Location: Križanke, Ljubljana
Concert date: 08.05.2007
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 40 EUR
This time the legendary Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek rolled into town with a proper “All Stars” lineup. Really, though, it’s not much of a backing band, since all four musicians, Garbarek included, are totally on equal footing, more a collective of seasoned old tomcats who just happen to be led by the sax player for now. And as they showed over this two-hour set, anyone could have backed anyone else, which is exactly what they did, as they all shone about equally. If anyone stood out next to the man himself, it was percussionist Trilok Gurtu, who is a pretty well-loved musician around these parts. Rounding out the lineup were the extremely good-humored Rainer Bruninghaus on keyboards and piano, and Yuri Daniel on bass. Daniel was filling in for Eberhard Weber, who had to cut the tour short for health reasons, though according to the management he’ll be back with the group soon.
They kicked off with a piece that crept in very quietly from the keyboards, which sounded like the wind, a wind from the north, and the other three instruments slowly added some ambient freshness to it. They created music that suited the weather perfectly, with the city soaked in rain all around.
Right after this opening prelude, the band completely reinvented itself musically. The Scandinavian undertone gave way to something much warmer, since the Jan Garbarek Group is made up of guys from all corners of the world, and the geographical and musical environments that left their mark on them are just as varied. Even though you could feel that “north and nature, song and mystery,” as Jan’s playing has been described, in the sound of the sax the whole time, it kept blending with other sounds that, through the souls and bodies of the instruments and their owners, chipped in their fair share. In a way, it was mostly north and south that kept merging and complementing each other, rather than east and west. Each pole had its two representatives and their four folklores. Reigning on the northern side, with Nordic precision and only seemingly cold, were Jan, who glided effortlessly across the octaves with his two saxophones, switching between accented long notes and clipped, unaccented ones, and Rainer, who mostly stayed musically glued to him and usually wove the sounds of his keys straight into Jan’s playing. On the opposite, seemingly more relaxed southern side, the shining lights were the wildly inventive Trilok, who was like Jack DeJohnette or Al Foster and Mtume rolled into one, and Yuri, who stayed a bit more in the background with his playing but held down a decisive role there, firmly anchoring the lowest register with his mostly slower lines.
Everyone except Jan himself also got a few minutes of pure solo time to show off some extra virtuosity. Yuri was up first. He played his solo on a Fender Jazzmaster bass, though otherwise he reached more often for a non-standard fretless five-string bass with a much warmer tone that bordered on double bass territory. At this point, though, he pushed some sharper, funk-flavored melodies to the front, especially with a loop he recorded and then played back for a while while soloing a bit more energetically over it.
Several songs later, the honor of going solo fell to Rainer, who was maybe the most mischievous of this fine quartet that evening. He set off on a short odyssey that could easily have lasted a whole evening or two. He radically changed his playing style, shifting from a quicker jazz motif played on keyboards with no special effects to a classically inspired étude on a real piano. He wrapped up with a new theme that the other three soon joined in on.
Toward the end of the show, Trilok Gurtu was the last to get his fifteen minutes, and as usual he had his hands and feet full, playing several rhythms at once. For a while he sat on his drum stool, just leaning toward the various percussion instruments surrounding him, but later he had to stand up and turn his attention to yet other percussion, keeping the basic beat going only with his right foot on the bass drum. Some of those many percussion instruments sounded almost like instruments made of ice, and certain cymbals practically sang. The little bells sounded as if they were being played underwater, which they actually were, since he had a tub of water behind him that he dunked them into. Near the end of the performance Jan joins him, this time with a kind of pipe that gave off a very distinctive sound, and its melody perhaps quite unintentionally conjured up fairy-tale landscapes, probably from up north, punctured by Trilok’s drumming, which seemed distant or at least withdrawn. These sounds certainly backed up the claim pinned to Jan’s playing, namely that this is very intense and extremely visual music.
All evening long you could hear music that flirted openly with that primal, simple beauty that’s fairly easy to access, and it usually didn’t venture into more demanding territory, or if it did, it was more of a day trip where you watch from afar. It would certainly be hard to trace any lines suggesting that Garbarek once drew his inspiration from the work of the extremely free-spirited, avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler. Today this music sits squarely in the zone closest to the idea of “European jazz,” that cool jazz that no longer has much to do with radical, avant-garde content and blends very well, and very vividly, with the sound pioneered by Pat Metheny.
Undoubtedly something that will satisfy jazz connoisseurs and, at the same time, all those who aren’t exactly crazy about the genre. Besides the music itself, the simple but wonderfully inventive stage design also worked brilliantly, melting perfectly into the music. You could also call this music “chamber jazz,” and it clearly has plenty of fans, because after two hours of top-class music, Jan Garbarek’s group had to come back for an encore, one you couldn’t really expect to actually happen, but it did, and that surely speaks for itself.
Photo: Jani Lah
Setlist
Lineup:
Jan Garbarek: Saxophone
Trilok Gurtu: Drums, percussion
Yuri Daniel: Bass
Rainer Bruninghaus: Keyboards, piano
