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Jazz Orchestra, a highly skilled but fairly conventional
big band, was followed by an intimate duet by
Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler and Portuguese
trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, which blended
compositional control with creative soundscaping.
Another Slovenian, Maja Osojnik, gave a shouted (as
opposed to spoken) word performance over a barrage
of joystick-controlled, high-energy/lo-fi electronic
mayhem, making eye-to-eye, hit-for-hit contact with
drummer Patrick Wurzwallner. Boston singer/guitarist
Jeremy Flower’s melancholy song cycle “The Real Me”
included Carla Kihlstedt on vocals, backed by a
chamber orchestra.
The night’s brightest moments came during Cuban
pianist Harold López-Nussa’s trio set, featuring his
brother Ruy Adrian on drumkit and cajón, both
charismatic performers who connected well with the
audience. Vocalist/guitarist Cassandra Wilson and the
trio Harriet Tubman (guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist
Melvin Gibbs and drummer J. T. Lewis) ended the
show with a medley of blues, psychedelia and On the
Corner-era Miles—with mixed results, if the
underwhelmed audience response was any indication.
Sunday was extraordinary. Roots songster Becca
Stevens and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Jacob
Collier shared a morning set at the music school that
showcased the latter’s innovative harmony singing,
improvised in four- (and more) parts on his Novation
synthesizer. On the main stage, Moers-born Tim Isfort’s
“Zapptet”, featuring a rowdy four-alto saxophone choir
(Silke Eberhard, Jan Klare, Angelika Niescier, Hayden
Chisholm, the latter pair former Improvisers-in-
Residence), roused the crowd with seamless soli
sections and blasting freebop and funk.
The Liz (Lizes Kosack, Allbee and Erel; the first
hidden in a full-body jackal costume, the last in drag)
staged an elaborate performance art piece based on
Egyptian mythology, including a pyramid illuminated
with home movies and a giant white dinosaur/bird
puppet with eerie lightbulb eyes lip-syncing Kosack’s
avant-recitative. Medusa Beats, a piano trio led by
Köln-based drummer Jonas Burgwinkel, gave a refined
yet adventurous set. While performing from his ECM
album Mbókò, Cuban pianist David Virelles ran rampant
over the steady pulse provided by bassist Thomas
Morgan, drummer Eric McPherson and percussionist
Román Díaz, delivering dazzling high-speed runs and
nuanced ornaments, encoring with Díaz on a
magnificent duet. Amazingly, the energy cranked up a
notch further when Warped Dreamer, a half-Norwegian,
half-Belgian quartet of trumpeter/electronicist Arve
Henriksen, guitarist Stian Westerhus, keyboardist Jozef
Dumoulin and drummer Teun Verbruggen, selfdetonated
onstage in a bombastic free blow.
Two Brooklyn bands concluded the night: piano
trio Dawn of Midi changed it up with a highly
disciplined and restrained set—a lesson that less can be
more—followed by Moon Hooch, a frenetic two-tenor
saxophone trio (one doubling on contrabass clarinet)
with shirtless drummer James Muschler, all plugged in
to a relentless click-track beat, playing what might be
called ‘house jazz’.
The festival wound down Monday with more
morning sessions at the music school and, in the big
hall, the Lisbon Underground Music Ensemble, a
raucous big band featuring clarinetist Paulo Gaspar,
German-Finnish keyboard-percussion duo Hauschka
& Kosminen and U.S./German/Swedish improvising
quartet Amok Amor, to end with a second performance
by Stevens and Collier.
If this year was any indication, the future holds
many more political, economic and artistic challenges
for the Moers Festival. Far less predictable is the music
that will be played there. v
For more information, visit moers-festival.de
(FIMAV CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13)
The trio Microtub (tuba players Robin Hayward,
Peder Simonsen and Martin Taxt) also used sculpture
as a focal point in its performance, but to different
effect. The group’s work centered on the expanded
capabilities of the microtonal tuba, a brilliant oddity
that composer/leader Hayward created in 2009 to
explore the full spectrum of tonality on the burly
instrument. Together the three tubas, positioned in a
circle around a geometric construction, created deep
consonances that dissolved seamlessly into palpable,
oscillating dissonances—hard work on a brass
instrument. But the result was a subtle, nuanced
performance, full of oceanic movement despite the
seeming stillness of the piece.
For his three sets at the center of the festival,
composer John Zorn, a regular at FIMAV, culled
selections from his “Bagatelles”, 300 short compositions
with themes alternating between haunting/melodic
and frenetic/disjointed. Zorn asserts that any small
group can play these pieces and to prove it he cast his
musicians from all corners of the musical establishment:
concert pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and violinist Mark
Feldman; young rock group Trigger (guitarist Will
Green, bassist Simon Hanes, drummer Aaron
Edgcomb); acoustic guitarists Julian Lage and Gyan
Riley; and jazz guitarists Mary Halvorson and Marc
Ribot, for instance. To be sure, some renderings were
more interesting than others. But even the lesser pieces
only served to underscore Zorn’s clever approach to
deconstructing genre.
Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq reduces improvised
music to its most elemental. The ancient art of throat
singing requires dramatic shifts between vocal registers
and masterful command of vocalizing on the inhalation;
using this technique Tagaq conjures up unearthly
sounds from some other dimension—guttural screams,
disconcerting hisses, flute-like riffs. Backed by her trio
of drummer Jean Martin, violinist Jesse Zubot and
sound artist Peter Kadelbach and along with guitarist
Bernard Falaise, Tagaq on stage was at times terrifying
as she swept through the complete arc of human
emotion. In her willingness to reveal the fierce
howlings of her inner reality, however, Tagaq frees us
to acknowledge certain primal forces in ourselves. At
some point in our human history, her work reminds us,
the preternatural singer with the animal voice was the
avant garde artist for the tribe—to wit, the one who
envisions the future and holds it up for all to see. v
For more information, visit fimav.qc.ca
(NATTJAZZ CONTINUED FROM PAGE 13)
styles and ensemble sizes. Voice & Strings & Timpani
in Røkeriet, USF’s main hall, was a fascinating sextet of
paired (processed) vocalists, guitarists and drummers.
The effect was hypnotic and multi-layered, so much so
that the switch between folk, hippie drum circle, ‘60s
Santana, indie rock and industrial was remarkably
seamless, frosted by a live oil-based light show. Spirit
in the Dark in the club-like Sardinen was a tribute to
the long history of the organ trio (bass subbing for
guitar in this case) but suffered from a lack of crispness
and energy, two aspects crucial to the aforementioned
history. Then it was back upstairs to the USF Studio for
the Bjørn Alterhaugh Quintet, another bassist-led
ensemble featuring John Pål Inderberg, this time paired
in the frontline with the much younger alto saxophonist
Frode Nymo for a warm sound, exploring moody
originals in the spirit of late ‘50s postbop.
The night closed with shows contrasting in the
success of their ambition. Where the Trondheim Jazz
Orchestra featuring vocalist Maria Roggen at Røkeriet
didn’t excite with their arrangements of American jazz
classics, due primarily to Roggen’s stiff, almost-poppy
delivery rather than the work of the band, American
quartet Sexmob, celebrating their 20th anniversary and
the work of Italian composer Federico Fellini in
Sardinen, did their best to liven up the somewhatsedate
crowd with a patented mixture of bracing
groove, extemporaneous squawk and leader Steven
Bernstein’s Catskills humor.
Edvard Grieg, composer of Romantic-era classical
music, spent his life in Bergen, dying in 1907 at 64,
a giant despite his height of 5’1”. A short bus ride south
of Bergen center the next morning brought the Nutshell
program to his house/composing shack Troldhaugen.
As part of the museum on the site, an absolutely lovely
concert hall has been erected, with views of said shack
and the fjord behind it, hosting daily concerts and the
annual International Edvard Grieg Piano Competition.
Perhaps a bit far afield of Grieg’s own music, pianist
Svein Olav Herstad’s trio with bassist Magne
Thormodsæter and drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen
presented originals ranging from a burner that nearly
toppled over itself to a soft pastoral march taking full
advantage of the hall’s acoustics. Later that afternoon,
back in Bergen, it was up the nearly-century-old Fløyen
funicular’s 26-degree grade for absolutely spectacular
overhead views of the city and the solo trumpet and
electronics of Hilde Marie Holsen. Veering away from
the more apocalyptic sounds of a Peter Evans or Nate
Wooley, Holsen focused on delicacy and attention to
detail, even interacting with the birdsongs coming in
through the window.
At Nattjazz that evening, there was an emphasis
on the larger jazz world with the Polish/Norwegian
collaboration of violinist Adam Baldych with pianist
Helge Lien’s trio and Norwegian fusion group Red
Kite, both at Sardinen, and Danish trio The Firebirds at
Studio USF, playing the music of Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky. The Baldych/Lien band was mystical,
mixing Nordic strains with frenetic gypsy dances,
Baldych using his virtuosity to spur the rest of the
group to higher and higher levels of intensity from the
softest of openings. Red Kite’s guitar-bass-keys-drums
format had a similar approach but overegged the
pudding, becoming plodding funk or overamped
garage rock, not really impressing with its
musicianship. Neither was an issue for The Firebirds,
another in a long line of eclectic projects for drummer
Stefan Pasborg. Alongside saxophonist Anders Banke
and keyboard player Anders Filipsen, The Firebirds
invigorated already invigorating music with
intelligence, bold deconstructions and impossibly high
energy married to nearly mechanical tightness.
The final day brought your correspondent’s trip
full circle, beginning with a Nutshell showcase of
vocalist Mari Kvien Brunvoll and guitarist Stein
Urheim, one-third of the first night’s Voice & Strings &
Timpani, at the former women’s poorhouse Stranges
Stiftelse. There was glacial movement to the duet,
helped along by an array of effects pedals and
flirtatious melodies appearing out of and then
disappearing back into the mist.
Another highlight of Nattjazz also came from
Denmark in the form of the Carsten Dahl Experience at
Sardinen, featuring the caustic alto saxophone of Jesper
Zeuthen soaring over Dahl’s piano, Nils Bo Davidsen’s
bass and Pasborg once more. The music was a series of
loose, shifting structures in lengthy expositions,
abstract post-Bill Evans in one tune, free skronk in
another. It was perfectly conceived and executed. The
same cannot be said about Hardanger fiddler Erlend
Apneseth’s trio with guitar and drums at Studio USF.
There were very pretty moments, cinematic elegance,
fjord-worthy resonance and narrative flow. But the
25-year-old Apneseth needs some time to sort out all of
these influences into something more cohesive.
I’ll close with a confession about my wonderful time
in Bergen. I ate whale. It was delicious. I am ashamed. v
For more information, visit nattjazz.no
THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | JULY 2016 47