Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Date: Saturday, 04/16/2016
The Norwegian-Swedish free jazz quintet All Included rolled into Cerkno a good month before the 21st edition of the famed Jazz Cerkno festival, playing the perfect warm-up overture. All Included are “held up” by a powerhouse wind section of alto sax, trumpet and trombone, backed by a hard-grafting rhythm section of drums and double bass.
All Included are bandleader and saxophonist Martin Küchen, trumpeter Thomas Johansson, trombonist Mats Alekint, double bassist Jon Rune Strøm and drummer Tollef Østvang. Martin and Mats are Swedes, the other three Norwegians. Mats and Martin go way back and played together in Angels and Angels 8 before All Included. The Norwegian trio know each other inside out too, having worked together in Friends & Neighbors. Strøm and Østvang also play together in the trio Universal Indians, while Johansson, besides All Included, plays in Cortex. So there are no “hide-and-seek” games in this band, and in performance terms the quintet is “superiorly well-oiled”. They came to Cerkno to present their second studio album, the current »Satan in Plain Clothes«. The first one, »Reincarnation of a Free Bird«, came out three years ago, and they presented it back then at Menza pri Koritu on Metelkova in Ljubljana, the very same Menza they played once more in September 2014. As expected, the band mostly played tracks from »Satan in Plain Clothes« at the Cerkno show.
The Scandinavian approach to jazz has always been seen as “quirky” and, thanks to its unusualness and peculiarities, has always come across as extra attractive, and All Included didn’t budge an inch from that fact. Over an hour and a half (encore included) they served up a “bonkers” set, and in the first two numbers in particular they stunned with repeated chaos, pushing their story to the very edge of experimental chaos, only to catch themselves masterfully “on the tip of a sharp blade,” like the most skilled circus tightrope walkers, and bring the musical story back into the waters of calm phrasing. It was really only the third song that gave a detailed look at the quintet’s remarkably layered makeup, in terms of switching between moods efficiently. I’ve Been Lied To was meaningfully opened by the wind section with such easy softness that the sound of all three instruments was barely audible. The blowing into the tubes of the instruments actually drowned out the tones coming from the instruments themselves, and with the bow on the double bass deepening the weight of the lower registers of the chosen tonalities, it heightened the feeling of someone remorsefully confessing to a lie. As the song developed and the instruments spontaneously created interwoven waves of relaxed, soaring improvisational splashing, the nature of the mood they’d set up could draw you into hypnotic states of detached consciousness. All of it with a majestic interplay of every building block, an excellent work ethic and temperament, bound together by the strong chemical bonds that make this quintet tick.
Every soloist got equal room to open up, often in dialogues between two instruments that, in the chosen melodies, created a feeling of “bickering” with each other, only for it to find, soon after, remarkable musical harmony through tightly tuned phrases. Through the principle of perception, the principle of unexpected turns and spontaneous playfulness. At the same time, the show’s main link to the audience, the wildly charismatic and likeable saxophonist Martin Küchen, “won over” the crowd with his lucid black humor as he introduced individual numbers. All Included found their way into the audience’s hearts in no time, and the crowd filled the Bar Gabrijel venue nicely once again.
The band switched between faster parts and then, every time, masterfully caught itself in sophisticatedly calm ones, with feather-light ease and sensual wisdom. When the wind section, in unison, all three together, took air in with full lungs and squeezed out of their instruments their tightly tuned maximum of harmonized phrases, the motifs often brought to mind a kinship with the parts Frank Zappa composed in the era of the albums Waka Jawaka, Hot Rats or The Grand Wazoo. Extremely sly, cunningly one-of-a-kind and, in short, in the glow of Scandinavian experimental jazz weirdness.
The hour and a half flew by in the blink of an eye. Just like that. The crowd didn’t let the band out of its grip until they came back on stage to treat the music lovers to the obligatory encore. The music is so broad and rich in execution, so freewheeling and unmolded in its fusion focus, that it never lacks provocatively avant-garde touches, not even for a second. That’s why an hour and a half was plenty, since by the end the association cortexes of the brain’s processing were already seriously buckling under the sheer excess of jazz experimental improvisation. As said. All Included. You get everything. In one place. In one piece. Alongside the musically cunning weirdness, a generous dose of the contagious humor of this wildly likeable quintet, who will hopefully be back on our turf soon to deliver a fresh helping of musical delights from their story of Scandinavian jazz vibes “straight from hell.”
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
- Three Courses
- Despair is in the Air
- I’ve Been Lied To
- Tune For Martin
- The Gap
- War in a Child
- Satan in Plain Clothes
—encore— - The Indespensable Warlords
