Location: Cerkno / Stari plac / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 05/21/2016
The third and final day of the traditional 21st jazz festival in Cerkno was a lively one from the morning on. The side program kicked off with a hike for the “hungry” in the company of Dario Corstese, who walked a select few through some sly food superstitions, from which the participants, as always, once again emerged happily alive. Meanwhile, Boštjan Gombač (Katalena) and Blaž Celarec ran a workshop teaching kids about clay instruments, wrapping up with a joint concert where the whole gang tried out their clay instruments on the main stage of the old square. In the afternoon, Joe McPhee and Daunik Lazro (Pourtant Les Cimes) played at the school, two saxophonists from two different worlds of jazz who no doubt served up some real concert bliss. Sadly, the author of this piece missed that one, since the brain’s processor needed a bit of a breather from all the wild partying so it could function properly when the first band hit the main stage on the festival’s third day: the totally bonkers avant-trio Transitory Museum of Minds.
This is a group made up of three musicians from three very different winds of musical rough-hewnness: Slovenian drummer and percussionist Dre Hočevar, who is based in New York, saxophonist Michael Wroblewski and keyboardist Christian Balvig. Hočevar picked this trio to stand alongside him last year, and this very show was even supposed to be recorded for a potential album release. It hardly needs saying that the trio served up a strange, even unusual and brazenly provocative musical puzzle. Christian Balvig grabbed the attention first and foremost. With an electronic sound “toy” (some kind of “sequencer”) he coaxed out a whole parade of the most unusual, at times downright old-school (“new wave”) sounds, and with his “artificial” sound manipulation he literally cracked people up with its lucid ring whenever he joined in with the sax and percussion. Balvig grimaced so passionately as he cranked and twisted the knobs, now and then jumping over to jerky hits on the piano, that his faces, together with the sounds, only amplified the trio’s lucid character. A fun combination that breathes and plays for the moment of inspiration, on the principle of transforming the current “provocation” of inner feelings, which coaxes a unique musical story out of them, one the trio follows and gives itself over to in free-flowing fashion.
Universal Indians with Joe McPhee is no less of a brilliant combination! Universal Indians is a trio built around two Norwegian musicians, Tollef Ostvang (drums) and Rune Strom (double bass), whom we got to see on 04/16/2016 in this very same Cerkno, at the local Bar Gabrijel, when they played with the All Included lineup. The trio is rounded out by American saxophonist John Dikeman. And so that things wouldn’t be too “simple,” for a few years now the trio has also been playing alongside the veteran and, to a good extent, jazz oddball if not innovator, saxophonist Joe McPhee. As mentioned, he had already played in Cerkno earlier that day, but the guy, who is a not-so-modest 77 years old, no less, is clearly still kicking like crazy. The quartet hit hard, unbridled and passionately, with a mischievous jazz energy and a whirlwind musical picture book, where the guys kept trading solo shenanigans of tightly attuned communication in a free-spirited, no-strings format, definitely staged on the edge of the spontaneous yet always unexpected course of events, where the free jazz story always manages to just barely stay balanced on one leg, so it doesn’t drift too far outside the bounds of phrasing and drown in potential aimless self-indulgence. Exceptional communication, exceptional listening, an exceptional musical stew, where the quartet always finds a common point of musical intersection where they meet and merge, and then drift off again, each in their own direction.
Something similar goes for the band that closed out the third day and so delivered the final act of the Jazz Cerkno festival. That’s Norway’s Cortex, led by trumpeter Thomas Johansson. We already met him in the company of Tollef Ostvang and Rune Strom a month ago in Cerkno, when he played here with the All Included lineup. The quartet, whose rhythm section of drums and double bass is, as expected, spiced up by an additional alto sax, and Cortex in many ways at moments pulled on their predecessors Universal Indians, or, broadly speaking, at the very least satisfied the tastes of the Scandinavian approach to free jazz culture. A quartet of seasoned musicians who play in many other projects and lineups, they sounded, as expected, tremendously bold, hot-blooded and energetic, teasing with their homegrown free jazz content and inventive bursts of free-flowing improvisation that never drifted too far from the main motifs. The spas theater and the Saturday partying in Cerkno dragged on late into the night, long after Cortex had hit their last note and switched off the lights on this year’s edition of Jazz Cerkno.
As always, and by tradition. Jazz Cerkno remains the melting point for the most unusual and, in their visions, literally “bonkers” jazz performers, who stir up our imagination and fill our wandering souls and hearts with bubbling artistic passion. Boštjan Cvek’s legacy included. Long live Jazz Cerkno! See you there again next year.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
