The sweetest melodies

Now that was amazing. Brilliant. If awesome would still mean anything, that would be the word. I’m sitting here pointing at something that is too great for words, making funny noises. I’m still in shock.

This was one of the side events, therefore unfortunately unstreamed, a trio of Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, and Ken Vandermark at the protestant church here. Let me get this straight, if I saw Vandermark as a weak link yesterday with the tentet, here he was every bit as good as his cohorts. He gave us beats and crazy double arpeggios (don’t ask me how you do that, some kind of overblowing involved), he often seemed like a complete backing band, circularly breathing textures, while Gustafsson went in search for the deepest growl hidden in his baritone, and like yesterday, there were plenty of ghost harmonies under the vaults.

Brötzmann started out on something that looked like a clarinet but sounded like an alto in need of some cough syrup. This must have been his fabled tarogato, and I’m glad he used it, because there are two things you simply have to mention whenever you write about Brötz today, and that is the tarogato and the fact that the old firebrand has become surprisingly … wait! It’s actually true. I don’t know what it was, maybe the stompbox built into his instrument broke down, but I swear he did his best Johnny Hodges emulation. When he was filing at his reed during the first track, I thought he would be roughening up his sound, but no, he played the sweetest melodies. Intermittently that is, then he tore up his sax in mid-flight.

Gustaffson probably didn’t play a single lick or line during the whole concert, he went for deep, cavernous sound, grounding the whole thing. His bari sounded so big they would have to build an extra aisle or two to make it comfortable. Plus he must have a whole jungle of ferocious beasts hidden somwhere in the bell of the instrument.

More than in the tentet, they were free to create spontaneous structures. Such intelligence, and freedom, and wildness, and tenderness. I’ve already written too much, I will now go back to pointing at the thing in amazement, stammering.

Floored, Lutz

The shadow of the girl on the flying trapeze

Oh, and I just notice I have a picture which sort of shows what Paolo Angeli was after yesterday. I listened in on an interview he did later, and he’s quite serious about wanting to enchant us all, about the spiritual background, and the fact that everybody involved is friends or family. Here he’s contemplating the shadow of the girl on the flying trapeze.

The middle of the road

Toshi Reagon & BigLovely. Before I start bitching again, let me quote a tech who shall remain anonymous: “This music lacks any kind of character. I don’t know, the main acts are quite weak somehow.” Amen to that. Everybody had fun, though.

Campfire music

We had advance warning. Bill Frisell and Arve Henrikson had never ever played together, not in public, and not even in a practice room. They blithely took the stage and drove the first number against a tree firmly.

What they did with the wreck of that was not exactly great music, but their attempt to make something work, and above all, to entertain the audience, was so honest and likeable, that it made you smile anyway. Henrikson mostly took the lead, he had canned atmospheres on his laptop, which helped the duo going until sombedy stumbled over a riff or something that would keep proceedings moving. Between the computer, stuff to augment the trumpet with (effects or a sax mouthpiece), and his surprisingly good vocals, Henriksen had quite an arsenal at his disposal to keep us all in a good mood, and for the finale he organised the least cringe-inducing singalong I ever croaked to. Frisell mostly just sat there, enjoyed the show and played some country licks.

I think these must be very nice people. Such warmth exuding from the stage. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now as the encore. Campfire music.

Orotund sonorities

This is the second time today I see Paolo Angeli. He’s in completely different mode now, hammering out bass notes (on the one) while elegiacally bowing his Sardinian guitar (think an acoustic Sigur Rós). He’s accompanied by Takumi Fukushima on viola and very grungy vocals and Ganesh Anandan on frame drum and whistling. They do some kind of faux folk laced with lazy soundtrack muzak.

Sponde di Passione the project is called (Shores of Passion? that would be a perfect fit, but don’t trust me, I have no Italian). It’s quite the multimedia event, we have slides of catholic rituals, we have a light show, we even have a girl on the flying trapeze.

