Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 11 January 2020
There is nothing better than kicking off a new concert season — a season of going out and catching shows close to home, and not in Ljubljana but in the magnificent Cerkno. At bar Gabrijel, among the “locals,” among people of extraordinary organisational talent who live and breathe for one another. That moment when you feel, among Slovenians, that desperately missed sense of solidarity — which in the rest of the country exists only as some utopian, mythical endemic creature that only the most feverish imagination could conjure up. And yet. In Cerkno it is real.
The 25th international festival of (good music) known as Keltika invited the Scandinavian — more precisely Norwegian — jazz outfit Cortex to Cerkno as its opening concert of the year. Cortex played Cerkno a while back, three years ago, as part of the Jazz Cerkno festival (Rockline review of the third festival day HERE), and trumpeter Thomas Johansson is himself quite a familiar face at bar Gabrijel — he performed here three years ago as well, with the Swedish jazz unit All Included (Rockline review of that concert HERE). Cortex are a breed apart, in the way that the Scandinavian approach to jazz is a breed apart. The group fuses influential elements of bebop and free jazz into a uniquely crafted musical conglomerate through an incredibly well-judged balancing act. The band is constantly, brilliantly comfortable in the role of a skilled tightrope walker between loose, open-ended passages that frequently peer toward the fields of the avant-garde — though still keeping a healthy distance from the kind of chaos that, say, the modern Chicago free-jazz school wears openly on its sleeve — and more lissenable, concise forms.
But let’s take it from the top. The opening slot of the evening belonged to a trio rooted in the school of Zlatko Kavčič, going by the name Durizzotto / Bajc / Furlan Trio. Three excellent young musicians with serious mileage and experience behind them. Clarissa Durizzotto on alto saxophone, for instance, performed with her group Maistah Aphrica at last year’s three-day Jazz Cerkno festival (Rockline review of the third festival day HERE); Gal Furlan collaborates with the Gorizia-based outfit Neseseri Kakalulu and has already released several solo albums; and Matjaž Bajc co-founded the ensemble Koromač from Vrtojba and plays with Brencl Banda, Acamar Trio, and others. Given the description of Cortex’s musical direction above, this up-and-coming trio actually set things up in stark contrast, bringing far more fury, racket, and an outright punk tornado to its jazz statement. The trio presented their debut album Spontaneous Clip, released last year on the Klopotec label, and in 40 minutes of playing convinced the room that this is a crew that communicates and listens to each other on stage with astonishing precision. You could feel the connection between them — the trio operates with tremendous cohesion and compactness, even if that compactness has to be sought within a decidedly freedom-loving improvisational looseness. Bajc, whom we last saw here as bassist with Brencl Banda (on a cold autumn-winter day in 2018 — Rockline review of that concert HERE), and also with Koromač (Jazz Cerkno 2019 festival — Rockline review of the second day HERE), this time only managed to set his cap aside before taking the stage — and from that point he was thrashing wildly on the double bass as if in a trance, so completely had he merged with the vibration of the group’s jazz mission. It was no surprise that in coaxing sounds out of the instrument he repeatedly ventured into wholly unconventional uses of the bass body itself, approaching this element with such intensity and passion that it sometimes looked as though he wanted to saw the double bass in half with his bow. We have seen this kind of approach with Jošt Drašler (Rockline review of his performance in Cerkno on 18 January 2019 HERE), who likewise draws out a wealth of sounds beyond the classic resonance of the strings, resorting to knocking on the entire body of the instrument and so on. Gal Furlan on drums later joined in on that element too. The trio speaks to you, as the telling album title suggests, very spontaneously. Loose structures serve as a handrail so the crew doesn’t “get lost” and maintains some kind of compass — yet all three building blocks mostly venture out into the vast ocean of boundless jazz improvisation, and in doing so they astonish not only with high technical polish but also with witty, inventive solutions and expressive sparks. An excellent opening warm-up, then, which delighted the sixty-strong crowd.
Cortex are a supremely seasoned quartet, made up of Thomas Johansson (trumpet), Kristoffer Berre Alberts (tenor saxophone), Ola Høyer (double bass), and Dag Erik Knedal Andersen (drums). The band was formed in 2007, and its members have collaborated — or continue to collaborate — with other well-known Scandinavian outfits, including All Included, Paal Nilssen-Love Large Unit, Bushman’s Revenge, Zanussi 5, Friends & Neighbors, Honest John, and The Heat Death. The quartet draws its inspiration from the work and spirit of the legendary quartet that featured Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.
And sure enough. Those who were still riding the high of the opening group’s set were already asking, before the Cortex concert was even over: “Did they actually play anything faster?” In truth, the opening and closing sections of the Cortex set (before the mandatory encore) — which ran for a good hour — were of a more up-tempo nature, but it is striking, when you listen to Cortex, just how many calm and subtle passages are woven into the architecture of their jazz compositions. The structure of each piece is clear, and the quartet follows a strict red thread throughout, which holds the tracks together as a coherent whole. At the same time they still carve out a concrete amount of space for vivid improvisational interludes, in which trumpeter Thomas Johansson and his tenor-saxophone companion Kristoffer Berre Alberts naturally take the lead. It was a joy to watch those sudden switches between sections of compositions — sections that demand not only full concentration but also an abundance of sophisticated elasticity and smoothness, alongside the contrasting passages that required the players to shift into a higher-adrenaline gear while still delivering a palpable measure of lucidity.
The quartet reads each other phenomenally, and there are clearly no secrets between the members of this crew. In the final stretch, the industrious double bassist Ola Høyer and drummer Dag Erik Knedal Andersen also came into their own — the latter’s refinement practically demanded that he take an extended solo excursion within one of the evening’s pieces. The band played mostly material from their forthcoming new studio album. Alongside the bravura performance, Cortex radiated a great deal of ease and playful good humour — something that accompanies many of their Scandinavian compatriots in their approach to modern jazz (just skim through the track titles and see how much reconciliatory wit sits at the collision of imagination and dark humour). The band’s likability was further boosted by the charming, ongoing introductions of each piece between songs, handled by Thomas Johansson. The quartet also won the crowd over with a sense that they were genuinely, incredibly grateful for the invitation to play this concert — a modest yet proud bearing, and above all an evident capacity to enjoy their own performance to the fullest and channel all those positive vibrations straight to an audience that felt every bit of it, signalling as much with near-constant applause.
The band had already stunned on their appearance three years ago during the third day of the Jazz Cerkno festival, with their free-wheeling kinetics that walk perfectly and with feather-light ease along the thin dividing line between the clear structure of individual pieces and those vivid, fully tangible bursts of improvisational mischief drawn from the wit of free-jazz “rules” (and above those rules) — and they have now confirmed that performance brilliance once again. Unique originals, just the right amount of “free-jazz unhinged” and just the right amount of “bebop accessible” for a comfortable listen, they wowed, seduced, charmed, and enchanted the Cerkno audience all over again on this return visit!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
