Boys’ music

Pawel Karszmarczyk came with his Audiofeeling Band from Poland with all the confidence in the world and a cool, youthful presentation and recent awards for his album and for him as pianist so I was looking forward to this one. I was disappointed. Not with his playing or the playing of any of the other band members. Pawel was wonderfully slick and skilled and expressive and had a great tone and obvious classical chops. He was very good. So was Grezch Piotrwski who blew fast and hard on tenor sax that flowed through tonal and atonal lines with nonchalant ease. And Maciej on bass did some cool solos and held the rhythm with solidity and played with synths for some nifty sounds and Dawid Fortuna played with speed and abandon. It wasn’t that. I was just disappointed that this was just all it was. This was boys’ music - hot skills and lots of energy and every solo crescendoed to abandon – but the melodies were mostly obvious and the chords were common and repeated and I heard Hollywood rather than New York. Did I mention, they were tight and arranged, too: recorded-rock-band tight. These players were worthy and sometimes I even enjoy West Coast music with its slick commercialism and succulent popularity. But when I think of that gig with Jason Moran and his sense of history and his similarly cool Gen-? presence, I just wish for more. I asked the guy I was sitting with what he thought and he responded “It’s OK” and he had it spot on. Pawel could be so good. He’s got great sound and perfect touch and endless skills but this was just OK to my ears. Perhaps because he could be so good that it’s so disappointing. He’s got plenty of time, as long as those awards don’t kill whatever humility he has. The Audiofeeling Band was led by Pawel Karszmarczyk (piano) with Grezch Piotrwski (tenor sax), Macirj Adamczak (bass) and Dawid Fortuna (drums).

Brave Mr Blackbird

Night two of the European Jazz Nights mini festival at the Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene and it’s another three bands. The first band tonight is Loch / Balthus / Herskedal. Now this is an interesting combination and a change from the piano / bass / drums + sax standard. This is piano, trumpet / flugelhorn and tuba. Can these guys swing with this mix? Yes. It was a very cosy and sometimes bouncy swing, sometime with a circus-vibe, and quite gentle and lyrical set of tunes, but these guys did swing. I loved the tuba with its gentle and billowing groove that had just enough attack to lay down the beat. And Daniel Herskedal’s tuba just cut the bass lines. They were right on, swinging and sweetly embroidered with higher register fills and truncated notes, or bow-like with big, sustained tones. This was nice playing and perfectly catching the bass role in jazz and giving it that warm presence of tuba. Lovely! The others were similarly lyrical. Bert Lochs on trumpet and more frequently on the warmer flugelhorn stated his own melodic tunes with smooth melody and honey solos. Dirk Balthus’ piano was restrained and direct with intimations of Keith Jarrett and dissonances from symmetric movements up or down the keyboard. This music sat gently and eased the mind and heart. One composition was called Brave Mr Blackbird and it told the story of this music. Others were called Zany or B-tango or Capriccioso, but I felt Mr Blackbird better expressed the heartfelt simplicity of the band. It was soft and I enjoyed the honesty and the different tonality of this band. Something different; something true. Bert Lochs (trumpet, flugelhorn), Dirk Balthus (piano) and Daniel Herskedal (tuba) opened for the second European jazz night at the Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo.

Back to Bare

Back to Bare Jazz for an occasional live concert upstairs in the cafe. I arrive as Hanna Paulsberg and her band are negotiating space and drums and upright piano in a corner that must take a quartet with double bass.
It's all part of the game and an amusing interlude before their short set. Hanna and her mates studied jazz at Trondheim and she assured me it's a good school. Good on Trondheim to be so lucky. They perform just a few original tunes in a style reminiscent of Wayne Shorter and '60s postbox. Satisfying tone from Hanna, some dotted crotchet grooves, waltzes and moderate swing. A pleasant interlude in this cool record store cum cafe with Norwegians enjoying the mild weather. It's autumn here, and the jackets are needed by all, not just tourists, but it’s OK out of the wind and the sun sparkles at a strangely low altitude. Here’s also a pic of fellow tenor-play Hanna Steinsholm sharing a drawing she did at the gig. Hanna Paulsberg Concept are Hanna Paulsberg (tenor), Oskar Grönberg (piano), Trygve WalkemarFiske (bass) and Hans Hulbækmo (drums).

