Monthly Archives: January 2010

Concert review: Jan Garbarek Group

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Town Hall, Birmingham UK
29-01-10
Well, if anyone should know how to warm a chilly, and possibly chilled, audience it’s the Norwegian saxophonist. But he didn’t do that straight away. For those who had strode through snow flurries and held pink noses to the icy winds to get there, the Jan Garbarek Group – Rainer Bruninghaus on keyboards, Yuri Daniel on bass and Trilok Gurtu on drums – conjured up an equally shivery opening in a near full Town Hall.

Jan Garbarek (Picture: Russ Escritt)

Against a striking tented backdrop the band looked like intrepid mariners before the mast of a high-tech sailing ship. Bruninghaus provided a synthesized Arctic wind while Gurtu added depth-charged drum rumbles and Daniel more low thunder; Garbarek, meanwhile, shrieked and squawked like tearing ice sheets over it with his signature soprano sound.

But then we were into the lyrical bass melody that introduces The Tall Tear Trees and the thaw was upon us.

And there was plenty of warmth to follow in a generous two and a half-hour, unbroken set, which included other favourites from the recent Dresden CD (ECM), like Once I Dreamt A Tree Upside Down, the funky Maracuja and the almost Celtic-sounding Voy Cantando.

The last time Garbarek’s group played Birmingham it was with Eberhard Weber on upright electric bass, and Marilyn Mazur the percussionist. The band was excellent but had a certain detached feel. During the solo showcases, the other three would sit on chairs at the back of the Symphony Hall stage looking for all the world like anxious patients in a dentist’s waiting room. If only they had had some old copies of Country Living or Saga Magazine, I could have relaxed.

This time they might have retained those silly backstage seats but at least they were more hidden behind backline amp and monitors, and the lighting was more subdued. The music too is a lot less detached than before. This is mainly due to the more focused pulse provided by Yuri Daniel’s electric bass guitar and the boisterous and fabulously engaging Gurtu, a man for whom the words shrinking violet remain a complete mystery.

Garbarek gave each player a substantial solo spot though, with the exception of Gurtu’s, which included some tongue-knotting konnakol singing as well as manipulating tin cans with wires attached and dipping things in a bucket, the concert would have been stronger without them. It was revealing that the leader did not take one himself.

But it is the group play and interplay which remains most satisfying: Daniel providing the foundation, Bruninghaus the harmonic riches, Gurtu the at-times almost Baroque rhythmic decoration and Garbarek, favouring the soprano for most of the evening, soaring above it all with his strongly folk-inspired melodies

The saxophonist has developed a style of playing which is centred on the sound, the timbre of his instrument, but also on the nuances of phrasing and the constant reshaping of this sound. He has also found a way of making a new music that relies on the basic structure and constituent parts of jazz music without making any obvious references to that music’s past. He doesn’t play conventional “solos” and doesn’t really like to refer to his music as jazz.

Nevertheless, he attracts – and satisfies – a substantial and enthusiastic jazz audience happy to accompany him on his travels to fresh musical lands.

Disc of the day: 29-01-10

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Trichotomy: Variations (Naim Jazz naimcd131)
The more one listens to modern jazz piano trios the more one realises just how influential E.S.T have been. No group since the Bill Evans Trio in the 1960s has so profoundly altered the path taken by the perfect little combo of acoustic piano, double bass and drums.

The opener, Island Of The Sun, could fool many in a blindfold test into thinking they had stumbled on an unreleased E.S.T. recording, albeit from their early, From Gagarin’s Point Of View period. And if they listened to At The Right Moment, its follow-up, in the same circumstances, they might think of the Tord Gustavsen Trio.

But to suggest that this Australian threesome of Sean Foren (piano), John Parker (drums) and Patrick Marchisella (bass) are copyists would probably be unfair. What they have done is absorb the influences of some of the most distinctive piano trios around in the last decade. And that includes The Bad Plus and fellow Australians The Necks, too. They also, like so many young jazz groups, listen to Radiohead and Tortoise, too. And Philip Glass.

There are strong tunes here, there are good grooves, there is subtle interplay, and a nice range of moods, from delicate swing on At The Right Moment, to minimalist texture-laden pieces like Start (which includes strings and saxophone), and complex cross rhythms and pretty freaky moments on Variations On A Bad Day.

