Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Star plac / Slovenia
Concert date: May 19, 2017
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: €17.50 (presale) / €20.00 (day of the festival)
The second day of the traditional, and by now 22nd consecutive, Jazz Cerkno festival went down as the most experimentally challenging one, the kind that encourages the “growth of brain lettuce”, provided you haven’t managed to fully chill out beforehand, open your “third eye” and get properly primed for the message-heavy, especially complex “shrapnel” of free-spirited jazz culture.
Just like the day before, the second day got going with a half-hour delay. Around eight in the evening, Šalter Ensemble took the stage. It’s an international twelve-piece project built on the compositional vision of its four core members: Swiss-French saxophonist Bertrand Denzler, Slovenian double bassist Tomaž Grom, Croatian bassist Rok Crnić and Serbian guitarist Srđan Muc. Eight more players from the international music scene (including, of course, Slovenia) joined the core four, most of them a good fit for the demands of the project’s musical vision. The crew is incredibly young by birth certificate, with just two gigs behind them (counting the dress rehearsal in Zagreb on May 6, 2017), so the composing wing of the orchestra, meaning Crnić, Muc, Grom and Denzler, picked seasoned »hired guns« who can react fast to the very loose binding material of the writing, on which four demanding compositions are built. Those are what the crew plays at its shows. In just five days they brought the music from a basic idea to life. That is, all the way to realization on stage. Musically, the whole thing flirts with the edge of musical reconciliation, in its bold and carefree bursts of experimentation still acceptable to the average listener, if at all. Usually the musicians are grouped into triads within the twelve-strong crew and pass strings of played notes around in circles. The notes are mostly played so that the music keeps a basic balance between runs of medium-length tones and the “silences” in between. The band never veers into solo escalations, nor does it get stuck in longer pauses where “silence would do the playing” for them. The whole thing reacts in spontaneous consonance, even though there are certain rules of the game within the loose format of the compositions, and along the way it picks the weirdest sonic tricks that only a lush human imagination can produce. Instruments and vocal techniques are used in an entirely unconventional way. Frenetic, piercing screams (the main instigator of the vocal excesses being none other than Irena Tomažin) are what you can only wish for next to the atonal dimensioning of the sound structures. And there they were. Straight out of a horror-movie soundtrack. A daring experiment in provocative new musical »blasphemy« that, right in the opening slot of Friday night, the festival’s second day, and even though the show didn’t last a full hour, handed the audience something tough to gnaw on.
Ches Smith (drums), Craig Taborn (keyboards), Mat Maneri (viola), an American jazz trio, took over the stage next. The main driving force and musical visionary of this trio is Ches Smith. A drummer who has already shown off his mastery over a career on numerous albums by all sorts of artists (Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, Xiu Xiu, Secret Chiefs 3,…). In the new trio, though, given the considerable noisiness and rudimentary directness that marked most of his past drumming deeds, what surprises is a newfound creativity that swears first and foremost by soaring chains of motivic structures. Structures like that can also speak in a minimalist, utterly serene and soft way. In that sense, the pairing of viola and classical piano is actually a natural choice for Ches Smith. Smith set his sticks down several times and swapped them for brushes, and he often built the backdrop purely on cymbals and tapping on the drum shells. The trio is incredibly experienced and knows every trick in the book, with the flow between all three building blocks deftly balanced, and nobody in the band takes the lead, or rather it’s shared equally among the three. A dynamic interplay carefully dosed with just the right amount of daring escapes into improvisational feats and moments of subtle fine-tuned mechanics. A band armed to the teeth with primal instinct and incredible chemistry of mutual awareness. They communicated as if in a trance, in a performance that demanded the listeners’ full concentration, yet never strayed from the red thread. The guarantee of that is, of course, a high-quality dose of virtuosic skill, which all three instrumentalists deliver to this story in abundance.
Third and last on the second day’s bill was Red Trio! The Portuguese “red trio” is known for liking to host other performers at its shows, and for the Cerkno gig they invited the eclectic Finnish guitar wizard Raoul Björkenheim to join in. He already appeared in Cerkno years ago with the band Scorch. The trio plus Raoul, so a quartet, unleashed by far the biggest rush of adrenaline into the room that evening, through a bold, almost forceful and at times downright aggressive ride of hellishly fast-paced steps of free-spinning jazz improvisation, enchanting music gourmets with a wide palette of musical vocabulary and an incredibly loose formatting of musical structures, which they kept sparklingly “shaking up” with adventures in soloing skill. Mostly on the keyboards and drums (percussion) axis, and the special charm, as far as improvising with sound goes, was of course the excellent Raoul Björkenheim on his Parker guitar from the Fly series. A similar guitar is used by, say, a former member of the great sonic and musical innovators King Crimson, so yet another no-less-eclectic musical oddball! That’s Adrian Bellew. A procession of incredibly intensely played macramé of demanding jazz variations, contemplative sensuality and a feel for the building blocks of musical substance! Hand in hand. The combination of both confirmed the excellence of all four musicians. On the verge of primal instinct! Throughout, the band made sure not to fall apart in the musical forms. Whenever it came close to that fragmentation of structures, whenever the character drove it to the edge of chaos and it swung into the bosom of boundless solo indulgence, it also managed to hold on to concision and thoughtfulness and to “resolve” the apparent musical impasse by always deftly wriggling out of it at the (last possible) moment and returning with great success to the safe haven of the leading musical motifs. A masterpiece and an indescribable treat, crowning the mission of the second day of Jazz Cerkno with a grand finale!
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