Extremities

Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio are Finnish but have connections. Mikko performed a drums/alto/vocal dedication to John Tchicai who died only weeks before, and another composition that was influenced by Yusef Lateef. It just shows the company that these guys keep. I could believe it.
They didn’t take themselves too seriously given plenty of sly chuckles and smiles, but this was out there and as serious as your lives. I guess some improvisation was free but there were clear written parts, complex unison or harmonised lines with intervals that most wouldn’t find, neat counterpoint when Mikko accompanied on baritone sax, fluid melodicism from both the horns but plenty of frenetic excess too. The skills and chops and beauty were clear in sinuous tenor or alto but so were the escapes to extremes of noise and strange superabundant beauty. The keyboard, too, was mostly extreme, seldom pianistic but UFO-logical, groovy with funk rhythms and bluesy-tinged solo development at times and whimsical with sampled sounds and one sampled R&B woman’s voice for the funk number. The drums were a ring-in for the night, but with Mikko’s brother-in-law so not unknown to the band. This was extreme and madly skilled and funky and fun and sometimes touching music (“Where did you go, John [Tchicai]”) but never indulgent and always in touch. Wow and world class to my ears. Innkvisitio are from Finland and were led by Mikko Innanen (alto, tenor, baritone saxes) with Fredrik Ljungkvist (tenor sax, clarinet), Seppo Kantonen (synth) and visitor Stefan Pasborg (drums).

Every breath

Thought-Fox is an Irish band, but as I listen to the patter of singer and leader Lauren Kinsella, I learn that they are based in London and pianist Tom Gibbs is now resident in Glasgow. This music is joy to my ears.

Firstly, it has vocals, although mostly wordless, and that makes it human. Lauren is all breathes and puffs and clicks and improvised vocal tones. I think Bjork and a singer I chat with mentions Sofia Jemberg. Lauren tells me later that she finds inspiration in the tones of languages even when she doesn’t understand them and this fits. Think of those vocal tones that you lose when you settle to your native language. She continues to play with these. There are words there, too, although less often. Words form TS Elliot’s The Wasteland in one; words written by Lauren in another; in another there were words written by another band member that Lauren was thankful for, joking that singers usually get stuck with writing the words. But this was a lovely band, too, not just a singer. I felt Lauren melded wonderfully in unison lines and in intertwining melody with trumpeter Laura Jurd (lovely to see a female trumpeter). Laura’s solos, too, were strong and with meaning: some nicely unexpected pitches, some imploring tones and some one long flourish that surprised me but demonstrated skills. I noticed Tom Gibbs on piano as secure in an easily dissonant but sturdy style. I really liked the confidence and steady thought, but I didn’t expect the several piano trio segments to be explosive. They were. Drums were not flashy but were purposeful and bass was strong with nicely jagged syncopation. This trio was paying together so nicely. Then there were some all-in improvs where bass set an unwavering ostinato and the voice and trumpet and piano and even drums variously appeared with snippets of melody and returned to a melange of rhythm. And then I realised how worked were the arrangements and how neatly the band performed them. Lauren had mentioned that they are about to release their CD so maybe it’s recently well-practiced, but she told me they are also preparing for a festival gig. Whatever, this was well prepared and attractive music with energy and I enjoyed it with my feet as much as my head. In some ways, a compleat band. Thought-Fox are Lauren Kinsella (vocals), Laura Jurd (trumpet), Tom Gibbs (piano), Michael Coady (bass) and Simon Roth (drums).

