Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Stari plac / Slovenia
Concert date: 05/19/2018
Attendance: 350
Ticket price: €39.00 (all three days)
Third day and here we go again? Cerkno, of course! Jazz and all the other cultural and artistic creativity that the festival always has plenty of room for. We were already enjoying Gombač’s sound and music workshop for kids in the morning, which whetted our appetites, so we had to set off with Dario on his famous annual tour of the Cerkno hills in the hinterland of Cerkno, where we recharged our batteries with biomass from primary producers. In proven, sacred purity! No colorings, no chemicals, none of the stuff we don’t even know they’re selling us along with everything else every single day, and we only find out when it’s too late.
In short, time at a festival flies by at breakneck speed. Faster than you’d like, and suddenly it’s Saturday. Your sense of time and space slowly slips away. The senses, intuition and instincts sharpen. Reason gets pushed to the back seat, or at the very least stands on equal footing with that part of our soul essence that we have to shove into the background every day and renounce so that we can survive in the »I think, therefore I am« system and forever slave away for our masters. So the last day of fun was still ahead. Backed up by concerts, of course, and an excellent musical matinee. At five in the afternoon, Satoko Fujii, who had played the festival the day before with her Kaze lineup, gave a solo recital in the middle of the music school in Cerkno. As for the effects of the »petrification« caused by a hefty dose of lactic acid fermentation, not even Donat’s magnesium could ease them, so we preferred to hang around for a while in Gabrijel, which of course remains the go-to address for all »parched« throats, a flawless little beer corner.
But at half past seven in the evening we did have to drag ourselves out of the Gabrijel bar and a few meters down the road, where the richest fortress in Cerkno, dedicated to heavenly worship, stands, and in front of it Stari plac, covered with a tent canopy, thoroughly sown with chairs and of course that most essential prop. The stage. People hadn’t forgotten about the festival on Saturday either. The chairs ran out, and a bunch of people watched the concerts standing.
On stage already stood Novo mesto saxophonist Igor Lumpert with his backing crew Innertextures. Igor, in a wool cap on tenor sax, didn’t stand out much in the opening figure of the album »Eleven«, alongside the rest of the company: Greg Ward (alto saxophone), Masa Kamaguchi (double bass) and Jason Nazary (drums). Although the long musical career of this Slovenian jazz standout, who has lived in the US for almost two decades, reveals work made under deep bebop influence, the opener 13th of August didn’t show that all that clearly, but the rest of the album »Eleven« in his rendition gave a real insight into all of Lumpert’s vivid understanding of the elements of bop jazz and how he transforms them into modern jazz rhetoric. The opening piece worked like gradually putting together scattered pieces, which the four musicians fit together. Right away it was clear the band was enjoying itself immensely on stage. The dialogue between Ward and Lumpert, meaning the dialogue of the saxophones, was incredibly playful, conciliatory, dynamic. The support from the rhythm section was exceptional, with plenty of room for every building block to unfold. The opener served as a fitting moment in the concert to fully calibrate the quartet, bring it up to the right working temperature and let the »chemistry« interact and express itself as fully as possible. Finally a band without freejazz outbursts, finally a somewhat gentler treat for the ears. Don’t get me wrong. Having this group on the bill is a very welcome change of pace in the demanding program that jazz delivers, even though Lumpert, with his philosophy of understanding bop, has taken it right to the edge, where it can still get along complementarily with pronounced, complex improvisation, the way Miles revolutionarily hinted at back in the day, but Lumpert does it his own way. The motifs are clear and tangible. Perfect playing, perfect sensing of a fellowship that has serious mileage and a solid history of working together. You can tell in the playing. Loads of instinctive reactions to the feelings at hand as the motifs get strung together. Music is an extraordinary medium. Jazz. »Wondrous« jazz that, in all this sacred, truth-loving free-thinking and purity, we respect so much, value, and ultimately adore. Lumpert and crew opened the third day of the festival in a most attractive and bravura fashion.
At half past nine in the evening, ICP Orchestra took the stage! Which, spelled out, means Instant Composers Pool Orchestra! A Dutch collective featuring Han Bennink (drums). Ab Baars (clarinet, tenor saxophone), Tobias Delius (clarinet, tenor saxophone), Ernst Glerum (double bass), Thomas Heberer (cornet, trumpet), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Guus Janssen (piano), who stepped in for the group’s founding member and pianist Misho Mengelberg, who passed away last year, and then Michael Moore (clarinet, alto saxophone), Mary Oliver (violin, viola)
and Wolter Wierbos (trombone).
