Trio Grande w/ Matthew Bourne - 26/10/2007@Beursschouwburg, Bruxelles

Laurent Dehors - b cl, contrabass cl, two more straight clarinets I don't know the keys of, ts, ss, hca, jew's harp, bagpipes
Matthew Bourne - p (website)
Michel Massot - tba, tb, euphonium
Michel Debrulle - d

Bagpipes over the slow funk of an African-tinged vamp in 7. Michel Massot and Matthew Bourne spastically dancing opposite each other during the first encore. Bourne letting his improvising be guided by a plastic water bottle cap springing across the piano's strings. A cartoonish take on dixieland abruptly catapulted into mid-20th century classical music, expressed through a series of short waltzes. Possibly the funniest impromptu explanation of how clarinets work ever given.

Those are a few of the things that made this yet another great Trio Grande (plus guest Bourne) gig. The pianist fit surprisingly well into the group's aesthetic, moving easily from doubling melodic lines to pounding out scattered free playing to lush romanticism. Whether it was his influence, or the general direction the band's music is taking, there was a loose, drifting feel to much of the repertoire, whereas I tend to think of Trio Grande as both more barn-storming and more melodic. While the group seems to focus more on melody and timbre (eg. Massot's nuanced use of multiphonics), the song structures they use - impressive without really calling attention to themselves because they sound so organic - sort of replace harmony's forward drive. In any case, the upcoming quartet CD should be a worthy heir to the fabulous Signé.

That I am elated by these kinds of concerts and am left somewhat indifferent to Mikkel Ploug or even Drew Gress has me slightly worried. Am I able to appreciate what Nate Chinen calls "the deeper subtleties of harmony and form," or am I merely attracted to "a lot of surface dazzle," like some sort of musical magpie? I'd like to get really excited by that subtle stuff, too...

The Bad Plus - 14/10/2007@N9, Eeklo

Ethan Iverson - p (blog)
Reid Anderson - b
David King - d

[Yes, this post is almost a month overdue. Consider it a prelude to The Bad Plus's return to Belgium on the 15th. I'll be seeing Brad Mehldau that day, but you should go if you can.]

I bought a PlayStation 2 a while ago, just to play Guitar Hero. Passing in front of a second-hand video-game shop, I popped in on the off chance they might have something of interest. They didn't, but there was a book section in the back. So, instead of Fifa 2007, I walked out with Sartre, Proust and Boris Vian. The Bad Plus is a bit like that: first you hear about the Nirvana, Black Sabbath and Vangelis covers, then you find out that that's not really what they're about, at least not in a superficial way.

Perhaps it wasn't obvious with their first couple albums, but having "Street Woman" on Give, then a series of blog posts and, on a personal level, my very recent discovery of The Complete Science Fiction Sessions, have made evident how indebted TBP is to the Ornette Coleman/Charlie Haden/Keith Jarrett American Quartet axis.

Given that (and taking other influences into consideration), it's not too surprising for one section of Dave King's new "My Friend Medatron" to totally draw up a new intersection of pop's teleological movement, the wheel-within-a-wheel rhythms of funk and the disassembling impulse of free jazz, like Julius Hemphill's "Dogon AD" or the Art Ensemble of Chicago's "Le Thème de Yoyo" before it. And it is as un-sellout as its predecessors (we can add On The Corner to the list), a point emphatically made as "Heart of Glass" (my favourite TBP cover) was torn to shreds: they aren't pandering. And somehow, this all goes well with the absurd tangents TBP like to go on, whether spoken ("We're big fans of disco... Especially roller-disco" prefaced the Blondie tune) or musical (the juxtaposition of two completely different uses of handclaps in "1980 World Champion").

While none of the new tunes jumped out and grabbed me quite like "Physical Cities" did a year ago, there were a number of really good ones. "People Like You" was a classic Reid Anderson ballad: a tender melody (suggesting that the title's "like" was a verb, not a comparison) and a steady crescendo from a spare beginning to a more emphatic climax, without losing a certain sense of drift, in the vein of "Prehensile Dream," the concert-opening oldie-but-goodie. Ethan's "Old Money" featured Reid in a different mode, as his solo started with vigorously syncopated arpeggios, wriggled into a funky single line and suddenly slowed for a poignant close.

Finally, as it was the eve of Reid's birthday, we (the audience) sang for him, to a very slow drum accompaniment that was kind of destabilising: I, for one, was never too sure when, or where, the next beat was going to land. A mini-taste of what it's like playing with Dave King, I guess.