Caos

Caos Musique is an Italo-French collaboration. Angelo Oliveri leads from trumpet with trombone, electronics and drums. Firstly, I luxuriate in satisfying tone and a melodic ear and obvious harmonic skills as Angelo runs solos and toys with sequences with gentle persistence.
Next I am thrilled by French trombonist, Yves Robert, with his screeds of notes and supple tonguing and tones and flexible pitch. Yves is all sixteenths notes and ridiculously fluent slithering melody and yet is also delightful and decisive in counterpoint when called for. This is a lovely, purposeful although diverse pair. I didn’t click so easily with the others. I found the electronics harsh and intrusive next to the beauty of acoustic instruments well played. I wonder if the balance is right. Shouldn’t these processed tones be just recognisable (that’s how I do reverb in recordings) but they blare at times, then are absent at others. Then I hear a ballad that uses electronica effectively and I’m more comfortable, but it’s just that tune. The drums, too, are somewhat at disjunction from the two brass instruments, with a heavy tone and flowery presentation with lots of feints and otherwise an ornery urgency that seems out of place. I’m wondering if maybe my journey in music is to the past, to a love of acoustic tone and harmonic knowledge and instrumental skill - to the building blocks – but I’m not sure that’s true. I enjoy this band for the twin brass that’s so diverse in style yet so capriciously communicative, but I wonder if the drums, as essential as they are, and the electronics add much to my ears. Caos Musique are Angelo Olivieri (trumpet), ECM recording artist Yves Robert (trombone), Antonio Pulli (electronics) and Marco Ariano (drums).

All to Oslo

This may be the best jazz club in the Scandinavia. Maybe the world. Certainly I like it. I’m in Oslo and the Nobel prizes for science have just been announced in the last week and the Ghanaian Ashanti crown jewel have just been stolen from the lobby of a local hotel. Norway is rich but it also seems to punch strongly for a country with only 4.5 million people. It’s something I feel in Europe with plenty of small nations. Australia may be out of the way but we should expect to have significant influence with a decent population and wealth, but we stubbornly remain in thrall to one or other great power or political thought pattern. Just think of the future of our jazz school in context of the cult of management and economy and dread. This jazz club, the Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene, is virtually across the road from the Parliament building and I someone suggested it receives government funding, perhaps like a national jazz theatre. It certainly looks like a repurposed theatre. Decent stage, tiered cabaret-styled seating at back and café tables up front; a few boxes and low lighting and several bars and a garderobe and great stage lighting and a digital mixer and a linear array and foldback that Lauren Kinsella praised. Not a pristine environment, but musically and socially effective and comfortably dark - and no waiters serving drinks at tables during gigs. Perhaps the best jazz club I have encountered. I’m in this town for just hours and will be here for just days, but I’ve found Bare Jazz, a stunningly attractive and popular jazz CD-store-cum-café. And thus I found the Victoria. Looking very good. A prize due already for jazz in this city. But it’s the performance that ultimately matters, and I’d arrived for a two night series of European Jazz Nights, featuring 3 bands per night. This was the first night.

What are we here for?

