Its been a little while since we filled these pages with insights from LOFT, brought to you by our trusty live blogger Lutz - so here’s a view from the outside. Ulrich Kurth wrote this piece for the Frankfurter Rundschau, here’s our translation.
Inner Mogolia is not a real place but rather a vision, somewhat like the mythical Shambhala. The saxophonist Hayden Chisholm invited old and new companions on his musical journey- all part of his “Plushmusic2” festival in which they came together to create imaginary and poetic spaces. Chisholm came with new compositions in which he packed the musical strengths of different music cultures. His theme is the development of artist forms through the play-off between composed and improvised elements. Gareth Lubbe plays solo Viola in the Gewandthaus Orchestra, BJ Cole plays pop productions with Sting and Bjoerk, Nils Wogram’s trombone style is now an accredited style studied at universities. Xu Fengxia has opened her traditional Chinese repertoire for cross-over work, cellist Adrian Brendel is a soloist and chamber musician who plays in all the big halls. The line up aroused high expectations.
The artistic idea of the Plushmusic community comes from the experience of the musicians who create new possibilities between the traditional boundaries separating “serious” music and improvised forms. One cannot simply mix these anyhow in a wanton cross-over, but when creative musicians from differing genres gradually and carefully approach each other with open ears then something new can happen.
For this one first needs to find an alternative place. In Plush this is an old village church, in Cologne it is the LOFT, a music studio and concert room which is mainly used for new and improvised music. Adrian Brendel, the founder of the chamber music festival in the village of Plush in Dorset, showed how it could be done. In Cologne he played scintillating versions of Kurtag and Saariaho. He improvised with Simon Nabatov over song fragments by Birtwistle and he premiered Chisholm’s work “Critical Mass” with Lubbe, Chisholm, and Nabatov. One hour later he improvised in one of the “wildcards”.
On this first evening Chisholm presented two blues inspired suites. One of his bases lies within the impressive nature in Kansas which inspired him to write “To the heart of Kansas”. In melodies loaded with Blues turns he revealed his America behind the huge advertisments. Lubbe played in this set an instrument from the beginning of last century, a trumpet violin, sounding sometimes like a hurdy gurdy. BJ Cole searches for the roots of his instrument without resorting to the all too familiar clichés of the Hawaiian guitar.
Chisholm’s texts divide the sentence. He speaks of a grape under whose transparent skin he discovers a tiny Kansas with a mysterious silver moon. alone with the sound of his voice he is a beguiling storyteller of symbolic tales, evoking the past. It is an atmosphere that Lubbe and Cole support masterfully. In this way a musical story is constructed using free improvisation and with continuous tension for over half an hour - a trilogy in which Chisholm’s alto saxophone sometimes takes on the role of the narrator. The score allows for such freedom of narration.
“Odessa Blues Suite” produces very different somd worlds, written by Chisholm during a cold winter on the Black Sea. The Blues seems closer here with ironic honky tonk passages and heavy grooves. It is a suite with many parts and small windows of fine, microtonal sequences, rock guitar phrases, and a dense interplay between Nabatov and Cole, who send each other reworked melody fragments back and forth.
The third night of music offered music of the highest level, with vastly differing attitudes, from concentrating on the written material to passionate improvisation. On the final evening we arrived at “Voyage to the inner Mongolia”. Chisholm and Lubbe encountered many years ago masters of asian overtone singing on their travels. They were delighted with the singer Xu Fengxia, who corrected any false expectations with her improvisations around the “Chinese Blues”. Filled with joy and humour, the three musicians captured their Shambhala, a mythical place of extravagant fantasies and a wide breadth of emotion.”
