Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kranj / Transtation SubArt / Slovenia
Concert date: 20.09.2016
Attendance: 42
Ticket price: €10.00
Jonas Hellborg is one of the most fascinating jazz-rock fusion bassists of our era. The Scandinavian master of melting jazz and rock together is a highly respected and acclaimed name around the world. Over his career the man has worked with John McLaughlin (he spent five years of the eighties in Mahavishnu Orchestra, after all), and with other heavyweights too, among them Billy Cobham, Tony Williams, Ginger Baker, Bill Frisell, Mike Shrieve, Ornette Coleman, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, and the list is nowhere near finished. As a fun fact, let me throw in the names Jens and Anders Johansson too, in case some inconsolable power metal fan happens to be reading this article.
Hellborg decided to go solo in 1988, and in his first lineup the keyboards were played by none other than Aydin Esen, a brilliant and versatile keyboardist of Turkish origin. Old love never dies, or so they say, and in the mature stage of his creative life Hellborg felt that the time was right again and called his old friend into the trio formation Trinity. The third piece of this puzzle is none other than the striking American drum wizard Keith LeBlanc, who is only too well known to many a fan of experimental music with a solid grounding in rhythm, since they had already seen him a few times in Slovenia, when he came over as part of Little Axe’s crew (guitarist Skip McDonald’s band), and over his career this esteemed drummer has also lent his services to such music moguls as Tina Turner, Seal, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry, among others.
The stage of Kranj’s Trainstation SubArt, which keeps bravely holding its ground right where it has always been, next to Kranj’s train station, offers an ever more diverse music program, and the arrival of this witty experimental jazz formation probably heralds plenty more sensual delights that we true music gourmands can look forward to in this club in the near future.
Around nine in the evening, maybe a little earlier, the trio climbed onto the stage almost unnoticed and kicked off their performance a bit shyly, or, if that doesn’t quite cut it, they started addressing the audience with their music in a totally relaxed, quiet and unobtrusive way. Aydin Esen soon took the initiative on keys, and Jonas, the main star of the evening, respectfully stepped back into the shadows of the stage for most of the show, deftly slipping out of the glare of the spotlights.
The trio developed an immensely willing and soft experimental jazz blend with occasional fleeting detours into blues as well as classical music, where Esen, as expected, created most of the melody, well-versed in the ultra-nimble speed of Jonas’s fingers racing along the neck of his acoustic Warwick bass guitar, while LeBlanc showed the audience in the most beautiful way what finesse and sensual flexibility mean, in an incredibly skillful and inventive filling of the available space with countless transitional tricks that know no limits, and with which he further laid bare the fragility, yet also the huge dynamism, of the trio’s rhythmic framework. There was no shortage of dynamite, and the expressions of all three musicians at times radiated incredible absorption in their work, which they carried out with the greatest pleasure this evening too.
The crowd, made up of »music doctors«, members of art-prog rock bands (Game Over from Jesenice, Divje Jezero from Idrija,…) and above all a core of big music enthusiasts drawn to anything that smells of an experimental avant-garde musical excess, totaled a good forty people, not counting the staff who took care of the concert’s logistics, of course. Even so, they delivered a few thunderous ovations for an excellent mood, which the trio on stage certainly enjoyed too, and yet. You’d expect a bigger turnout. Maybe next time, or otherwise in the next life. We live in Slovenia, after all.
Jonas Hellborg, who spent the whole evening at Trainstation SubArt completely barefoot alongside his two companions, split the concert into two halves with a twenty-minute break in between. The second half was just as thrilling, with the trio’s attentive and sensual awareness of one another, an incredible, almost instinctive way of following each other, and above all a bravura blend of organic-sounding, adventurous musical complexity that filled the room with the warmth of natural sounds. The Rhodes keyboards even conjured up a bit of a Weather Report flavor. Put simply, the trio shone and absolutely delighted a small crowd of demanding listeners, who got exactly what they came for. A real wet dream of top-shelf jazz-rock fusion. And on top of it all, at a ridiculously cheap ticket price.
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