Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Gabrijel / Slovenia
Concert date: 22.04.2017
Attendance: 70
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry!)
Cerkno came alive with jazz for the second time this April. As part of the Keltika festival, the acclaimed Slovenian trumpeter Igor Matkovič played here, having already performed in Cerkno two years ago. Last autumn the man released a new studio album titled »State of KU« (2016), and he brought exactly the same backing crew to Cerkno that played on it. So the Igor Matkovič Quintet is made up of, besides Igor himself, some of the established aces of the Slovenian jazz scene. First among them is the almost legendary Milko Lazar on keys, followed by Jani Moder on guitar, Jošt Drašler on double bass and electric bass, and Bojan Krhlanko on drums.
Five seasoned masters of their craft took their positions in the Gabrijel bar around half past nine in the evening, and this time the gig ran in one piece, with the focus squarely on presenting Igor’s latest studio album »State of KU«.
The opening stretch felt like a slow warm-up. Igor was the first to start addressing the crowd through his trumpet, and the rest of the musicians gradually joined him one after another. On an excellently attended Friday jazz night, with sound that was every bit as excellent, the guys spun a daring weave of feelings, passion and emotion dictated by the moment. The moment as they lived it, in the sequence of inhale and exhale. A web of spontaneity and unexpected twists, wrapped up in stretches of sharp improvisation between the players, with Igor’s trumpet naturally in command, kept company by guitar and piano in a blaze of brilliance and incredible style, never lost the »red thread«, meaning the shape of the compositions never fell apart. Even when the musicians soared toward the realms of free jazz, the quintet’s character always caught itself, like a tightrope walker, deftly, and returned to the fields of musically »legible« motivic structures.
The band didn’t hold back on the decibels either, generated through electricity. Jani Moder on guitar, with a sparkling integration of »quirky« and consistently very catchy and fun sounds, which he co-created through the use of specific effects pedals; Jošt Drašler, who picked up the electric bass and also bent the shape of the songs into some fine funky kinetics; and especially Milko Lazar on a Rhodes electric piano, coaxing out a retro-sounding nostalgia that brought to mind the likes of Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Trumpet, guitar and piano often ended up in a shape reminiscent of Miles Davis’s electric phase (say, moments from the album »In A Silent Way«), most of all thanks to Igor Matkovič, since you can spot the inspiration from Miles Davis’s work in his jazz variations on the trumpet in no time. One of the central and most interesting points of the gig was the song Spontaneous Converstation, which can also be found on the new album »State of KU« and in which the band managed to deliver even moments of mysticism. Here in particular the group showed incredible softness and refinement as it slowly built (circle by circle) a layered soundscape, as if played by a many-piece orchestra and not just a modest crew of five musicians. This came through the use of sound effects, the opening use of a violin bow on the double bass, and the skillful doubling of guitar and trumpet on the motivic structures. The piece itself is made up of several parts, and what stuck in my memory was a simple, actually classically conceived motif from Milko Lazar, instantly captivating in its musicality, which the other musicians latched onto, developing an extraordinary rhetoric of jazz-experimental figures, but as said, always keeping the motivic compactness, even as the first hints of free jazz were rising on the horizon.
At the Cerkno gig the Igor Matkovič Quintet put on an extraordinary experience and showed how jazz can, while maintaining compact forms, be accessible throughout, with a subtly woven rhetoric of complex improvisational play, and yet at the same time be constantly inviting to every jazz gourmand out there who looks in music for adventure, free-spirited provocation and the »weirdness« of experimentation, which in its unusualness shakes and shocks in an instant. A gig that turned on a dime, that’s how interesting it was.
So there you have it. With the close of the Igor Matkovič Quintet gig at the Gabrijel bar, the spring series of Keltika festival concerts has wrapped up too, and everything in Cerkno is now set for a new edition of the traditional Jazz Cerkno festival, which runs from 18.05.2017 to 20.05.2017 and which you absolutely mustn’t miss either.
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