Excellent sound as you would expect from Naim.

Trichotomy are currently touring the UK and play Cardiff’s Torfaen Jazz Society this evening, Stratford-upon-Avon’s Stratford Jazz on Sunday, Ray’s Jazz Shop in London early on Monday evening, The Vortex in London on Tuesday, The Stables inMilton Keynes on Wednesday, The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh on Thursday and City Halls in Glasgow next Saturday. For more information of all these gigs go their website here and for the Stratford-upon-Avon gig go here.

Trichotomy

Garbarek breathes fire through the ice

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The cliched view of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek is that he plays icy cool music, slightly strange and detached. The reality of one of his concerts, especially those with his Quartet, is very different.

Even a cursory listen to the band’s latest disc, Dresden, confirms the misconception. It’s a powerful recording, full of excitement, instrumental fireworks and passion. And at times it achieves a red-hot intensity. And it is only by chance that this recording, which earned a five-star rating from one of the sternest jazz reviewers around, was released. Garbarek was going through some concert recordings which he had forgotten about and came across these superb performances almost by chance.

It’s also unusual in that it is the first live recording of a Garbarek band despite the fact that he has toured consistently for the last 35 years.

Garbarek explained: “It’s so much more practicable these days with the equipment. Before you had to have a huge bus and a big mixing board and it got very serious. So that some musicians would actually freeze and not really do that well because it was that one opportunity. But now it’s so much more easy to manage – the equipment can be brought along in a small car. A sound engineer travelled with us and he recorded five nights. In the end we went for the one (that is on the CDs).”

Jan Garbarek brings a precision to his music, but, especially in the case of his working, touring band, it is by no means just one man’s vision. All four members of the quartet have strong characters and strongly influence the sound. His longest standing partner in the group is German keyboardist Rainer Bruninghaus, and in concert and on the Dresden recording, his piano solos are particularly fiery affairs.

Brazilian electric bassist Yuri Daniel brings a new, more rhythmic feel to the bottom end of the music – he was brought in at short notice and in sad circumstances after longtime bassist Eberhard Weber suffered a stroke during a soundcheck and had to retire from touring.

Garbarek has always chosen strong drummers to work with. The Dresden album features Manu Katche, but for this tour the saxophonist is reunited with an old collaborator, the extraordinary Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu. The two drummers have been alternating in the touring band for a while now.

“They are really very, very different players, different instruments and different approach, different culture, different discipline, different personalities. Everything is different. And you know I enjoy tremendously playing with both of them. It’s been quite a lesson also for me to switch from one to the other. It’s been very fresh. I feel free to reach for the sky any moment and I will have a proper propeller, you might say, with me. Either with Manu or Trilok it’s really been a tremendous fortune to have these players, you know, very inspiring.”

It has been observed that Garbarek likes to keep the programme – the sequence – of the music at his concerts fairly consistent. How did he compose these sets?

“That’s the way we like it, that way we all feel confident and we know what kind of dynamic the piece needs in the programme. But it’s simply, if you have only slow pieces and you do the concert a number of times, some of them are ending up as fast pieces, because the situation just demands it, you know… You have to put the pieces where you know they will get the right amount of strength and dynamic. For a concert you have to balance things… great teachers are all the old symphonies in four parts.”

And is four the magic number for the group he likes to work in? “I need rhythm, I need chords and I need melody – and that’s music. The piano takes care of the chords, and the drums and bass also the rhythm and fundamentals. And I do the melody. And it’s a good, classic combination.”

The Jan Garbarek Group, featuring Trilok Gurtu, are playing just four UK gigs – at Gateshead, Glasgow, London and Birmingham. The Birmingham concert is tomorrow evening at 7.30pm in Birmingham Town Hall. Tickets are available from the Town Hall box office, on 0121 780 3333 and here

See also: My earlier interview with Jan Garbarek – Across The Table (and scroll down)

Disc of the day: 28-01-10

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Julien Lourau: Quartet Saigon (Naive NJ620111)
The Marseille-resident saxophonist has made some fine and consistent albums down the years, mainly with Bojan Z on piano. This one finds him in his more regular current quartet with fellow Frenchmen Laurent Coq on piano and Thomas Bramerie  on bass, and New Jersey’s Otis Brown III on drums.

