Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Jerneja Jerak
Venue: Kino Šiška
Concert date: 05.04.2016
Ticket price: 15 € / 18 €
On Tuesday, Nerve, a New York collective led by world-famous drummer Jojo Mayer, stopped by Ljubljana’s Kino Šiška as part of their European tour.
The band came together toward the end of the nineties as a kind of offshoot of the Prohibited Beatz electro parties that Mayer ran between 1996 and 2001. The events were designed to blur the line between electronic and acoustic music and to fuse genres that seem like polar opposites at first glance.
Nerve consists of three stage musicians plus sound engineer Aaron Nevezie, who stays in constant contact with the rest of the band and adds elements to the sound that are usually added in post-production. For the past few years, Jacob Bergson has been on keys and DJ duty, adding a ton to the band’s wildly varied and wide-ranging sonic palette. The core of the band, though, is Jojo Mayer and John Davis. Live, Davis manages to conjure up some really interesting bass sounds, ranging from jazz all the way to dubstep, using nothing but an electric bass and analog effects. The main driving force of the collective is of course Jojo Mayer, a musician who has already worked with many giants of the jazz scene and is one of the most respected and admired drummers on the planet. His current work revolves around incorporating electronic elements into acoustic music, and he’s really good at it.
The band looks like a jazz trio, with the musicians set up so they could see each other and the sound engineer the whole time. On stage there were acoustic drums with a minimal dose of electronics, an electric bass with an amp and effects, plus keyboards and a DJ mixer. The sound they made with these instruments, though, was a long way from classic jazz or rock. Over a two-hour set, they laid out their unique vision for a packed hall. It’s a kind of merger and upgrade of the two musical extremes of the 21st century. I’d have a really hard time pinning Nerve down to a genre, since their compositions draw on elements of jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, dubstep, minimal, ambient, jazz, fusion, rock and at moments even djent, all of it tied together brilliantly with improvisation. It’s worth stressing that all the musicians are super tight and nobody tries to outshine the others. That’s especially to Mayer’s credit: even though he’s an incredibly technical drummer, he has a really great feel for the music and for the other musicians creating it with him. He shows off his technical mastery most clearly in the chaotic parts, where he occasionally splits off from the band and follows his own internal metronome, leaving everyone in the hall confused about what rhythm to sway to, and then rejoins his bandmates on the downbeat without breaking a sweat. Every time that happened, the crowd went wild and rewarded him with a really loud ovation. In moments like these he makes the clearest case for his principle that human emotion and creativity will always beat the computer.
Jojo Mayer and Nerve prove that electronic music can blend beautifully with acoustic, that people still care about live playing, that improvisation still means a huge deal even in a world where computer-made music rules the roost and human creative input keeps shrinking, and that technology should serve human creativity instead of being its own tool and purpose.
text. Klemen Udovč
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