Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Cerkno / Stari plac / Slovenia
Concert date: 18.05.2018
Attendance: 350
Ticket price: 39,00€ (for all three days)
And then came day two of this year’s 23rd edition of the traditional Jazz Cerkno festival. Once again with three exceptionally interesting acts on the day’s bill. And once again, half past seven in the evening was when the jazz kicks off in Cerkno. Before that, though, we got through a rainy, muggy, but by no means dull day in pretty thrilling fashion. Among other things, with an adrenaline-fueled climb up Kojca (1301 m a.s.l.) in the Cerkno Hills, in the company of a wily crew member who headed up there without any hiking gear, followed by a “cleansing” program of putting the beer menu at Bar Gabrijel through its paces.
First on the program were the Japanese band Kaze, but at half past seven, when things got going, they were still catching their breath after a “rocket” expedition from Vienna (more on that below). Luckily, four musicians were already on site and at the organizer’s disposal: Slovenian Zlatko Kaučič (drums, percussion), Brit Evan Parker (reeds), Frenchwoman Joëlle Léandre (double bass) and Spaniard Agustí Fernández (piano), “shortened” to Kaučič / Parker / Léandre / Fernández. Zlatko has no hiding places in Cerkno. The exceptional musical visionary earned his own inventory number here long ago, and the very growth of jazz in the town has been tied up with him one way or another over the years. Given his body of work, he’s one of the musicians who practically define the festival itself, the very jazz pulse of Cerkno. We saw the man at the start of May this year at a solo gig in Bar Gabrijel, but this time the situation was completely different. The quartet know each other very well, since the members had already worked together before. Léandre once played the festival (in 2009) and even gave a solo recital at the music school in Cerkno.
The members quickly delivered first-rate proof of why they ended up on stage together. The chemistry between them is simply extraordinary. Free-jazz principles, experimentalism and avant-garde adventurism at every step of their playing. Mandatory eye contact, and at times pronounced, instinctive reactions to what the individual players were doing. Seriously demanding stuff, yet loosened up into witty, experimental exploration. This time Kaučič left aside the sonic manipulation he likes to include when he’s alone on stage, but that didn’t make his hands any less full, as he used all kinds of beaters to coax sound not just out of the drumheads but out of the entire frame of his drum kit. At times he even set the sticks aside and hit the drums with his bare hands. Delicate yet incredibly compatible lines from all four building blocks, which at first listen drift off in their own directions, completely independent of each other. In reality it’s an incredibly in-tune and coherent chemistry that barely gets caught up in the grip of rational and logistical empiricism in music, even though of course it does that too. The rhythm section above all, with the exceptionally skilled and musically intuitive Joelle expertly filling out Kaučič’s lively rhythms, laid the right platform for a dialogue between reeds and piano. Leandre’s omnipresence is unbelievable. In her right hand she keeps a bow the whole time, using it on the double bass to accompany individual motifs and give such tones almost the connotation of a musical mantra. Exceptional charisma in musical freedom. A brilliant, inspiring performance by four extremely compatible musicians, whose boundless musical unusualness only confirms this enigmatic compatibility and mutual harmony. All the building blocks coexist in interplay and expression, arranged into a gorgeous balance and a real sonic contrast within the soundscape they create. Even in the sections where the lines grow tense and, say, Fernandez explodes like a thunderstorm with almost blasphemously fast machine-gun bursts of notes from the piano, the other three building blocks keep an extremely clear common thread and focus on this musical unusualness. An incredible reconciliation of provocative musical sweetness, which only jazz can deliver when it flirts with avant-garde approaches.