The band’s name, which is also this album’s title, is taken from the city of their first gig together, and Saigon also features as one of the disc’s strongest tracks. It’s apparently a programmatic piece with a central, more strongly-grooved bridge symbolising the US invasion, but on either side the mood is vaguer, more atmospheric, with a quietly insistent cymbal pulse that feels like the creak of a roof fan in a soupily hot, lethargic room. Bramerie’s bass provides the intro and outro and Coq and Lourau are lyrical in between.

In fact, lyricism is a hallmark of much of this disc – especially in the jazz waltz-time Angels – and Baron Samedi has an African tribal feel. All these are Lourau compositions.

For me, the tunes get even stronger when Coq is the composer so the album gets stronger in its second half. While Lourau has exploited the soprano more strongly in the first few tracks, by the time we get to Nico he is on the more richly expressive tenor. This piece starts quietly reflective but soon winds up the tension with Brown stirring hard and Lourau up in the overtone register. Around The Corner has an intro which reminds me of Julian Arguelles tone and melodic style, before breaking into a swift time-shifter which has the air of Django Bates about its rhythmic changes.

The album’s closer is the only non-original – Burt Bacharach’s A House Is Not A Home. The solo intro shows Lourau’s firm tenor tone off a treat; the band give this classic tune a pretty straight reading with a strong snare-thwacked groove.

If you want to hear the band live, they are at London’s Vortex club in Monday and Tuesday, 8 and 9 February. More about those gigs and the Vortex here.

Gig review: Led Bib

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Happy in his work - Led Bib's Mark Holub (Picture: Russ Escritt)

Jazz Club
The Rainbow, Digbeth, Birmingham UK
27-01-10
It’s easy to see why Led Bib was chosen as the 2009 jazz contenders for the Mercury Prize. The great and the good who decide such things have predominantly rock music ears and tastes, and if you pretend for a moment that the two musicians encircled by bass, drums and keyboards are guitarists rather than saxophonists, well, Led Bib could just be a rock band.

But of course they are more than that, just as Miles Davis’s 1970s bands were not rock or funk outfits, and the Zawinul Syndicate was not a world music group, and John Zorn’s Naked City was not a punk band. Like those groups Led Bib is made up of jazz musicians trying to move the music into other territories and enjoying not only the resultant blend but also the resultant clash.

There is a comment elsewhere on this blog about the influence that US musicians like Tim Berne have had on the young UK jazz groups currently making a stir, and the hand of Berne can be felt hovering above Led Bib in blessing.

The back courtyard at The Rainbow provides an apt setting. Its pastiche of a graffiti-emblazoned derelict  factory complete with metal crowd-control railings and skip-retrieved pub benches is cool as hell or post-industrial pretension depending on your viewpoint.

And Led Bib achieve a kind of industrial shriek when they are at full tilt. Their opening few numbers acted as a kind of metallic barrage, the twin alto saxophones, the distorted Fender Rhodes and electric bass played high and strummed all inhabited a narrow sonic band where the ear could buzz and thrill to the nuances of the clashing tones and timbres.

Certainly any conventional jazz presumptions need to be checked in at the door – horns sonically in front of the rhythm section?, extended solos?, the relief of the ballad? No, no, no, you won’t find those here so don’t look for them. The band gives variety in a much more limited way – by leaving one or two of the five out for a while. Some of the evening’s most interesting moments came for me when the saxophones rested and Toby McLaren could show his singular harmonic and melodic sense at the Fender Rhodes. In fact McLaren was fascinating throughout, his percussive technique at high energy moments making him look like a conga player rather than a pianist.

And leader Mark Holub, though behind everyone else on the stage, is crucial, bringing a great rolling and churning energy and bottom to the band, and often managing to combine power and subtlety the most effectively of the lot.

They finished the main set at their most powerful, with saxophonist Chris Williams’ Zone 4 – this had a depth and more subtle texture, as well as stronger melodic fragments, without skimping on the metal power. Or did I just prefer the more extended soloing in this one?