The music is slight, though. Oh no, now the guy even starts crooning. Orotund is a word that springs to mind … I’m back with the techs, watching a silent screen until the danger is over. As you can see, it ain’t over yet.

Ghost voices

So. What can I say. He came, saw, and delivered. And, one has to add, he looks really good. That was the first thing I thought, what a beautiful man.

It’s become sort of a critical trope to stress that the old firebrand these days also plays surprisingly tender passages. (Which is not really surprising if you’ve heard Schwarzwaldfahrt from 1977 with Han Bennink. Hey, I think it’s out again, you absolutely need to buy that one, and then something by Last Exit, let’s say the eponymous debut. Where was I?) I’m not sure if I would put it thus, I’d say the Chicago Tentet does the Pixies-loud-quiet-loud thing. They begin with a fanfare to the warriors that leaves one with ears burning, then move into a slow trombone choir before stuff explodes again. They make an unholy din, it’s beautiful.

Brötzmann is very strong. Gustaffson is a great team player. It’s interesting, he has a reputation for testosterone-filled playing, but he cries like shot deer. Solely as if to vent, while Brötzmann’s skronk always is musical. McPhee plays beautifully. I wouldn’t need any solo space for Bishop or Vandermark, the latter honking like a texas tenor with a stammer, but he gets standing ovations for that. Suddenly a nicely pastiche Arabian Nights setpiece with Brötzmann on clarinet. Before the thing explodes again.

What’s so beautiful about these totally wild collective improvisations is that you start hearing stuff that maybe is not there. It becomes more than just skronk, there appear ghost harmonies and ghost voices. Deeply satisfying.

It’s kind of amazing that this music nowadays is plain good fun. “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” somebody in the audience cried out.

The pic is of Brötz practising poses for a Blue Note cover.

A lifetime of tinnitus

I have a confession to make. I didn’t go see Grubenklang, although with Frank Gratkowski they had a true Plush artist in their midst. How can you ever forgive me. Instead I went to the Concerts in the Dark series because I wanted to hear John Wall. Definitely worth it.

He began with waveforms crashing on a digital shore. (This is pure computer music, where Wall improvises with prepared chunks of sound.) And I really mean crashing, this was rather loud for the tiny room. Unbelievable detail in the smears and tears of pixels, sounds gnawing their hearts out from within. After a while (and maybe helped by the fact that we were surrounded by 6 speakers so everything constantly changed position) I couldn’t help projecting a narrative into the noise. TVs were thrown out of windows. Lions ripped their prey apart. Galopping horses changed to machine gun fire in mid-gallop (that was sort of the refrain, it came up now and again). Hitchcock’s birds returned as mutant zombies. More and more, intolerably high notes crept up, like a lifetime of tinnitus rolled into this short cozy afternoon session. After 15 minutes, somewhere in mid-development, Wall just yanked the sound and mumbled something like “that will be enough.”

Pretty annoying, pretty cool. That’s him you can see at the laptop if you really strain yor eyes.

The second set was by Manu Holterbach. He began with field recordings from a forest in the Netherlands (you know, I have that kind of ear). To my right a brook was murmuring. Birds everywhere, it sounded like an invasion of song. A dog yelping. I am no fan of dogs. I don’t know, it was too active for me. There were two or three forests layered on top of each other. In the background, a smallish drone like from a harmonica. Then the only nice moment, when the whole environment slowly got eaten by computer glitches and static, but it was not brought to a logical conclusion, and we were back again with in your face pastoralism. The second track sampled birds from the Guadeloupe rainforest (I told you, I have that kind of ear) in a stammering loop, accompanied by the same three chords on a keyboard over and over. Holterbach did nothing but press play. Pretty boring.

The last set was from Jonathan Coleclough. In an unfortunate move, he began with another brook. I felt my heart sink into its shallow waters. As if to mock me, there were resonances from another harmonica. Do they all use the same patch? Luckily, things began to change, became more pointillistic. Little gongs, pings and tuned clicks and crackles. The harmonica changed to sitar-like drones, which now and then vanished into computer feedback. The brook slowly faded, thank god. When it was gone, the music was quite nice, digital temple music. The structure followed the Beethoven mode, ten minutes of exposition, ten minutes of fake endings … then for the real ending he held a nice, complex chord. Conciliatory finish to a mixed concert.