We also caught the Japanese-French quartet Kaze, led by the charismatic and tremendously prolific sixty-year-old jazz musician and pianist Satoko Fujii. Keeping her company in the lineup are her partner in good times and bad, Natsuki Tamura on trumpet, and two French musicians, Peter Orins on drums and trumpeter Christian Pruvost, the latter two also companions from the bands Impressions and Muzzix. So: two trumpets, piano and drums. A completely unusual combination, just as the group’s music is unusual. Unlike the opening act, Kaze are a band that bets more on tangible motivic substance, although you can sense detours into free jazz, since Kaze too sometimes drift all the way to the edge of completely smashing up motivic templates and into a free-spinning interplay of free-spirited improvisations among the building blocks of the sound. The motifs may be more tangible, but in the long compositions they develop in such a way that you can never predict where the quartet will swim off to next within a given motif. The element of spontaneity was present the whole way through. At the same time, Kaze can also be very musical. The piano holds the motif, the drums hold the rhythm, and the dynamics come from the often harmonized trumpets over the top. Satoko Fujii’s improvising and experimenting is rounded out by an incredible stylistic vividness. From neoclassicism to world music. Her immersion in the given moods is incredible, as she constantly waves between unbridled scatteredness and serene, gentle softness and cheerfulness, which completely calms the churning waves of the improvisational escapades. And she does it nonstop. Satoko acts like an entity unto herself within the quartet and, with her expressive musical penetration, practically dictates the development of a given composition and the very use of the tools and levers of improvisation. Even if you can’t spot it right away, there’s a heap of filigree work and touches of fine aesthetics in Kaze’s music. The trio of men follow the musician’s moves with remarkable skill, and Kaze as a whole come across as an entity of incredibly vivid musical enchantment woven from the blending and interlacing of several genre palettes. They head toward the edge of avant-garde adventurism, but never address the listener with extreme unusualness and outbursts of “musical weirdness.” Exceptional, in short. The omnipresence of the trumpets and the lightness of the compositions do summon, from somewhere far away, the restless spirit of Miles Davis’ pioneering, but it’s merely a kindred energetic vibe, especially when you watch how the musicians step into their solo spots and how they prepare the right space for each other beforehand for the perfect improvisational maneuver. There was also a heap of unusual tone coloring on the trumpets, which kept surprising and thoroughly, lucidly entertaining. Satoko Fujii also uses the piano’s strings themselves, coaxing out of them, with the help of all sorts of props, a further multitude of unusual sounds that the lay listener usually doesn’t even expect from piano playing. Satoko Fujii took the time to tell the audience about the trip from Kraków to Cerkno, when Kaze nearly got stuck in Poland because they were left without a booked flight. So they rented a car to Vienna, and from the other end of Europe the caring and self-sacrificing festival boss Simon, who’s becoming more and more the rightful successor to Boštjan Cvek, drove to Vienna and ferried the band safely to Cerkno. The Japanese musician said the band is extremely honored to play in Slovenia and to enjoy the beauty of this little corner of our country. Satoko Fujii performed the next day, the third day of the festival, a solo recital at the music school too, and one more curious detail. While we were lazily sitting in front of Gabrijel at around half past six in the afternoon, drummer Peter Orins turned up at our table from somewhere, and not to buy a round, but to borrow an umbrella, because the whole of Friday it really kept pouring from the sky on and off.
Rob Mazurek, a Chicago musician who loves playing with the word “underground,” since the second half of his band’s name, Underground, takes a different label depending on the geographic origin. Normally Underground is preceded by Chicago, but in 2014 the musician played Cerkno in a combination with two Brazilian musicians, and Underground got, for instance, Sao Paulo in front. For a couple of years now, though, Mazurek has been working with a crew on the US-England axis, so he renamed the formation Chicago / London Underground.
The Chicago Underground crew (Mazurek and drummer Chad Taylor) plus the Brits John Edwards on double bass and pianist Alexander Hawkins make up the formation Chicago / London Underground. Last year this quartet put out an excellent record called “A Night Walking Through Mirrors,” played in one piece at a concert and later released as an album. And their musical meeting point? An incredibly special blend and musical experience. In Cerkno, another Brit, Evan Parker, joined them on stage for part of the show, having earlier played in the already mentioned, stirring Kaučič / Parker / Léandre / Fernández quartet. That created a unique musical body and with it a new musical formation, naturally far more in love with free-jazz rhetoric. The album “A Night Walking Through Mirrors” itself, which the band mostly played at this concert, thus took on completely new musical dimensions. Mazurek and Parker repeatedly stopped to trade lines in a dialogue between piccolo trumpet and tenor saxophone. Exceptionally witty contrasting, at moments as if two completely different voices were bickering, but playful and fun all the way through. That evening Mazurek’s samples weren’t as expressive, the crew had a more classic sound, but it was driven by the distinct kinetics of a new situation and the new challenges that such a situation opens up in the options of improvised play. Partly thanks to guest Evan Parker. Toward a new dimension.
How strong these musicians are, how multilayered in their skills and how limitlessly they grasp the magic of music, is confirmed by the fact that they can perform in a given combination of concert networking, fully and credibly, even though they had never played together on stage before. That’s how the record “A Night Walking Through Mirrors” came about, recorded at a concert in London, and nobody would be surprised, let alone bothered, if Chicago / London Underground also put out an album from the Cerkno show.
Mazurek also didn’t forget a touch of glam, which he brought with funny percussion props, some stage excesses topped off with yelling into the microphone, and the glam element itself he also brought with his tinted glasses, which he’d already worn on stage the day before, when he played as a special guest at the gig by Cene Resnik and his trio. A solid musical bone to gnaw on to close out day two of Jazz Cerkno.
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