Travelling on this ship in Norway isn’t as serious as Ellington’s original: we are here for the Aurora Borealis. Megan had never seen an aurora and it was the genesis of this trip. I’d seen one, or at least the Aurora Australis, our Southern counterpart, outside Bungendore in a break while playing with White Cockatoo, a bush band, in ~1990. That was a beautiful and established memory: rippling blues and reds and greens in a curtain stretching from ~10-60 degrees from the horizon. We had been worrying that we’d miss this one. All the way from Bergen, the sky had been overcast or raining. Then we wondered if it was too early in the year or if there was too much moon. We avidly checked aurora prediction websites and the SOHO observatory and meteorological sites. The background level was 2 on a scale of 7, ie, low auroral activity. This didn’t sound too exciting. But then the sites raised short-term forecasts to high activity on the night of 7/8 October due to an observed Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). (Aurorae are charged particles from an active Sun that glow when caught in the Earth’s magnetic field. They peak every 11 years with the sunspot cycle and have a 28 day sub-cycle related to solar rotation. Unpredictable CMEs can send particles to Earth and cause otherwise unexpected auroral activity). But the weather was predicted to be overcast. In the end, at 10pm, the sky was clear, the Moon was not risen and the aurora was stunning. We saw streams of green over the ship, horizon to horizon: we were right under it. Mostly yellow-green, but with some rare tinges of red or purple at the edges; constant, billowing movement; great clouds or sinuous snakey trails; occasional whisps or dark lines. Stunning beauty. We got out at 1am and 4am too, but nothing like the first. I got some pics, but not as good as those of Thomas Stutz of Switzerland with his Nikon full frame and 14-24 f2.8 lens and tripod and 3sec exposures at ISO1600. His were superb. Here are a few of mine (handheld) and the link to Thomas’ site. Expect Thomas' pics by end October.

Thomas Stutz photos

Thinking of piano men

Tristan Parrock is a piano man and the only regular entertainment on this little ferry-cum-cruise liner. He does a good job, but it’s not too easy. The passengers are pretty mature crew. Not that that totally writes of a party atmosphere. But they are mostly Brits or Germans. Grog is seriously dear here for Brits with their economy and for German with their cheap prices. So Tristan gets a steady flow of people with coffee cups to listen, and there are one or two bar-hangers, but this is not a raging audience. But he does a good job.

I sat there admiring the all-encompassing nature of the job. This is one guy who sings, runs an accompanying drum machine, plays left hand bass and right hand piano chords. It’s a neat one-man band with a nice feel and some variation; it’s not just sequenced regularity. And I was particularly impressed by the bass lines. They sounded just right. He’s got that left hand loose and rhythmic and independent. But even more than that. It got me thinking that the lines are just as they should be. I guess this is because he’s doing it all. The right and left hands are a package, even if independent, and both fit to, and serve, a vocal line (which is the most important part) that he is also performing. So there are no unnecessary or unfitting fills or improvs. This is neat and eminently suitable interplay, because one person, one mind, is doing it all. It must take some time to develop the skills to do this, even on popular piano-bar numbers that we all have in our heads, but it’s a skill that I’ve recently enjoyed and even marvelled at. Piano bar is not something I hear too often (recently it’s been once per ship) but it’s a particular and attractive skill. I’m enjoying this one. But then, just to confirm how hard it is, I ran off with everyone else when the PA announced an aurora was on view on deck. Being the piano man can be a lonely job, but we all know that from the music.

Tristan Parrock (piano, vocals) is the piano man on the Hurtigruten ship MS Richard With.

Hurtigruten

Back on ship. We’re taking the famed Hurtigruten line up the Norwegian coast to Nordkapp - the northern-most point in Europe, on the good and quite compact ship MS Richard With. It’s an interesting cross of mail and supply ship, ferry and modest cruise ship. There’s not much music, so the reports will be sparse, but before leaving, a student of the Grieg Academy (Griegakademiet) came on board for a short concert of Grieg’s music. I understand the Grieg Academy is a music conservatory in Bergen serving two institutions. They are lucky enough to have one but Norway has done some clever things that Australia hasn’t. Think oil wealth and fisheries. Through state ownership and licensing of exploration and production, they have made a motza and invested it wisely in a sovereign fund. We struggle with our MRRT* and even then it's controversial. Fisheries, too. A Norwegian in the fisheries industry told us of Norway, unlike Europe, managing its fisheries for sustainability. And as for conservatoria, I presume Bergen understands how easy it is to dismantle and how difficult to build. But what of Grieg?

