Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Glasbena šola / Slovenia
Concert date: 20.05.2017
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €8.00
The last day of the 22nd Jazz Cerkno festival arrived under the sign of an unwelcome weather mishap. Really just one, but a big one: loads of rain. From early morning and on through nearly the whole damn day. After a hearty lunch, cooked up by the deft and resourceful culinary hand of Dario Cortese, which we washed down with rounds of Stiegl wheat beer for a better blood count and some grounding, and topped off with a sturdy shot of savory schnapps (common calamint, lat. Calamintha menthifolia), where else but at Cerkno’s home base, the Gabrijel bar, it was time to head over to the music school. A short stroll, then. The clock was about to strike five in the afternoon. That’s where a duo with an intriguing reputation had announced their set: guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Despite the surnames, both are US citizens. Mary is regarded as a special kind of guitarist who has been developing a style all her own. In a distinctive, singular way, she has fused jazz elements with neoclassicism into an eclectic musical blend. She’s a highly sought-after guitarist, though she works mostly with Marc Ribot on his projects and in his lineups. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara is constantly busy with all sorts of projects, but he’s best known for his rock-solid collaboration with trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum.
The venue was nicely packed. An hour of musical delights from a truly unique expressive lineage was on the cards. And that’s exactly what we got. Mary Halvorson plays a specially modified guitar with a device built into the edge of the body that’s reminiscent of a Floyd Rose. Behind the bridge, the strings run all the way to the edge of the body and are clamped into this device. When she brushes the strings with her palm, they bend, the sound warps, and Mary magnifies the effect by working a bunch of effects pedals at the same time, wah-wah included. She’s surrounded by pedals, and she makes generous use of echo delay too. Mary played her own compositions, at times spinning out an incredibly rich harmonic web, and still found time to dutifully read the sheet music. Her style is truly something else. At first glance you’d think she “escaped” from Fripp’s school of guitar. Her atonal forms occasionally recall the melos Robert Fripp brings to his creations, and the artistry of the mighty King Crimson naturally doesn’t slip away either, so we’re talking about an eclectic mix of jazz elements and neoclassical figures. That’s why a note of musicality and compact motivic forms is ever-present. No fragmentation here! Mary also often leans on sequences of open-ringing chords to build an intriguing musicality, pleasantly surprising thanks to the occasional atonal resolution.
In all this interplay, Tomas Fujiwara found an enormous amount of room for a full-blooded implantation of varied tunes and tricks, with boundless improvisational ideas on the drums. Always on the lookout, he also showed himself to be an extremely refined musician, able to adapt with incredible softness to the leading expressive forms of the music composed by Halvorson. The encounter with the two musicians was short and sweet. It was over before it began, that’s how gripping a musical experience they delivered.
The show was followed by thunderous applause and a general excitement that just wouldn’t die down. The duo came back for the obligatory encore and then said their final goodbye. But only until around half past nine that evening, since Tomas Fujiwara and Mary Halvorson make up half of the Tomeka Reid Quartet, so we crossed paths with both musicians once more later that same day. In slightly different roles.
Next came a look at the photo exhibition by Žiga Koritnik, which Žiga himself led us through, “head and beard” in person, on the first floor of the music school. After that came the long-awaited assault on the festival grounds. But what do you know. Concert sound was drifting over from the direction of the hotel. Somebody was already playing. The clock was creeping dangerously toward seven in the evening, in fact it had already struck past seven. In the hotel foyer, right by the roofed entrance, Neseseri Kakalulu were performing. The bad weather had driven them there. But that’s material for the next report, which also covers the concert action in the program of the festival’s third day.
Photo gallery
