Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kamnik / Grad Zaprce / Slovenia
Concert date: August 18, 2016
Attendance: 20
Ticket price: €0.00 (free admission)
Dre Hočevar is an incredibly prolific jazz creator, and the international scene, in the terminological passion play of the elusive free jazz format, is getting to know him better and better. And, as a result, appreciating him more and more. The Slovenian musician, who is based in New York, is at heart a drummer and percussionist, and he plans to release his new studio effort, »Transcendental Within the Sphere of Indivisible Remainder«, this November. The man who presented himself at this year’s Jazz Cerkno festival with a trio called Transitory Museum of Minds, that is, in the company of saxophonist Michael Wroblewski and keyboardist Christian Balvig, this time called up guitarist Domen Gnezda and saxophonist Cene Resnik for Dre Hočevar Trio. Some of you may still remember the latter’s name from the days when he played on the early stretch of Siddharta’s career.
Quiet, humble, free, and heartfelt! At ten in the evening. At Grad Zaprce. In Kamnik. As part of this year’s Kamfest. The right music for just the right ambiance. In front of a gathered audience of twenty listeners. Dre, together with Domen and Cene, played just two compositions, but the show still stretched to a good hour of playing. And what playing it was.
Hočevar acts as the initiator of the basic musical forms, and with barely perceptible, extremely loosened connective tissue he somehow steers the impulses of three musicians into coexistence within a musical body that shines with a fully freewheeling fusion of ideas, built from free jazz forms that can’t be directed in advance, let alone predicted. Intuition, sensory mindfulness, and really just intuitive responsiveness. All the way through, in an incredible blend of mutual listening and following among the three players. The way they complemented each other was exceptional. Dre repeatedly took off his cymbals and laid them »upside down« on the snare and the kettle, coaxing additional sounds out of the »newly created instrument«, sounds of experimental »weirdness«, or let’s rather call it freewheeling spirit, which doesn’t take well to being boxed into set musical forms and much prefers to keep uncovering uncharted musical horizons. As always, this gathering was a completely unique musical experience, a unique interaction between audience and band. Unrepeatable. What it turns out to be is decided by a free flow of energy that gets channeled through the castle ambiance of Zaprce, through a dozen music lovers in attendance, and which the trio intuitively transforms, in the glow of an absolutely spontaneous response, into a one-of-a-kind piece of musical reading. Loosened, frayed forms, in which the search for higher degrees of musicality (what the rational way of consuming music, the one we’re used to, would consciously like) is a kind of total utopia, bordered on the brink of chaos, yet despite all the generally crackling musical madness, or (to soften the expression) provocative weirdness, or bizarreness, and the dominance of experimental provocation, it was precisely in this strangeness that it completely captivated and enchanted me. Domen Gnezda also repeatedly leaned on a delay effect and on memorizing phrases, which he used to build a soundscape woven from several sonic pastels, a gathering of the most unusual sounds you could expect from the invention known as the electric guitar.
Toward the end of the set the band developed an incredible degree of softness, playing quieter and quieter with each round, right at the edge of audibility, as when, for example, the work of Cene Resnik’s hands and his blowing into the saxophone was drowned out by the instrument’s own resulting response. With adventurous experimenting, Hočevar showed the ways the drums can be exploited and everything that can be coaxed out of this instrument. Even by striking the frame of the drums or the cymbals with gentle thrusts of bare hands. Jazz in the finest manner of absolute freedom, without a speck of holding back in the transformation of the moment’s energy, which the trio’s musical body conveys. Only on this evening and never again. The next performance will be a completely different story and a new musical adventure, or experience. Dre Hočevar puts the audience and the performer on equal footing. He puts an equals sign between them. Hočevar is clear that he, too, is constantly learning from the vibrations the audience sets off in the concert space, so at the end of the show he thanked the audience for the experience, warmly and sincerely.
A good hour flew by in an instant. Plenty of people simply meditated in their seats, slipped into a hypnotic state beyond the logical empiricism to which the workings of our consciousness are otherwise subject, and rode off into the parallel world created by the trio’s music. In its unique musical format, Dre Hočevar Trio served up true musical voluptuousness, through a fold-out brochure of a free jazz story, delighting a dozen real music gourmets who made their way to Grad Zaprce that evening for a genuinely weighty reason. And, of course, got exactly what they came for.
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