Matt Wilson Arts & Crafts - 05/11/2007@De Werf, Brugge

Terell Stafford - tp, flh
Gary Versace - p, acc
Dennis Irwin - b, cl
Matt Wilson - d (myspace | website)

A few days ago, Jeff Albert wrote a quasi-love letter to Matt Wilson. After seeing Arts & Crafts last night, I feel like doing the same. Here's what it might look like:

Dear Matt,

I love you. I know that might sound a little forward - after all, you don't even know me - but let me explain.

Let's face it: in 2007, straight-ahead jazz be boring. It is too often, if anything, the sound of constraint, or of missed opportunities. But when you guys started the concert with Monk's "We See," all I could think was how it was bursting with life! With happiness! It was real. It swung in a natural yet unsystematic way. Like kids in a playground, there was a sense of freedom to it. And then your "Free Range Chicken" reminded me of Jimmy Giuffre's cowboy songs on The Western Suite.

Terell was bouncy and impassioned, Gary gave things a soulful bent. Dennis even played some musette-style clarinet on a fun couple of tunes. And you... Well, just how is it that you can make a drum solo consisting mostly of rolling a drumstick on the snare drum sound so good, in this context?

You talked to us about playing with Dewey Redman for a dozen years and dedicated the last song of the second set, "In Touch With Dewey," to him. You launched it by clanging away irrevently on a small gong laid on the floor tom. That spirit of irreverent celebration (of Dewey, of classic jazz feels) infused the whole set and made everyone in the room happy. It made the guys on the bandstand happy (it even made the people at the bar happy: the Tongerlo dubbel that had cost me 2.50 before the concert cost me 50 cents less at intermission). And what makes you happy, makes me happy, Matt.

By the way, why do you pronounce Gary's last name "verse ace", rather than "versacci," like the fashion designer? Maybe that's something we could talk about by the fireplace, on a long winter's evening.

xoxo,

Mwanji

P.S. I loved the glasses, too.

Then again, maybe I should wait until our second date to let my feelings out. I wouldn't want to scare him off.

Mikkel Ploug Group ft. Mark Turner - 07/10/2007@L'Archiduc, Bruxelles

Mark Turner - ts
Mikkel Ploug - g (myspace)
Jeppe Skovbakke - b
Sean Carpio - d
Joachim Badenhorst - ts

On what could very well have been the last sunny and warm days of the year, it felt unnatural, perhaps even heretical in these suddenly eco-concious times, to sit inside the gloomy and electrically-lit Archiduc. One constant pleasure of this cramped and impractical room remains, whatever the season: the passing of the trendy neighbourhood's local fauna. There are the good-looking, expensively-dressed women, the eccentrically hip, those who wander in and look appalled (when it's free jazz), who look put off (when it's non-free jazz) and those who look lost (in any circumstance). In this particular instance, there was also the woman sitting next to me. At one point, I looked downwards for a while, at nothing in particular. She had slipped off her sandals, her bare foot dangled in the air. She must have gotten the impression I was staring at it: she freaked and hurriedly put her sandals back on. Maybe she was just self-concious about them.

This to-and-fro was more entertaining than the concert itself. As when I last saw Mark Turner, the audience was musician-heavy (as it was, though in a lesser proportion, for Drew Gress). I am beginning to seriously distrust this measure as a barometer of enjoyment, but maybe I just have a problem with New York-based Scandanavian guitarists.

Sean Carpio and Jeppe Skovbakke kept up a dynamic beat, hearing Turner close up was interesting and when Joachim sat in towards the end, the two-tenor combination gave the music a sensuous heft. For me, though, the show suffered from boring writing: it took four pieces before we got to hear something that sounded like a song rather than like a series of riff transpositions. Mikkel Ploug's guitar sound - bright, dry, unadorned - isn't one I'm really attracted too, either. Listening to the tracks on his MySpace page, I kind of like them (even though the trio version of "I'll Be Seeing You" makes me wonder if it's meant as a joke), so I'm not sure if the problem was a lack of familiarity, a sub-par performance or music that sounds better at home.

Tied + Tickled - 05/10/2007@Ancienne Belgique, Bruxelles

Any band with two girls (cellist/xylophonist and keyboardist, plus some guy on drums) has my immediate sympathy, but, in this case, that dissipated very quickly. The unannounced opener, which remained anonymous throughout a brief set that seemed too long anyway, was undoubtedly among the worst concerts I've attended. Perhaps the worst.

They played simplistic, repetitive, my-first-chord-progression motifs devoid of any creative effort. I could be accused of taking them altogether seriously, but I think it's the other way around: they drew such disproportionate self-satisfaction from the faintest sign of creativity or humour (playing "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" on kazoo, a burst of noise at the end of one song, the shaking of a banana-shaped shaker) that my loathing seemed justified.

