place: Cerkno / Stari plac / Slovenia
date: 19.05.2018
Day three, and Cerkno again? Of course! Jazz plus every other kind of cultural and artistic creativity the festival always has room for. We started the morning with Gombač’s sound-and-music workshop for kids, which whetted our appetite enough that we had to join Dario on his famous yearly tour of the Cerkno hills behind Cerkno, where we recharged our batteries on a biomass of primary producers. Certified holy-clean! No dyes, no chemicals, none of the stuff they sell us every day without us even knowing, until we find out when it’s too late.
Anyway, time at a festival flies extremely fast. Faster than you’d like, and suddenly it’s Saturday. The sense of time and space slowly slips away. Your senses sharpen, along with your intuition and instincts. Ratio gets pushed to the back seat, or at the very least has to share the wheel with that part of our inner essence we have to shove into the background and renounce every day so we can survive in the “I think, therefore I am” system and pleasantly slave away for our masters. So, one last day of enjoyment was left. Backed by concerts, of course, and an excellent music 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 “petrification” caused by all that lactic acid fermenting in our legs, not even Donat’s magnesium could ease it, so we preferred to hang around in Gabrijel for a while, which remains the proper address of the finest beer corner for every “dried-out” throat.
Still, at half past seven in the evening we had to move from the Gabrijel bar a few meters down the road, where the wealthiest fortress in Cerkno, devoted 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. A stage. People didn’t forget about the festival on Saturday either. The chairs ran out, and a bunch of visitors watched the concerts standing.
On stage already stood Novo Mesto saxophonist Igor Lumpert with his backing crew Innertextures. Igor, in a woolen cap on tenor saxophone, didn’t stand out much in the opening figure of the album “Eleven”, alongside the company that also includes Greg Ward (alto saxophone), Masa Kamaguchi (double bass) and Jason Nazary (drums). Although the long musical career of this distinguished Slovenian jazzman, who has lived in the US for almost two decades, reveals that he creates under deep bebop influences, the opening 13th of August didn’t show it all that clearly. The rest of the album “Eleven”, in his rendition, delivered real insight into Lumpert’s vivid grasp of bop jazz elements and how he transforms them into a modern jazz rhetoric. The opening track worked like slowly piecing together scattered fragments, which the four musicians were assembling together. It was clear from the start that the band enjoys being on stage together immensely. The dialogue between Ward and Lumpert, meaning the dialogue of the saxophones, was incredibly playful, conciliatory, dynamic. The rhythm section’s support was superb, and there was plenty of room for all the building blocks to stretch out. The opening number served as the right moment in the set for the quartet to fully calibrate, get up to proper working temperature and let the “chemistry” loose and express itself as thoroughly as possible. Finally a band without free-jazz outbursts, finally a slightly gentler feast for the ears. Don’t get me wrong. Having this group in the lineup is a very welcome change of pace in the demanding program jazz serves up, even though Lumpert, with his philosophy of understanding bop, has brought it to the very edge where it can still get along complementarily with pronounced, complex improvisations, as Miles once revolutionarily hinted, but Lumpert does it his own way. The motifs are clear and tangible. Perfect playing, a perfect sense of camaraderie among guys with serious mileage and a real history of working together. You can feel it in the playing. Lots of instinctive reacting to the feelings at hand as the motifs stack up. Music is an exceptional medium. Jazz. “Quirky” jazz, which we respect, appreciate and, last but not least, adore in all this sacred, truth-loving free-spiritedness and purity. Lumpert and crew opened the third day of the festival in a hugely 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 replaced founding member and pianist Misha Mengelberg, who passed away last year, then Michael Moore (clarinet, alto saxophone), Mary Oliver (violin, viola)
and Wolter Wierbos (trombone).
ICP Orchestra are legends. They’ve been active since 1967, and of the founding members the incredibly charismatic drummer Han Bennink is the one still in the lineup, and the collective naturally put him dead center on stage. Watching Bennink, who has already visited Jazz Cerkno with some members of the collective, you can’t believe how much high-voltage passion and sensual, devoted refinement this gentleman still has in the later years of his jazz craft. He plays with his eyes closed the whole time, sensual, proud, and his facial grimaces constantly show something close to a true stage addiction to the magic of jazz. Even the collective’s name sounds fun. And the music itself sounds endlessly fun too, lucid, playful, sparkling and “bouncy”. Since the members belong to the generation that naturally came out of classic jazz elements and tradition, the numbers are full of swing, without missing the cheeky stuff of cabaret-style merriment in the collective’s playing.
ICP Orchestra are an incredible embodiment of the democracy of musical artistry. So many building blocks, and so much cohesion? And what a mix. Traditional and new. Classics, swing, jazz. Incredible. And when cellist Tristan Honsinger joins in vocally on top of it all, the picture is complete, and you’re suddenly flooded with the feeling that Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby had popped up in Cerkno from out of nowhere. The playing evokes the spirit of Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Louis Armstrong would have found a common language with ICP Orchestra very quickly too
Total disconnect, and Jazz Cerkno was bursting with all that lively playfulness and cheerfulness, which, through the group’s lucidly mischievous spirit, slowly spread from the stage to the audience and put a spell on them!
The grand finale of this year’s Jazz Cerkno went to the Italian lineup Roots Magic, featuring Alberto Popolla (clarinet, bass clarinet), Errico De Fabritiis (alto and baritone saxophone), Gianfranco Tedeschi (double bass) and Fabrizio Spera (drums). The band is interesting in that it likes to play blues standards and cross them with its own jazz rhetoric, and it does so with an 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, expressing themselves equally in a mutual dialogue of full-blooded conciliation and symbiosis. It’s no surprise when the band tackles inserts of blues numbers like 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 further exploration of 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 saxophone went into dialogue on the pedestal, as well as other combinations of the two reed players’ instruments. Extremely solid and concise focus. Uniformly tight. From the first second to the last, they just played. Just offbeat enough that it isn’t too demanding and just conciliatory enough that it isn’t too simple. Unpretentious, then suddenly with a distinct, potent glow and drive, and in the next moment soft and charmingly proud again. The band didn’t run out of dynamite, and the easily winning nature of the music, along with the flirty rhythmic “groove”, instantly sucked in the listeners. The crowd was bursting with enthusiasm and all kinds of vibrant feedback. For the grand finale, Roots Magic lifted the festival-goers up to the sky and put the cherry on top of the big amusement park of the festival’s third day, whose path had been paved just before by the excellent ICP Orchestra. A final crescendo, then. No wonder the audience literally snapped up every copy of the album “Last Kind Words” after the show.
So the 23rd Jazz Cerkno came to a close and shone in the full-blooded yield of its mission. In the glow of charisma, uniqueness and a clearly chiseled stature, it keeps making a distinct contribution to the cultural and artistic pulse of our country, a qualitative standout of high and hard-to-reach value! It keeps its originality, its independence, its autonomy and its backbone! We’ll meet there again next year. Among nothing but good people, and of course on a fresh rollercoaster of exceptional jazz content.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
