Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kamnik / Bar Pod Gradom / Slovenia
Concert date: 29.08.2013
Attendance: 60
Ticket price: €0.00 (free entry)
Moonlight Sky are a trio these days, made up of Miha Petric (guitar), Janez Moder (bass) and Žiga Kožar (drums). A trio of properly aligned, creatively performing force lines. On the last Thursday of this August, they touched down right on cue at the legendary Kamnik bar Pod gradom.
Mainly jazz rock fusionists these days, they put out a new studio album last spring, the current »Changing Parmaters« (Celinka 2012) – RockLine review HERE. These are guys who have been at it from the very start, back when they were still a quartet, and in terms of their own one-of-a-kind substance they stand as a unique Slovenian and European musical phenomenon.
At long last, the author of this piece found a bit of free space in a jam-packed everyday life to knock back a round of light Czech Bernard beer in an even more famous Kamnik pub! The clock had struck a quarter past nine in the evening. Did I miss something? Did I walk into the venue during a break? Two things hinted at that possibility. An acoustic guitar parked on stage behind Miha’s back, which its owner Miha Petric didn’t touch once in a mere 45 minutes of the show. And by their ID numbers, Moonlight Sky are in the prime of life and peak vitality, so it’s almost impossible that they’d drive all the way to Kamnik to play just 45 minutes. The show must have started a bit after eight. So I missed half of it. Damn. Clearly the same regime as in Trnovo, where all the racket has to wrap up by ten in the evening at the latest. Gerontocracy, what can you do.
Anyway. At least we’ve got the second half of the set. Its most impressive moment was the second tune, an arrangement of Marcus Miller’s Tutu, famously spiced up with trumpet by jazz giant Miles Davis on the album of the same name from 1986. A seriously thrilling event, then! The engine driving the melody and the flow of things remains the singular guitar approach of the brilliant Miha Petric, backed up safely by the outstanding rhythm tandem of Moder and Kožar. Miha was in his element, took the original jazz form apart and bent it to his own perception of musical experimentation, as effectively as could be. The trio doesn’t lack wit. The piece kept its head and tail and lit up in the voluptuous jazz rock fusion manner of Moonlight Sky’s self-grown musical essence in its updated form. So the second half of the show ran on rock rails. A touch noisier, in other words. Since I didn’t get to enjoy the first half, I assume Petric used the acoustic guitar exclusively in it. In the second half he didn’t touch it at all. To bring the gig to its atmospheric peak, the guys tore into Hendrix’s standard Red House too, and the dot on the »i« of an evening of witty, boundless fun, in the hands of Moonlight Sky’s wealth of improvisational acrobatics, was the closing Jovano Jovanke, originally a traditional Macedonian folk song. Petric sticks strictly to playing with the fingers of his right hand, following the example of the famous six-string tunes of Vlatko Stefanovski (Leb i Sol). Right on. The connection between the musician, his musical perception and the instrument, as an expressive »extension« of the realization of his ideas, is as genuine as it gets.
Half in the dark. The guys had just three modest little spotlights aimed at their backs. That, plus the absence of a microphone, kept them a bit removed from the audience, who nonetheless filled every last corner of the seating in the courtyard of the Pod gradom bar and rewarded the band enthusiastically at the ends of songs, as well as at the ends of the individual players’ solo adventures. Moonlight Sky remain a concert attraction, then. They hit you with a colorful arsenal of many fused genres and an organic-sounding tone that’s warmly appealing and effectively filled out (put to full use) by the triangle of instruments. A touch of the spontaneous and unpredictable is present throughout and remains an important element of the charismatic appeal of Moonlight Sky’s stage essence.
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