Hosianna Mantra is best experienced like a sunset, so that you stand still within it and let it simply surround you. Though the early ’70s were a golden moment for the full-length album, few records of the time work so well as a cohesive piece: Eight tracks nodding to one another not just with a knotted mood of uplift and worry but also with themes, tones, and patterns that feel as unified as an impressionist’s landscape painting. Fricke was the classical piano kid drawn toward composition; Hosianna Mantra was built by improvisation, but the finished work is almost seamless.
Such a synoptic appreciation, though, is too simple for Hosianna Mantra, as reductive as hearing A Love Supreme and labeling it a mere prayer. The how is essential. Around the time Fricke met both Veit and Yung, a friend gave him a copy of the Hebrew Bible as translated by Martin Buber, the polarizing existential philosopher. Buber had finished his volume only a decade earlier, following more than 30 years of work. His goal was less a direct translation than one that got to the spirit of the stories, or, as one scholar put it, explored “Jewish creativity in a German context.”
In subsequent decades, Fricke would reject religion during interviews. (“They do not allow this free thinking,” he said in a 1993 radio chat. “With the exception of Buddhism. But I’m not a Buddhist.”) Still, he was enchanted and inspired by Buber’s translation, by the power of the text’s characters and circumstances. “The Bible became life for me,” he said soon after Hosianna Mantra was released.
After a preamble that suggests rubbing sleep from one’s eyes at day’s dawn, Fricke’s chunky piano and Veit’s laser-thin guitar push and pull in different directions during “Ah!” When Yun arrives during “Kyrie,” she pleads for mercy with a voice so generous and soft it suggests charity incarnate. As Fricke and Veit tumble into a mess of fractious notes above a tambura’s hum, she hovers around them like calm air, restoring the order that gently pulls them toward the first side’s finale, “Hosianna Mantra.”
The title track is 10 minutes of pure pleasure, Yun repeating prayers as Fricke, Veit, and oboist Robert Eliscu dive like swans and rise like rockets. They trade riffs and lines, exchanging bits of melody like a jam band that’s been at work for three decades, not six months. (Veit, mind you, is a ringer for Jerry Garcia here.) Fricke often talked about Hosianna Mantra as a mass, especially the first side; this is the blessing, then, the final word to disciples as they head out into the world. I find it impossible to hear without feeling lighter, as if some unspoken load has been lifted—perhaps not a burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea, but its own little miracle, nevertheless.
