Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno Bar Gabrijel / Slovenia
Concert date: 30.10.2016
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry)
Finally, another trip to Cerkno and its famous bar “Pr’ Gabrijel”. A fresh free-jazz session, pretty much the first since the three-day May storm, when the legendary Jazz Cerkno festival ruled the town. So. The destination is familiar. The old faces are there too, what I’d call the »bar furniture«, without whom no gig in Cerkno and that famous bar is complete.
This time they stopped by on their Made To Break tour. A brand-new international formation, really, but one with the name of Chicago’s master of the winds, reed player Ken Vandermark, behind it. A musician who has already played in Cerkno, and elsewhere in Slovenia too, including with The Ex. When you’re a musician of Ken Vandermark’s caliber, templates and molds quickly turn into limits. The man has always been drawn to musical excess, the so-called wonders of boundless, free-spirited experimentation that we usually lump under the label »avant-garde«, and he’s known for »networking« with artists of a similar musical vision who are scattered around the planet. So, not that long ago, well okay, back in 2011, he teamed up in the quartet »Made To Break«, which also includes Dutch bassist Jasper Stadhouders, Austrian »electronist« Christof Kurzmann, and his American countryman, also from Chicago, drummer Tim Daisy.
In a set of barely an hour, the band presented its fourth studio album »Before the Code«, released last year. And the gig ended before it had properly started. Or to put it another way, it wrapped up just as people had melted nicely into the free-spinning, free-jazz culture that Made To Break cultivate. A kind of culmination of the four players’ individual contributions to this musical body, where Vandermark kept an eye on things, but most of the time the show’s attention was “stolen” by the exchange of solo excesses between Daisy, Stadhouders and of course Vandermark. Stadhouders impressed with his Rickenbacker bass guitar, which he scraped with a metal object, coaxing out a “swollen,” stigmatized clang that at times almost recalled the howl of a lathe, with solos that now and then flirted sonically, almost by stealth, with elements of punk and hardcore, even though it was a full-blooded dose of improvisation. The same goes for Vandermark, a typical representative of the Chicago school of free jazz, as he switched between saxophone and clarinet and back again. Daisy, as expected, while keeping up a conventional jazz rhythm on the drums, used all sorts of gadgets in his solo spots, which he probably swiped from grandma’s pantry before leaving on tour, constantly trading them off with his sticks. Daisy coaxed all kinds of sonic pastels out of the whole drum kit. The fourth member, the “jolly good fellow” Christof Kurzmann, filled the whole sound structure from his “Apple” laptop with the most wrecked electronic sounds, which at times also recalled the pioneering days of primitive sounds like those built into the first personal computers, led by the ZX Spectrum, Commodore models and so on… At moments the man coaxed nothing but a random drone out of his “software toy,” warping the frequency on a chosen tone without trying to build a melody from multiple notes. The band opened and closed every track with a worked-out motif, but spent most of the time indulging in the pleasures of free-jazz improvisation.
Just when you start thinking it’s time for another beer, since the band will take a twenty-minute break, Vandermark proves you wrong after barely an hour of playing by announcing the final song. And that’s that. A short but sweet affair as part of the twenty-first edition of the Keltika festival, which traditionally takes place at Bar Gabrijel. So. On 26.11.2016, Austria’s “alter-shalter” outfit Hella Comet will play here, followed on 23.12.2016 by the celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the bar »Pr’ Gabrijel«, where the organizers’ staff promise a special concert surprise. If not sooner, we’ll meet there again before Christmas.
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