Label: Not Two Records
Release date: May 15, 2020
Recorded by: Borut Čelik
Mixing and mastering: Iztok Zupan
Album length: 45.02 min
Genre: Free Jazz / Avant-garde
Rating: 9.5/10
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This year saw the release of a gorgeous commemorative live document, taken from the 23rd edition of the annual Cerkno Jazz festival. On May 18, 2018, the second-day bill at this famous “refuge” for all true music gourmets featured Jubileum Quartet. As the name suggests, it’s four musicians. Gathered for a jubilee. But not just any four. Four entities who, over long careers in music, have left an indelible mark on the avant-garde rhetoric of free jazz.
They are double bassist Joëlle Léandre, tenor saxophonist Evan Parker, pianist Agustí Fernández, and drummer and percussionist Zlatko Kaučič. With the Cerkno show, the quartet grabbed a rare chance to line up the otherwise jam-packed schedules that fill the creative everyday lives of this spectacular crew, and, in honor of Zlatko Kaučič, dedicated the performance to marking the first 40 years of Kaučič’s musical creation and work.
The quartet was originally supposed to play as the second act on the festival’s second-day lineup, but it just so happened that Japan’s Kaze were seriously late getting to the venue. So the festival organizer, who already had one foot at Vienna airport, where he had to dash at top speed to pick up the Japanese band, sent Jubileum Quartet out to kick off the second day’s concert fun – a generous 45-minute dose of colorful free-jazz adventures to keep the always attentive, well-behaved crowd entertained, the kind that never goes missing at the Cerkno Jazz festival.
One track, packed with a hard-hitting yet relentlessly tantalizing, exploratory attitude, powered the quartet through a three-quarter-hour manifesto of a one-of-a-kind live show. It went as expected. Considering how all four musicians approach these one-off get-togethers, it’s actually perfectly logical. At the time the quartet took the stage, it didn’t even have a name, so it performed under a moniker made up of all four surnames, which is hardly rare in free jazz. The track “A uiš?” is a very clever play on words, going by the title alone. An English-speaking Earthling instantly ‘adopts’ it, and in the Cerkno dialect even more so, which proves the quartet’s international appeal.
The quartet stepped onstage with a thoroughly elementary game plan, one that was fundamentally clear to all four musicians, each armed with an incredible wealth of experience. It’s a gentle orientation compass of momentary, contemplative perception shared by all four creators of this album, in a way that opens up a free-spinning, freewheeling path for each other toward the coordinates of the unbridled expanses of free-jazz kinetics, which guaranteed a brilliant showcase of the quartet’s musical talents and genius. No obstacles that would stifle the expressive virtues of the individual jazzers. The logic of this easy, relaxed delivery, with its cheeky maneuvers into avant-garde territory, is staggering. Léandre includes plenty of bowed playing, while Zlatko made sure to bring in a pile of props, making the sonic backdrop even fuller and more dynamic, and (as is his habit) once again uses the entire body of the drums, boosting the reach of his percussive mischief with cheekily skillful provocation. Fernández’s contributions at times reveal his classical background and, in fact, his constant core of fusing elements of classical music with free-jazz adventurism. In this sparkling, dynamic jigsaw puzzle of free-jazz camaraderie, the legendary Evan Parker, 74 at the time of this show, delivers on tenor saxophone what is practically a “mythical sonic” extension of the quartet’s expressive character. The quartet could ‘charge’ into the action in phases with full force, and it’s staggering how much sonic and rhythmic space Zlatko Kaučič covers with his drumming skills, as if he had eight tentacles instead of just a pair of hands. In these moments of dense sonic interweaving, which Zlatko himself holds together within the looseness of the free-jazz structures, this vivid free-jazz ‘serpent’ builds up multiple atmospheric cumulus clouds, with a final crescendo at the very end of the concert, which closes with Kaučič’s thunderous strike on his drum set.
The atonality and diametrical opposition of perceptible interweavings in the free-spirited drift of improvised figures among the four creates a kind of “mantra” that carries you off into a special state of mind, beyond reality. Into a vivid parallel world that, with its unusual grips of avant-garde daring, thrills you when you spin the record and thrilled the festival crowd in mid-May 2018, who showered the group’s performance with salvos of ovations that seemed to have no end. But it’s not all outbursts. There are quite a few moments in the piece that are completely calm and played so that they fade out from circle to circle, to the point where they almost reach silence. Even this beautiful silence isn’t broken by the audience, who stay warily attentive in such moments too.
As I said. Another gorgeous document in the endless series of Zlatko Kaučič’s jazz exploits. This time surrounded by the artful grandeur of three legendary musicians, and you don’t even need to check. Just read the roster of names on the album cover. The rest is created by the magic of this wonderful free-jazz manifesto, which, given the state of the world, feels all the more nostalgic, and on the strength of which live documents like this gain priceless, immeasurable artistic value.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. A Uiš?
Lineup:
Joëlle Léandre – double bass
Evan Parker – tenor saxophone
Agustí Fernández – piano
Zlatko Kaučič – drums, objects
