Dick De Graaf Soundroots Quintet - 13/02/2004, Geneva

Dick De Graaf - ts
Andrea Pozza - p
Stephan Kurmann - b
Daniele Pezzotti - cello
Norbert Pfammatter - d

After safely landing in Geneva despite it being a friday the 13th, I met my father and we went directly from the airport to the concert. De Graaf is a Dutch saxophonist and here was playing a repertoire inspired/adapted from Schubert compositions such as the "Unfinished Symphony," "Death and the Maiden" and the "String Quintet in C." That source made for rather unusual melodies, even if the solos tended to be more firmly jazz-rooted.

We walked in on the highlight of the concert: as De Graaf soloed, the rhythm section (which did not include the cellist) laid down the kind of independent yet interlocking lines that create a groove whose beauty and dynamic is similar to that of the cycles-within-cycles traced by complex machinery. Unfortunately, they never reached this state again, even though Pozza provided some very good solos.

Besides the material, the quintet's particularity is of course the presence of the cello, which made for the interesting sight of seeing two rows of upright strings. When Pezzotti played pizzicato, it highlighted how opposite jazz double bass and the still classically-oriented cello are: pizzicato, the cello failed quite completely to project and articulate clearly, whereas jazz bassists tend to have intonation problems when playing arco (or maybe this is a dated notion? I find Paul Chambers's arco playing extremely grating - metaphorically and literally).