Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Star plac / Slovenia
Concert date: May 18, 2017
Attendance: 400
Ticket price: €17.50 (advance) / €20.00 (day of the festival)
A brand-new Jazz Cerkno festival, the 22nd already! There as always. In Cerkno. At the covered venue (so that no stray raindrop gives anybody a “lick”) called Star plac. The latter sits between the local church, the retirement home (where a beer costs a euro and a half) and the monument to the entire municipality of Cerkno, and I’m of course talking about Bar Gabrijel. Cerkno is a place that today, on the soil of this so-called »country«, probably counts as one of the last liberated enclaves, still holding back humanity’s approaching ultimate destruct behind barricades of healthy senses and healthy reason. That destruct is being cooked up in that well-known sneaky control room, as part of the Freemasons’ destructive, anti-ecological, anti-social and utterly lifeless plan. There are no shopping malls in this place, the police leave people in peace and you only run into them when people actually need their help, and the bars stay open way later than just eleven in the evening. That’s why people still hang out here! In short, when you come to Cerkno, you breathe deep again, and if your generation number is a little on the higher side, you can easily blast yourself back, nostalgically, to the days of carelessness and big hopes, when, among other things, there were still no »smart devices« to get in the way of people’s contact with nature, dull our senses and intuition, drag us away from our core and, as a result, from a healthy perception of the universal magic called music. So music found its refuge, its hideout, you could even say its sacred place, in Cerkno. Here, music in the noblest sense of the word steps right to the front of the action. Music of a free-spirited mindset, which doesn’t burden itself with anything at all and simply wants to speak its mind. Just as it is. With the full primal force of the senses. Fully intuitive and instinctive! You can’t dig any deeper in artistry, and heartfelt authenticity is the essence of expression in every art.
Old friends, in the same well-known spot. Everyone full of positive vibes and energy. Waiting joyfully for the festival to kick off! An event where all barriers vanish, a generator of absolute reconciliation of all the different ones in a coexistence of equals.
This year’s program opened by “setting up” a somewhat gentler, more easily digestible musical experience. This trick has been tried many times and is the established method for programming the first day of the jazz festival in Cerkno. The “warm-up” for the colorful program of this year’s edition went to our own Big Band RTV Slovenija, under the conducting gestures of Lenart Krečič, who was joined by two special guests. Slovenian saxophonist Jaka Kopač and Austrian drummer Reinhold Schmölzer. Yes, an exclusive. One-of-a-kind and staged just for this festival. Both stars of the evening, Schmölzer and Kopač, prepared the entire evening’s repertoire for orchestra. Schmölzer in particular has a good bundle of experience in this direction, since he recorded both of his records with an orchestra. The show kicked off with a performance of Kopač’s Thunder, which you can find on his second studio album »Present Thoughts«. Even that one revealed a collision of modern to avant-jazz approaches with classic jazz philosophy, which was to be expected from the very premise of this special “buddying up” of musicians on stage. Kopač’s music gained a new dimension, and the input of his saxophone vibrations dissolved a bit in the condensed core of the assembled ensemble, which is really the whole point of this one-time collaboration. One of the show’s highlights was a twenty-minute, epically sprawling, richly dynamic and seductive variation on the Radiohead song You And Whose Army?, an adaptation directed by Schmölzer, where the patterns of the musical elements described above fused most intensely and added a special ambient voluptuousness, roughly labeled a symph-prog-jazz epic. In its transformed shape, the piece delivered surely one of the most memorable moments of the show and an attraction of a special kind in the repertoire, not just of Big Band, Schmölzer and Kopač, but of the entire first day, and the festival too. Five minutes into this piece, our guitar hero Primož Grašič “woke up” too and, in his trademark manner of uniquely sophisticated fine-mechanics of manual dexterity, subtly set his fingers moving on his semi-acoustic Yamaha guitar. Let me not be biased. Quite a few other Big Band “heroes” enriched the proceedings with improv spots on their instruments, and the crew also played Kopač’s Twin Brothers. In short. The set flew by. The right dose of listenable ear-caressing and exploratory musical oddities. Teasing and thrilling all the way through.
The rest of the first day was no less attractive. Performing in Slovenia specially for this year’s Jazz Cerkno festival was top Slovenian guitarist Samo Šalamon, who has been living and creating in the US for years. For this concert in particular, Šalamon put together a quartet that, besides Samo, was made up of three oddballs, we could even call them »wild ones«: drummer Christian Lillinger, saxophonist Achille Succi and on double bass Pascal Niggenkemper. Samo Šalamon is a musical gem of sorts, highly valued on the international scene of contemporary jazz. Samo has over twenty albums under his belt, and plenty of jazz artists would love to play with him. This time was no different. The quartet assembled for the occasion in Cerkno delivered a unique musical character and the experience of an unbridled foldout of top-shelf jazz improvisation, where just about anything goes. Real little perversions of absolutely free-spirited approaches to interpretation, as dictated by feel and bare instinct. At times fiercely noisy, thanks not only to Samo’s guitar escalations but above all to the hot-blooded, almost theatrical gymnast on drums, Lillinger, who also kicked off the quartet’s set that way. While playing the double bass, Niggenkempker came up with attractive inserts, using various objects to rub along the body of the instrument and the strings. Waiting for the unexpected. Provocative improv outbursts! On the edge of spontaneous figures and developments you couldn’t call even a few moments ahead. Yet with one foot planted on the ground the whole time, in the format of compositions, to which the quartet kept successfully returning from the edge of “chaos”. A hard-to-describe experience. Words fail. The musicians do know each other well from past collaborations. Simple as that. An excellent fusion of four elements into a unique, unrepeatable character of free-jazz rhetoric. Let’s hope this concert also hatched some plan for this lineup to record a joint album in the future. The quartet doesn’t even have a proper name, that’s how unplanned its birth was. A top-class performance that took the listeners’ breath away.
The closing act of the festival’s first day went to a Black trio led by keyboardist and accordionist Hailu Mergia, an Ethiopian jazz legend of sorts. The opening bars already made it clear this set would be a completely different story too. Self-willed and headstrong in everything. The rhythmic structures were somewhat lighter, calling for the audience’s bodies to sway and move, dance steps included. Black musicians have rhythm in their blood. The solid, compactly salted and Swiss-watch-precise »snare« hits of accompanying drummer Kenneth Joseph and the boundless »funked-up groove« of noble vibrations of bass warmth from Alemsegeda Kebede, the kind that only a Warwick bass guitar can generate, alongside the otherwise tornado of breakneck outbursts played at top improvising speeds on keyboards and accordion, hadn’t penetrated the cochlea and cerebral cortex of this report’s writer so intensely in a long time. Unique. And it’s been ages since a bass guitar rang out so supple, so musically fulfilled and so witty in improvised music. The trio served up its own variation on fusing jazz, stuffed with world music elements and at the same time, as mentioned, »funk-sharpened«. The association with the increasingly rare sight of a Warwick bass guitar triggers grateful parallels to the Living Colour bassist, the versatile Doug Wimbish. With his two buddies, Hailu Margia delivered a joyful and boundlessly witty experience to close the first day of the festival, one that sounded absolutely distinctive and hard to compare with the established patterns of how »average European heads« perceive music. A band that could easily play at any edition of the annual Druga Godba. A band that thoroughly fired up, thrilled and charmed the audience in the late evening hours, bringing the festival’s first day to its close in grand style.
Photo Gallery
