
Train" as a bonus song.
The stories take place out there: Claus Dethleff points
to life, of which he can tell and sing in such a captivating
way.'
(Schwäbische Zeitung, November 8th, 2004)
* * *
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