The Teufelsgeiger mode

Paolo Angeli’s modified Sardinian guitar is a thing of beauty. It has the head of a violin rammed into its guitar head, carrying a set of slack strings that lead to a double bass bridge glued unto the body right above the endpin of a cello. It has five footpedals that trigger metal claws which beat on the strings. It has a little motored ventilator inside which plucks at the strings in an ostinato. The whole thing seems so much extended techniques objectified that it comes as a shock, ten minutes into the concert, that one can actually play the thing. You know, it’s a musical instrument.

This was a duo with Jon Rose in the protestant church here. Very nice atmosphere, but if you now expect to read that they explored the resonances, ‘tis not so. They played a lot. Especially Rose (unsurprisingly, for those of you who know him) was all over the place. The centerpiece fittingly was a Rose solo and had him in his most unforgiving Teufelsgeiger mode.

Since they both went through their catalog of moves so quickly (Angeli threw crocodile clips all over the place), by the third track rote repetition had set in. Until the tantalising outro which was just toneless scraping noises coming and going in overlapping cycles and by far the best moment of the concert.

There were lots of notes harmed in the making of this music.

Pop acts

Wait. Let me get back to the Miss Platnum show I copped out of yesterday. She does pop with a heavily Balkan tinge. My difficulty with this is: I have seen Fanfare Ciocarlia. They take no prisoners. Their music is wild and woolly, but still they have no problem with a mainstream audience, on the contrary, even uptight folks like me start shaking their booty. Their kind of music has nothing to gain from being translated into a pop act. So it’s all about that pop act gaining some recognisability. It’s no more than a shtick, even if Miss Platnum was born in Romania. She has the reputation of being a good live act, but that just depends on her repetition of all the trappings that come with a stadium act on a mid-sized stage. We watch a choreography pummelled along by more than able musicians who probably keep their creativity for after-hours sessions. I find that so sad.

I’m telling you this, because Miss Platnum is from the Berlin scene, which I think I understand well enough to insinuate motives. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing the same to Dobet Gnahoré. She has huge stage presence. She plays in various African styles and sings in a handful of languages. Her band saves all creativity for another moment (and I don’t say that because they’re French, I once heard Amadou & Mariam backed by three French musicians in a little club, and it was one of my best concert experiences ever). The music aspires to the grand stage and it communicates at a remove, the immaculate execution of a gesture more important than the sound itself (which was pretty good).

But I must say, she had a well-oiled machinery on stage, there’s no denying that.

Maybe the stream was sufficient remove and you all just sat there bobbing your heads, wondering what I’m talking about. Or maybe we’d agree if only you could figure out what the hell I’m talking about. Oh my, comes with the words.

Good night, Lutz

Every move counts

That was good. How was that so good.

It was just Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, and a drummer named Rudy Royston having fun. They played a rock number, they played something from Mali (which I can’t point my finger to, though I have that song somewhere), they even played a jump tune where Frisell suddenly remembered a whole book of Charlie Christian licks. It didn’t come across as that eclectic, though. Partly that’s the very naked instrumentation, I guess, noone had a place to hide and everybody made every move count. Then it was the soundworld. Frisell can sometimes sound a little pat to these ears, here he had fun and really stepped on his pedals. Kang had pedals to match. Royston’s drumming was an invitation to freedom, he kept everything going whether anyone did anything or not.

I guess I fail here. On paper it doesn’t look that good. They had fun and they let their hair hang loose and that’s why it was pretty killer.

Only the second encore, when they played a country ditty with a sense of humor, confirmed to what you might suspect when you read this. Fact stays, this was a really great show.

Savour the note

Spectacular gig by the Steve Lehman Octet. I wish they would let up now and then.

This is the first time I see Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Spectacular. I wish he would let up now and then. (He has a nagging snare, I love that.) Will he play like that on his own gig?