Katrin Sofia Heyland played six tunes from Grieg on piano. The circumstances were poor but she played capably considering the unresponsive and relatively dull electric piano and the chatty bar. This is classics as in Hippo: noise and chatter. I found the Grieg Norwegian folk-inspired, quite jumpy with odd time feels, sometimes leaden with left hand melody, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes lighter and sprightly but not too often, sometimes mournful. A worthy performance, doubly so given the circumstances. Katrin Sofia Heyland (piano) performed Grieg on the Ms Richard With while in port in Bergen.

* Mining the truth, Australia Institute, viewed 7 Oct 2012

Back to Bb

Stephane Belmondo’s session at the Bb last night got the title “The same as it never was before”. It’s meaningless and a thought twister but it’s apt for music like this. The tunes didn’t matter too much. Megan commented that there was no melody, and she’s essentially right. There was a ballad with some appealing melody and Round Midnight, played as an encore just a few minutes early, had a luscious and identifiable melody although Stephane’s skills and inventiveness embellished this to no-end too. The Bb program notes for the night talks of a “post hard-bop style mixed with a more classical jazz” but I pretty much heard it as harp-bop. No complaints there; I was writhing in pleasure at some of the best of the style that I’ve ever heard.

These guys are masters and seniors of the craft. They start hot to trot from the top, but then get hotter, and the play on, long sets of perspiration and streams of notes. But I also noticed a nice, professional mix of tunes. Boppers don’t usually swap instruments – they are masters of their own – but for the first tune in set two, Kirk took up flute and Stephane plucked piano strings and harmonised on conch shell. That was new to me. He pitched with a hand moving in and out of the opening and it was interesting and surprisingly effective as an instrument. But it couldn’t match a valved instrument. Stephane was wondrous with phrasing that bamboozled me at times. Lines that start and stop unexpectedly; twisted, scalar, sequences, dissonant, sidestepped, substituted. All the techniques but with a cleverness and artistic purpose that rose above all this. And great tone; rich, rounded, tongued; on trumpet and what seemed a very large flugelhorn. A master of the craft. But ears, too. I noticed the interplay of Stephane and Kirk on piano. Kirk was all big handed playing, coloured extensions, thematic variation, and eyes. He hardly looked down at the keys, always eyes at Stephane or drummer Laurent, always prodding, playing, switching, leading. The harmonic responsiveness between brass and piano was a wonder, and the rhythmic play between drums and piano were similarly real. I thought New Orleans with his bluesy funked up grooves and his stagey, jokey interactions and more-important-than-life commitment. This was sweat with the blues like it mattered. Nothing else in the world for these few hours. Laurent picked up on it. He was a driving monster with eyes to the band and the longest and sweatiest drum solos I’ve heard for some time in jazz. I forget Sylvain, but his solo was a wonder, too, using open strings wonderfully for a busy solo throughout the fingerboard and a great tone (a mic under the bridge and little GK), his walks strong and slightly ahead of the beat, and some very effective but not intrusive grooves. All round, these were experts. Earlier on I was most taken by Kirk and his colour and rich variation and harmonic leadership, but at the end I was drooling over Stephane’s phrasing and fluency and inventive melodic ideas. The take on Round midnight was just a blissful reminder of just how far these guys have taken the art. The variation and richness against something known just demonstrates the level of their artistry. This was a blowout by some of the best. Stéphane Belmondo (trumpet, flugelhorn) played with Kirk Lightsey (piano), Sylvain Romano (bass) and Laurent Robin (drums) at Bb in Berlin.

Just in passing, I’ll comment on jazz crowds. They are interesting. One bloke was writing stream of consciousness at the gig - Finnegan’s wake in Bb? His mate was an amateur guitarist and professional photographer. Here’s a funny story I had chatting to another bloke. “Guitarist?”, “No” … “Musician?”, “Yes, trumpet”, chuckling “I just thought guitarist because you wear a hat like Kurt Rosenwinkel”, laughs all round, “First time I met Kurt was in my kitchen one morning after he’d stayed over”. Wow, small world, cool, Berlin!