jb[at]lembro.net

Hamburg slang says 'it's time to heffel' or 'pretty heffelish' or 'well heffelled'. The Heffels are a bunch of wise guys who've been trafficking their music for years with good reasons for keeping themselves to themselves.

So everyone's heard of the hip-but-so-PC 'Hamburg School', a dull blip in the media coolness game battled out between Hamburg and Berlin. But The Heffels are a clandestine Hamburg scene all of their own, a busy crowd, a shared history, a deep pool of musical experience off the edge of the uniform map of the city's main music drag.

Rapid climate change and inevitable economic collapse will soon make the port the Havana of the North, and the Heffels are prime suspects for a Ry-Cooderization of the new Hamburgo sound.

Trouble is, Heffels music won't fit into any handy slot. For a start, it's improvised, but neither jazz nor jamming. You might hear jazz of various hues crashing in, but there's too much other stuff bouncing around to make strict genre sense.

Past caring about public image, the band's wayward musicians conspire like five distinct robber Samurai types, masters of artful recycling eclectically pillaging their way through the musical landscape, making up songs as they go. These may sound like compositions but are impromptu dialogues, drunken waltzes, slippery arguments and teasing serenades of friendship.

Listening to the Heffels, some people hear film soundtracks; others imagine landscapes or the comic babble of bizarre dialects crooning ostensibly familiar ballads. Some even want to get up and dance.

What are the Heffels up to on their extended picnic with all this gleefully stolen fruit, playing from hand to mouth, sharing their German griot nourishment with all who're ready to listen? A perky tango is suddenly garnished with punked-up spice; a dreamily floating melody is rudely doused in cacophonic jazz trash; a tripping film noir movie erupts into a Babel tower of criss-crossed urban samples; a hard, gleaming locomotive groove crashes muy loco at breakneck speed into a brittle wall of silence and melts softly into warm and lush vegetation.

That, sort of, is the Heffels sound. All improvised on guitar, drums, percussion, bass, organ, sax, trombone and voices, by seen-it-all, exile-kind-of-types from a port city with a few stories to tell to those who know, and enjoying every moment of it.