Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Stari plac / Slovenia
Concert date: May 21, 2016
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: €37.00
The third and final day of the traditional 21st jazz festival in Cerkno was already buzzing in the late morning hours. The side program offered a hike for the »hungry« in the company of Daria Corstesea, who walked the participants through a few sly dietary superstitions, and as always everyone happily lived to tell the tale. Meanwhile, Boštjan Gombač (Katalena) and Blaž Celarec ran a workshop teaching kids about clay instruments, wrapping up with a joint concert where the whole gang tried out their clay instruments on the main stage of Stari plac. In the afternoon, Joe McPhee and Daunik Lazro (Pourtant Les Cimes) played at the school, two saxophonists from two different worlds of jazz who, no doubt, delivered some serious concert voluptuousness. Sadly, the author of this piece missed it, since after all that lush revelry the brain’s processor needed a bit of a breather, so it could function properly when the first band hit the main stage on the festival’s third day: the wacked-out avant-trio Transitory Museum of Minds.
This is a band of three musicians blowing in from three very different winds of musical rough-hewn-ness: the New York-based Slovenian drummer and percussionist Dre Hočevar, saxophonist Michael Wroblewski and keyboardist Christian Balvig. Hočevar picked this trio to stand beside him last year, and this very show was even supposed to be recorded for a possible album release. That the trio served up an unusual, even brazenly provocative musical puzzle hardly needs pointing out. The first to grab the attention was Christian Balvig. With an electronic sound »toy« (some kind of »sequencer«) he coaxed out a plethora of the strangest, at times downright old-school (»new wave«) sounds, and with his »artificial« sound manipulation he literally cracked people up with his lucid resonance as he joined in with the sax and percussion. Balvig grimaced so wholeheartedly as he cranked and twisted the knobs, occasionally jumping over to jerky stabs at the piano, that his faces, together with the sounds, only amplified the trio’s lucid character. A fun combination that breathes and plays for the moment of inspiration, on the principle of transforming the momentary »provocation« of inner feelings and coaxing a unique musical story out of them, which the trio follows and freely surrenders to.
Universal Indians with Joe McPhee is no less brilliant a combo! Universal Indians is a trio built around two Norwegian musicians, Tollef Ostvang (drums) and Rune Strom (double bass), whom we got to see on April 16, 2016 in the very same Cerkno, at Bar Gabrijel, playing with the All Included lineup. The trio is rounded out by American saxophonist John Dikeman. And just so things wouldn’t be too »simple«, for a few years now this trio has also been playing with a veteran and, to a good degree, jazz oddball if not outright innovator, saxophonist Joe McPhee. The latter, as mentioned, had already played in Cerkno earlier that day, but clearly the guy, who’s a not-so-modest 77 years young, is still kicking like crazy. The quartet hit hard, unrestrained and passionate, with a mischievous, whirlwind musical picture book in which the guys kept passing things back and forth in a free-spirited format, with soloistic shenanigans and incredibly in-tune communication, always teetering on the edge of the spontaneous yet constantly unexpected, where the story of free jazz somehow always manages to catch itself by a hair, balancing on one leg, so it doesn’t drift too far outside the bounds of phrasing and drown in potential aimless self-indulgence. Exceptional communication, exceptional perception, an exceptional musical thicket, where the quartet always finds a common point, a musical crossroads where they meet and merge, only to sail off again, each in their own direction.
Something similar goes for the band that closed out the third day and so delivered the final act of Jazz Cerkno. That’s Norway’s Cortex, led by trumpeter Thomas Johansson. We’d already run into him, too, in the company of Tollef Ostvang and Rune Strom, a month ago in Cerkno, when he played here with All Included. The quartet, filled out in the expected fashion by a rhythm section of drums and double bass and stirred up by an additional alto sax, at moments pulled quite a lot toward their predecessors Universal Indians, or at the very least generally satisfied the tastes of the Scandinavian approach to free jazz culture. A quartet of seasoned musicians who play in many other projects and lineups, they sounded, as expected, extremely bold, hot-blooded and energetic, teasing with their homegrown free jazz content and inventive bursts of free-spinning improvisation that never drifted too far from the guiding motifs. Špas teater and the Saturday revelry in Cerkno dragged on late into the night, long after Cortex played their last note and switched off the lights on this year’s edition of Jazz Cerkno.
As always, and by tradition. Jazz Cerkno remains the meeting point for the most unusual jazz performers, literally »wacked« in their visions, who stir up our imagination and fill our wandering souls and hearts with bubbling artistic passion. Even after Boštjan Cvek. Long live Jazz Cerkno! See you there again next year.
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