Shanir Blumenkranz’ Abraxas Follow in the Footsteps of the Great John Zorn in Cerkno (2019)
Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Date: Friday, 18.01.2019
On that wild January Friday, one of the craziest gigs ever went down in Cerkno. John Zorn in person. Well, not quite, but very close. His works brought back to life in an unbelievably reworked version, born of the mind, hands and vision of his fellow countryman. On a cold January day, Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz and his Abraxas brought to Cerkno the winning formula of an absolute musical storm of adventurous avant-garde adventurism, which, with its musical manifesto of triumphant, incredibly penetrating and strikingly sharp “provocation”, simply floored everyone.
This much avant-garde and (to the extreme) off-the-wall experimentation in one place is something you get rarely, if ever, but Cerkno has been regarded for quite a few years now as the Slovenian music mecca, where the biggest music connoisseurs make their pilgrimage, feeding their souls by hunting for concert treats of pure “shock therapy”. And this visit to Gabrijel must have been tailor-made for them.
For the overture to a voyage through the unique sonic expanses of John Zorn, directed by Blumenkranz’s Abraxas, the “opening driver” role was taken care of by Slovenian bassist Jošt Drašler. In a set weighed down with serious running time, Jošt presented his solo debut “The Balloon Catcher”. To put out an album that you play strictly on double bass alone, two things matter. You have to be bold, or rather brave, and a very, very good and multi-layered, polished musician, to whom the notion of limits is completely foreign. Jošt is no new name on the scene. He’s a respected and sought-after musician. That’s how good he is. He has racked up collaborations in all sorts of musical environments, and is therefore incredibly nimble and skilled when it comes to swimming through different genres, or cross-genre fusion (blending). You can feel that Jošt went through the school of Zlatko Kavčič. Much like Zlatko on his drums, Jošt makes use of the whole body of the double bass, really every square centimeter of it. Whether it’s the “tuning pegs” (winders), which he deliberately winds and unwinds as he plays, or scraping the bow all over the place and wedging it under the strings (all over the instrument), or simply pounding and knocking wherever his left and right hands happen to land on the body of the double bass at any given moment. All of this is an experimental extension that widens the classic expressive language of jazz improvisation on the double bass. Without these so-called excesses surrounding the classic way of playing the instrument, Jošt’s language would be far less juicy, the performance certainly half as dynamic and, expressively speaking, of course boring too. But it was anything but! A cannonade of absolutely free-flowing improvisation, commanded by the moment, dictated by whatever inspiration strikes, the mode the musician’s genius finds itself in, drove the show in a totally unusual, spontaneous manner, with a generous dose of surprise. Pure improvisational play, where Jošt found himself, able to express himself full-bloodedly and not “molded” into the rules of the game that some musical style or genre would generate. Simple as that. That evening Jošt presented himself in a provocative musical environment all his own, which he commands very well, yet keeps discovering and conquering all the time, if you get what I’m trying to say. When you explore the undiscovered, the unconquered, and that discovering resonates like home. So right from the start we listeners had sunk our teeth into a hefty musical bone, tossed to us in homegrown fashion by the excellent Jošt Drašler.
That evening the venue at Gabrijel was “propped up”, if not downright “loaded”, beyond the usual crowd of regulars who count as part of the bar’s house inventory, with a good number of gourmets who don’t come to the bar every time. Simple as that. Because, in search of the very best, they are extremely picky. But that night quite a few musical “professors” crammed into Gabrijel’s small room, following everything the stage had to offer with incredible pleasure. That made the night all the more exceptional. From the very first opening bar, which Abraxas took into their stormy sails, it was clear this show would be something truly special, unusual and unique. Something that would sweetly shock, shake and enchant us to the core. Blow us away! Something that doesn’t happen many times, if ever again. The quartet, with two electric guitars, drums and an exotic instrument playing the bass role, an instrument called the gimbri (three strings made of goat gut, the body covered with camel skin), performed the works of John Zorn that Blumenkranz released some time ago on the album Abraxas: Book of Angels Volume 19 (2012). The album that is really the main culprit for this lineup coming into being at all.
A rondo of an outstanding mix, a musical mosaic that took on an incredible avant-garde fusion of jazz with Arabic melos (“arabesques”) and utterly stripped-down Arabic rhythms that’ll make you break both your legs on the spot. Bursts of almost wrecking-ball rock escapades, voiced by the “fatter” Gibson SG guitar and the somewhat “more precise” Telecaster, along with an instrumental looseness where just watching how coherent Abraxas are in their chemistry with one another took your breath away. All this caution, alertness, focus, concentration, attention on one another is simply fascinating. This much complexity and excess that gives the feeling of complete spontaneity is in fact steered by the complete conciseness of the quartet’s members. And that’s something extraordinary. Shanir in the role of absolute conductor, the other three with their eyes fixed on him the whole time. The incredible drummer Kenny Grohowski worked like an octopus with eight tentacles, conjuring true wonders out of a basic drum kit. With feather-light ease. Incredible rhythmic textures, flowing between them, pauses you don’t expect, hits “between the hits”, guitars in a completely different rhythm from the drums at the same time,… So much improvisational wildness woven into the perfect symbiosis of the Abraxas combo’s musical body that it’s impossible to describe in any in-depth “expertise” (concert review). It was worth listening to the show with your eyes closed. The magnification of sensations that this act of the listener conjures up was, with all the described musical “weirdness”, especially intense this time. At moments Abraxas come across as a demonic orchestra tearing down every template barrier, and it’s incredible how much sonic space they fill while doing it. The guitars of Aram Bajakian and Eyal Maoz, in all their splendor, could at moments thunder like avalanches, stop on a cue, the drums riddled the space in the meantime, followed by a new blasphemous avalanche from both guitars, speaking in a completely different sonic environment and complementing each other in a brilliantly harmonious way, filling the available sonic space.
All the instruments, merged into one unified musical body, pushed expressiveness for most of the show toward full “musical asymmetry”, full motivic fragmentation, and yet time and again, on the edge of this “apparent chaos”, they caught themselves with striking skill and swung back into a “tangible format”. This voyage along the trail of the great John Zorn’s opus, in the kind of musical footwear Abraxas go for, is of course a unique challenge and a special artistic allure, which an artist with the broad musical understanding and polish that Shanir Blumenkrantz carries within him simply can’t resist. That challenge is a magnet for the artist’s ego trip, a kind of drug from which there’s no coming back. From a simple desire for a modest experiment, an incredible quartet was born, and with its arrival at Gabrijel it stunned and enchanted absolutely everyone. Not only because of the exceptional complexity, tightness and brilliant moves that expand Zorn’s works, reaching a whole new dimension that way, but simply because of the sheer “theatrical” looseness and absolute unusualness generated by the boundless daring of a creative artistic spirit, in free-spirited musical expression.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