I’m totally impressed. But I do think I’d prefer the record where I suspect they maybe will let up now and then and savour a note or so.

Strange objects

Ok, Carlo Mombelli and the Prisoners of Strange just wasn’t for me. Thick electric bass, mostly ostinati, now and then leaving that for jazz rock licks, over that some sub Jon Hassell trumpet sound (I’m not talking about the playing, I didn’t have sufficient patience to analyze that), plus the band’s only asset, Siya Makuzeni on trombone and vocals. Well, I can’t stand scat even if it’s Sarah Vaughan, so I jumped ship and went to the sidelines. (But, if you view the pic above, the strange, which the musicians felt prisoner to, are indeed slightly unsettling.)

Concerts in the Dark is a series that unfortunately overlaps with the program on the main stage. You get seated in the dusk, so you can still see the shadow of the guy who shifts position creakily across of you. Behind a partition, a musician is mixing you sounds in surround. Some pretty cool folk involved. I caught Thomas Köner’s set. Very suggestive, this would go well with the existing footage of Shackleton’s antarctic voyage in slomo.

Tomorrow they will have John Wall, so I guess I must leave you alone with a concert stream or so. Let’s see. Now, for Steve Lehman …

Sloppy alliances

Really nice set from trumpeter Sanne van Hek’s new group. (Ahm, if that sounds like I knew the name five minutes ago, I didn’t. She’s now composer in residence in Moers, no idea how heavy that is.) It began like a live emulation of trying out your new loopstation. The first layer was some crackle from a computer, then a few bass notes, trumpet and bari, piano, trumpet sampled from a second computer, clatter from the drums, ghost piano from a third computer, and somewhere towards the last third of that process we had overstepped saturation point and had entered repetitive chaos. That’s the worst kind of chaos, because it simulates order.

I’ve already talked about that intro much too long, because it was just a matter of a couple of minutes, then it turned out this was some kind of calibration process. Led by Onno Govaert on drums’ meticulous punctuation (and hey, I work as a copy editor, so I know about that) the whole ensemble sought and found a sort of semi-abstract state of mutual distraction, where it was always possible that players would form sloppy alliances, but mostly everybody talked to themselves openmindedly. If that sounds like a backhander, no, I thought it was great. Then slowly they moved towards a lazy arpeggio and ended sort of on the same stage.

The second track was held together by the fact that each player now and then chose a single note from their flow of things and rang it out bell-like. While everybody mumbled to themselves. This kind of thing depends on every player’s reticence, if somebody starts to go the easy way and make too much sense, the whole effort crumbles. But nobody did that after the initial calibration process.

Again, this set benefited from the amplification, which added a sort of psychedelic layer, it was easy to immerse oneself into the many-minded music.

Having fun, Lutz

Don’t hear me

I sure am a mean bastard. These guys are all in their early 20s. They have a funny name: Super Seaweed Sex Scandal. Now if everybody in their early 20s were in such a band the world would be a better place. They have quite smart compositions. They know all the moves, they can do the skronk, they can do the half contemporary classical, they can do the back and forth aacm-style, they can do music you would want to ride a skateboard to, they can do chorales, and they can do a bee swarm. They can do silly beats to bang your head to. But they leave me depressed.

Ok. Their myspage pace says they met on the scene around The Stone, so there’s that John Zorn connection. That wasn’t too hard to guess. So let me hasten to add that I once saw Naked City, and they deeply depressed me too, because there was this huge amount of talent on stage and they all were made to just function. Like a splendid piece of high tech machinery. A classical concert was an exercise in anarchy compared to that. And that’s also what depresses me here: there’s just no freedom on stage. (Though they sure become fidgety behind the bars.)

Don’t hear me, I’m jaded. Besides Zorn, I used to listen to stuff like Dr. Nerve or Curlew in the 1980s. They can do all that (what did you think?) and better, and they’re still so young … Oh, and the crowd is happy!

For the die-hard fans

(pun intended): Miss Platnum.