location: Cerkno / Star plac / Slovenia
date: 17.05.2018
The year has come around again, and with it a new edition of the legendary Jazz Cerkno festival. Believe it or not, it’s the 23rd one! As always, going to this event is about way more than just listening to and enjoying good music. First and foremost, it’s a reunion of old friends, familiar faces, comrades. You’d be hard pressed to find as much good vibe piled up in one place, year after year, at the same time, as you do in Cerkno during Jazz Cerkno.
Day one already delivered three musical delights, and following the usual, well-oiled weekday program, shortly before 7:30 PM the Austrian jazz cosmonauts took the stage, united in an orchestra called Orchester 33 1/3. A twelve-piece crew made up of Christof Kurzmann (saxophones, electronics, voice), Thomas Berghammer (trumpet), Günther Castanetti (percussion, drums), Viola Falb (saxophones), Klaus Filip (electronics), Katrin Hauk (guitar), Susanna Gartmayer (bass clarinet), Petr Vrba (trumpet), Michael Krupica (acoustic bass), Maria Petrova (drums), Michael Moser (electric bass), and Michael Danner (sound engineer), with two special guests, the Slovenian musicians Irena Z. Tomažin (vocals) and Ana Kravanja (violin).
The band’s boss Christof Kurzmann, planted on the far right and mostly blowing into his saxophone, quietly commanded the course of events. The collective is sworn to absolute experimentation, and it turned out that “jazz” is merely an umbrella label for everything that happens at their concerts. The very opening, which forced drummer Maria Petrova into laying down a totally trivial rock beat that would fit some punk rock band, hinted that we were in for some real oddballs. Tight cues at just the right moments, solo bursts from saxophonist Falb or trumpeters Berghammer and Vrba, Moser occasionally scraping at his bass with a violin bow, weird sounds from electronic manipulation coming out of Filip’s Apple gadget, extra percussion, interlocking with the acoustic bass,… At moments a total “breakdown” into cacophonous spirals, then a swerve back into structured conversation, in forms where it’s easier to pick out a phrase, yet always prickly and unpredictable. Considering the crew operates as an orchestra, it takes a lot of precision and thoughtfulness to tune a team like that into one body that breathes and communes as a single whole with the magic of the given jazz experiment. One foot of that body stayed planted in pure avant-garde adventure the whole time. The band pulled off the grand finale with Kurzmann inviting both Slovenian musicians on stage. Irena of course froze the audience once again with her remarkable vocal articulation, reviving some sounds you can hardly believe a human body is capable of producing until you hear them. But the biggest surprise was the integration of the Slovenian partisan song Na oknu glej obrazek bled. The orchestra naturally transformed the familiar melody completely, seasoning it masterfully with at times fiercely provocative rhetoric from their own instrumental thicket, with Kurzmann and Tomažin trading vocal lines. Irena sang in Slovenian, Kurzmann (presumably) in Austrian. Huh? An Austrian band playing a Slovenian partisan song? That doesn’t happen every day. An outstanding opening to the new edition of the festival!
Then a leap into the realm of free jazz. When you met the trio Cene Resnik Free Stelar Trio, joined on stage by Chicago trumpeter Rob Mazurek, it was instantly clear why Mazurek gets along so brilliantly and effortlessly with the musical logic of the other three. With both eyes shut, it felt like you were brushing past a real jazz band, a derivative of the Chicago free jazz style. Loaded with complete musical strangeness, a real vagueness for the musical layperson, following total freedom and the spirit of drifting through complex, utterly wild unconventional jazz structures, through which you constantly challenge your inner self and pull out of it an expressive imprint of the genuine, momentary perception of musical magic. The trio is seasoned with every trick in the book. No wonder Resnik and Lasič are also occasional musical partners of Kaučič. Mazurek visibly enjoyed himself with his piccolo trumpet in a collective like this.
Anything but an easy bone to gnaw on, and of course an outstanding musical feast for everyone who doesn’t just have a thick skin but prefers the highest degree of musical complexity, unpredictability, and spontaneity. Intuitive perception of the building blocks of music, with Mazurek and Resnik in front, the quartet often “circling” so that the guys passed free jazz patterns around among themselves. Now and then Mazurek and Resnik fell into a boundless dialogue with each other, while Pacurig and Lasič dutifully waited for their moment, then Lasič replaced Mazurek, and so on… Pacurig gets up, leans over the piano, and starts plucking the piano strings. Nothing unusual for free jazz formatting. Of course, a visitor used to conventional jazz moves is shocked to the core when meeting Resnik and company, and starts wondering what the hell such avant-garde free-spiritedness is even doing on stage. Wild beyond borders, yet incredibly reconciled into a harmonious cumulus of the musicians’ brilliant perception. Cene was visibly swaying during the show. Apparently the guys had been happily tilting a few before the concert. That doesn’t even matter. This fired-up, devilish free jazz, which is hard to get close to, if you can at all, shook and moved the audience.
The first day of the jazz festival in Cerkno for 2018 was closed out by a Croatian collective, a sextet called Franz Kafka Ensemble, represented by Damir Prica Kafka (saxophones), Franjo Glušac (guitar), Bruno Vidović Vorberger (drums, toys), Roko Crnić (electric bass, double bass), Ivan Marincel (trombone), and Igor Pavlica (trumpet). A horn section, drums, bass, and guitar.
The band delivered an excellent experience. Just musical enough and just the right amount spiced with complex virtuosity. What impressed most were the broken-up rhythms, where there’s no room for a “healthy” dance step and, if I may be a little nasty, at best a “spastic” one. Jokes aside. Franz Kafka Ensemble proved to be an incredibly fresh, sharp, and inventively darkly humorous collective, creating a completely original musical calling card, a cunning mix of solid, resolute forms, dosed out by the group with a free-spinning jazz vibe that leads into an “unexpected” experience, yet without free jazz dilettantism. More than once the darkly figured melody, backed by enigmatic rhythmic rhetoric, was also reminiscent of King Crimson’s compositional patterns (Tarred And Feathered). Their debut is similarly meaningfully titled, Circus Noir (black circus), released this very year by the four-year-old collective, made up of experienced and excellent musicians.
The rowdy sextet really spread its wings and played the entire album. They certainly don’t lack drama, but in their playing together they never lose the red thread, and so never fall apart motif-wise, even while constantly flirting with the most eccentric combination of tuned note sequences, which feels especially provocative and appealing to the music gourmand. How do you fuse complexity with a tangible dose of musicality into a mix that’s consistently attractive and endlessly entertaining to listen to? Franz Kafka Ensemble know that best, and with this excellent performance they won at least one badly smitten new fan on the spot that evening (the author of these humble lines).
Postizati vrlo nezadovoljavajuće uspjehe (in translation: “achieving very unsatisfactory results”) is perhaps the most fitting title for everything described above. Rhythmically, Franz Kafka Ensmeble are incredibly strong and tight, rhythm runs in their veins, and you can feel that no collective could put something like this together unless its members had previously played in bands miles apart genre-wise. That’s exactly what gives them the platform for shaping the kind of musical oddity Franz Kafka Ensemble served up in Cerkno.
And just like that, the first day of the 23rd traditional Jazz Cerkno festival was over. As usual on a day like Thursday, the crowd was a tad smaller than you’d wish for. Thursday is still part of the week that’s followed by a working Friday. Still, it was in tune with expectations. So the first day served up absolute musical exclusivity and strangeness. And that’s exactly what experimental music fans come to Cerkno for every year.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
