Location: Cerkno / Star plac / Slovenia
Date: Friday, July 17, 2020
Yet another seriously fresh evening that we had the privilege of spending in Cerkno brought us there on the wings of an exciting concert announcement — another installment in the series of “isolation battles against the Covid-19 virus,” a framework that has shaped this year’s Keltika festival programming as well. It was a shared concert evening featuring an ethno/art and jazz raid from two trios: Wild Strings Trio and Golnar & Mahan.
Just over ten minutes past nine, the familiar voice of Dario Cortese announced the arrival on stage of Wild Strings Trio — Petra Onderufova (violin), Toby Kuhn (cello), and Aleksander Kuzmić (guitar). This international trio of fourteen strings presented their second full-length album, Bendjistan, released last October, and they played a generous helping of it during a set that fully lived up to high expectations. What you get with these three is a collision of extraordinary technical chops and a kind of chemical intuition — something the trio has built up through countless shared concerts on an enviable road of constant artistic growth and refinement. Wild Strings Trio are genuine one-of-a-kinds, weaving elements of classical music, ethno folk melody (especially from the Orient), and jazz together in a way nobody else does. And the sheer power of their playing knocks you flat. All that compelling force they build on stage — and the effortless ease with which they do it — creates impressions that stick, impressions an audience warms to very quickly. The songs carry a strong expressive character, and the band approaches them with astonishing self-assurance, always in the grip of the music, always burning with sensory devotion. Wild Strings Trio can whip themselves into a tornado of leaping, vivid eruptions of incredibly harmonized interplay through breakneck eruptive intensity — and then, at any given moment, pivot it all around with equal vividness, settling into the embrace of sweet-toned collages that demand a far gentler touch. The band is very clever about the trick they use to crank up the atmosphere: they latch onto a motif and play it round after round, each pass more intense and snappier than the last, while simultaneously driving up the tempo of the rhythm itself. The interplay is phenomenal and the “internal” on-stage communication sits right on the edge of pure intuition — even if it’s obvious you need to keep your head very much in the game when you’re tackling a fusion this demanding. The stage execution of the material is staggering in its free-spinning kinetics and the combination of speed and precision the trio’s members generate. The band whipped the audience into shape with warmth and bubbling energy, and laid more than favorable ground for the performer who followed. With their concert in Cerkno, Wild Strings Trio proved they maintain the pedigree of great world-class aesthetes and pilgrims in the craft of fusing the diversity of ethno melody with classical and jazz seasoning. They remain vivid musical bards who enchant you in an instant with an intense performance and carry you off into their unique musical world of Bendjistan!
Golnar & Mahan! Those aren’t surnames — they’re a woman’s name and a man’s name. The act is actually a trio made up of Iranian musicians based in Austria: Golnar Shahyar (vocals, keys), Mahan Mirarab (guitar), and drummer/percussionist Amir Wahba. Going by the advance billing, this set was shaping up to be another highlight of a sweet Friday evening. Conceived entirely differently from the preceding band — with plenty of openings for possible forays into avant-garde territory — the group conjured a singular experience of freewheeling artistic adventurism, fusing elements of traditional Persian folk melody with jazz variations. That starting collision in their musical DNA alone is enough to generate the absolute eclecticism with which this trio is so wittily loaded.
Just how highly regarded Mahan Mirabab is on the international stage is demonstrated by his many collaborations with top-tier jazz musicians — including his work with Slovenian composer and (first-call) bassist Robert Jukič. His take on jazz willingly absorbs the vivid contrasts of ethno music, ranging from “Arabesk” (Persia, Turkey, Kurdistan, …) all the way to motifs from the African continent. He and Golnar recently recorded and released their joint album “Derakht”, which was given a vivid presentation in Cerkno that evening.
Mahan Mirabab showed up as an extraordinarily refined guitarist who commits equally to playing along a fretless neck, favoring acoustic tones throughout. That’s why he mostly plays a guitar with two necks — one fretted, one not. His playing is definitely a unique mix of atonal jazz figures that coexist, grounded and unforced, with moments of ethno excursions, as well as strikingly simple, infectiously musical lines the guitarist occasionally latches onto. The result is a fairly unpredictable sequence of events on stage. That said, Mirabab probably wouldn’t be nearly as compelling on his own if it weren’t for the extraordinary vocalist Golnar Shahyar sharing the stage with him — a performer who seemed to operate with absolutely no vocal limitations in whatever interpretive maneuvers she chose to attempt. Alongside traditional arabesque melodies, her voice repeatedly functioned through improvised lines as an additional instrument, adding a vivid spectrum of emotion and passion to the vocabulary of Wahba and Mirabab, along with a heaping measure of contemplative harmonies — all of which intensified the expressive contrasts throughout the trio’s set. It’s remarkable what flexibility this singer develops on stage and how utterly present she is with her expressive intensity, yet also with astonishing gentleness and longing. Her vocal performance commanded the focal point of the concert, and Golnar flat-out stunned with her vivid vocal brilliance. The trio possesses that theatrical effect of unexpected shock that keeps the audience fully fired up right through the set and holds the listener firmly in its grip by sheer force of performance intensity. In short, the interplay between Mahan and Golnar is a unique experience that simply captivates.
The concert was over in a flash. Just like that. By virtue of its intensity, so dynamically and fiercely channeled through the forces of all three elements of this singular musical adventure. With a wild, self-grown character, an uncontrollable ferocity whose limits only these three musicians know and define, and above all the expressive strangeness generated from deep within these musicians’ artistic defiance — this vivid trio conjured yet another top-tier concert experience right in the heart of Cerkno.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
