Location: Ljubljana / Klub Cankarjevega doma / Slovenia
Date: Tuesday, 06/18/2019
After hanging out with the great John Zorn, who spent a good three quarters of an hour in the Gallus Hall trying his hand as a “church” organist, the colorful continuation of the second day of this year’s Jazz Festival Ljubljana was handled by Scandinavia’s Fire! They packed Klub Cankarjevega doma to the last corner. The trio is led by the incredible reed player Mats Gustaffson. For this show, bassist Johan Berthling, who’s expecting a little one, was replaced by Jo Myhre, while Andreas Werliin remains the timekeeper on drums. For this occasion the band also invited singer Mariam Wallentin, Werliin’s wife, with whom he worked before Fire! in the group Wildbirds & Peacedrums. She guested on the group’s 2009 studio debut “You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago” and otherwise performs in the expanded, orchestral version of the band (Fire! Orchestra). Considering Fire!’s ongoing collaborations in various musical bodies and the album releases that come with them, the current new album “The Hands” (2018) is really a kind of partial return to the roots, that is, to the debut, recorded in the style of a hard-hitting trio, just like that first record.
Fire!” the Swedish-Norwegian alliance, a proper “Scandi approach” to a potent fusion of rock and contemporary jazz mischief, dropped right into the heart of avant-eclecticism, sounds like a truly specific conglomerate of the rich Scandinavian scene of oddness, home to plenty of musical extremists, among whom we can easily count the experimental trio Fire! They brought to the stage a synthesis of punk, jazz improvisation with shards of free jazz and even noise. Yet it was compact and concise all the way through. The more the minutes of the show ticked by, the more pumped up the racket and ruckus the people on stage were making got. In the end the band, under the command of the sturdy motivic forms of Gustaffson and Myhre, slipped almost into pure-blooded punk trash, and the excellent singer Mariam Wallentin added her own bit. With her extravagant approach of seeking out unusual vocal musical forms, which even carry a bit of sympathy with Björk’s voice, she fit perfectly into the trio’s frothing, yet mostly wittily exploratory musical nature. In the parts where the band developed its instrumental side, Mariam of course used additional jingling objects that rounded out the sound. The band doesn’t embody just raw trash and playing at full tilt. It knows how to calm down in an extremely cohesive way, and here Werliin’s imagination, in the glow of delicately sensitive brushwork (he often laid a tambourine on the hi-hat), muffling the toms with a cloth, against the otherwise extraordinarily explosive kinetics of filling the space (beneath the motifs) with drums, comes through in an even more contrasting expression. Gustaffson and Myhre, then, took care of creating an avalanche of sound, with Miriam Wallentin’s vocals most often working as an additional voice, even though there’s poetry behind the singing too. It was fascinating to follow the dissonant swerves between the vocal lines and the lines of the saxophones, sequencer and bass guitar, which in the very next moment, unbelievably, almost instinctively came to terms and co-created (musically speaking) a seriously tangible harmony.
Gustaffson used baritone and tenor saxophones, while at times also complementing the low-ringing, room-rumbling bass with sound manipulation from the sequencer. The effected bass and sequencer set off quite a few noise tricks in building the sound. Sometimes the jazz elements are so heavily disguised that you can barely talk about jazz at all, and the group’s aesthetic and eclecticism at those moments get very special, as they team up, on top of the otherwise core punk spring-board, with avant-garde prog and more, with rock in opposition (RIO).
Fire! address the listener, as their name suggests, uncompromisingly and bury them in sound from every available position. Werliin, as a representative of the typical Scandi jazz school of drumming, eagerly and dynamically used up the space for drum improvisations that just didn’t seem to end. A classic drum kit, with a deep floor tom and a bigger and smaller snare. Destructive swings, played with the whole body, so there’s no shortage of sonic punch in the group’s shared musical language.
So the band came fully alive and slipped off the leash, especially in the last two numbers, lifting the crowd up to the atmospheric boiling point of the closing concert crescendo. The clock struck well past eleven in the evening when the show wrapped up, and with it the program of the second day of the 60th edition of Jazz Festival Ljubljana.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