ICP Orchestra are legends. They’ve been going since 1967, and of the founding members the incredibly charismatic drummer Han Bennink is the one still in the lineup today, and the collective of course put him dead center on stage. Watching Bennink, who has already visited Jazz Cerkno with some of the members of the collective, it’s incredible how much high-voltage passion and sensual, devoted finesse this gentleman still has in the mature years of his jazz craft. He plays with his eyes closed the whole time, sensual, proud, and with facial grimaces all the way through he shows an almost genuine onstage addiction to the magic of jazz. Even the collective’s name sounds fun. And the music itself is just as endlessly fun, lucid, playful, sparkling and »bouncy«. Since the members belong to a generation that of course came up out of classic jazz elements and tradition, there’s plenty of swing in the numbers, and the collective’s playing doesn’t skimp on the teasing side of cabaret-style merry mischief either.
ICP Orchestra are an incredible embodiment of democracy in musical artistry. So many building blocks, and so much cohesion? And what a mix. Traditional and new. Classical, swing, jazz. Incredible. And when cellist Tristan Honsinger joins the whole shebang vocally too, the picture is complete and you’re suddenly hit by a feeling as if Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby had popped up in Cerkno out of nowhere. The playing evokes the spirit of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Dave Bruebeck, and Louis Armstrong would have found common ground with ICP Orchestra very quickly too
A total disconnect, and Jazz Cerkno was bursting with all that joyful play and cheerfulness, which, through the group’s lucid, enchanting spirit, slowly spread from the stage to the audience and put them under its spell!
The grand finale of this year’s edition of Jazz Cerkno went to the Italian outfit Roots Magic, featuring Alberto Popolla (clarinet, bass clarinet), Errico De Fabritiis (alto and baritone saxophone), Gianfranco Tedeschi (double bass) and Fabrizio Spera (drums). What makes the band interesting is that they love to rework blues standards and cross them with their own jazz rhetoric, and they do it with incredible feel, totally unpretentious, infectious. Roots Magic are an exceptionally tight quartet, where all the building blocks of the sound coexist in remarkable balance and instinctive awareness, and everyone expresses themselves evenly in a full-blooded, conciliatory, symbiotic dialogue. It’s no surprise when the band tackles blues numbers such as The Hard Blues (Julius Hemphill), Frankie and Albert (traditional), Poor Me or Down the Dirt Road Blues (both Charlie Patton), and then The Sunday Afternoon Jazz and Blues Society (both John Carter). Their second record, released last year and called »Last Kind Words«, is entirely the quartet’s own work and delivers a further exploration of the points where traditional blues meets the hot-blooded tricks of jazz improvisation. The band painted exceptionally juicy sonic contrasts, especially when the bass clarinet and baritone sax took the pedestal in dialogue, as well as in the other combinations of the two reed players’ instruments. Extremely solid, concise focus. Coherently tight. From the first second to the last. Polished just enough that it isn’t too demanding and conciliatory just enough that it isn’t too simple. Unpretentious, then suddenly with a strong, potent glow and drive, and in the next moment soft and charmingly proud again. The band didn’t run out of dynamite, the quickly winning nature of the music and the flirty rhythmic »groove« sucked in the listeners in an instant. The crowd was bursting with excitement and all sorts of vibrant reactions. For the grand finale, Roots Magic lifted the festival-goers up toward the sky and put the cherry on top of the big amusement park of the festival’s third day, whose path had been paved by the excellent ICP Orchestra just before. A final crescendo, then. No wonder the audience literally snapped up every last copy of the album »Last Kind Words« after the show.
So the 23rd Jazz Cerkno came to a close, shining in the full-blooded payoff of its mission. In the glow of charisma, uniqueness and a clearly sculpted identity, it keeps making a distinct contribution to our country’s cultural and artistic pulse, a qualitative leap of high and hard-to-reach value! It holds on to its individuality, autonomy, independence and backbone! That’s where we’ll meet again next year. Among nothing but good people and of course on a fresh roller coaster of outstanding jazz.
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