If this was a terrible-opener-makes-headliner-look-good gambit, it totally back-fired. After a few songs of Tied + Tickled's electronica equivalent of bar-room rock, I left, fed up. I had come to this concert because of distant memories of a prior album, Observing Systems. I haven't yet re-listened to refresh my memory, but I can't imagine it sounded like what I heard here. As I went down the stairs leading outside, a woman ahead of me confirmed my suspicions when she complained to her partner: "That was so crap, compared to they used to do."

Othin Spake - 18/10/2007@PP Café, Bruxelles

Teun Verbruggen - d (website | myspace)
Mauro Pawlowski - g
Jozef Dumoulin - Fender Rhodes

The Ankh is a fabulous album (apparently , it's also available on iTunes), and Othin Spake's great concert early last year was one of the best of 2006, but here, texture kind of came back to bite me. The group started with really shambolic, discombobulated noise that couldn't help but to bring to mind disparaging clichés about noise-rock. No hopeful melodies or unstable grooves were hewn out of the din, no skeletal motifs made the onslaught legible. Their absence made evident why the high points in their 100% improvised music sound so miraculous: there's a very real chance they won't happen.

About halfway through, though, a few signposts started slipping in, as Mauro's approximation of 3-chord rock nudged Teun into a busy back-beat. A capitulation, perhaps, but it was the first time anyone (listener or player) seemed to be having any fun. And, let's face it, noise is a lot more fun when you can dance to it and cataclysm can always do with a catchy jingle (there are plenty such moments on The Ankh).

The last improvisation rewarded those who had stuck with the music. It started with a single repeated guitar note: warm, luminous, gentle; a fragile solitude in an unexpected stillness. These characteristics survived even as the music grew louder, more violent and gloriously crunchy in texture. And then it was over, too soon.

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - 24/10/2007@Ancienne Belgique, Bruxelles

The album covers, the period recording equipment, the strict adherence to the rules of the genre, or rather, the codification of the epoch, even playing on Amy Winehouse's retro-soul record: all this could have made the Dap Kings' thing seem like a pose, like the vintage get-ups some in the crowd were wearing, or other audience members' less-vintage t-shirts that put quotation marks around soul clichés.

But then, this woman, Sharon Jones, shakes, shimmies, struts and dances across the stage. Her mere presence takes the band, which in the purest tradition had started the show without her, to a higher level. And then, she begins to sing: powerful and clear, grit thrown in as needed. She's electrifying. The kind of voice that hip hop producers want to sample and that house producers get to belt over four-to-the-floor beats. The kind of voice that doesn't even let you imagine thinking about listening to anything else. This is no pose, Sharon Jones isn't wearing anyone else's clothes. She is soul music, and she'll make you soul music, too. She'll pull you on stage* and insert you into her theatrical mini-production. She'll take you through a 200-hundred year genealogy of her dancing style. She'll whip you into a frenzy and cut it off early enough to leave you begging her for more. As Rob Harvilla says, Sharon Jones will obliterate your cynicism.

--
* Well, not me, but, one by one, four young, good-looking black people from down front, stage right, all seemingly at ease on a stage in front of hundreds of people.

Drew Gress Quintet - 04/10/2007@CC Luchtbal, Antwerpen

Tim Berne - as
Ralph Alessi - tp
Craig Taborn - p
Drew Gress - b
Tom Rainey - d

It's hard not to expect great things from the above line-up. It's equally hard not to assess their concert as an indication of the current location of contemporary jazz, or at least a couple of its strands. So any lingering doubts and disappointment must be measured against those expectations. You know how it is: great musicians, some creative thinking, a few great moments. You leave not quite elated.

This was an all-star band, but also the leader's group: Drew Gress's long suites charted long-form courses through series of themes and a variety settings for solos. They were well played, but the sequences initially felt arbitrary and the melodies inexpressive. The second set consisted only of two even longer suites, but somehow they moved more convincingly, for example connecting a reconstituted Hard Cell's (Berne/Taborn/Rainey) free-ish manipulation of basic intervallic motifs to flowing post-bop.

The smaller moments were generally more engaging than the larger ones: the semi-spontaneous formation of duos and trios, the mingling of straight time and free rumbling, Tim Berne and Ralph Alessi repeatedly blending to produce buzzing overtones, Tom Rainey limiting himself to a ringing pattern on a single tom, Alessi handling a motif as he might a Rubik's Cube.

This quintet doesn't particularly strive to hide its identity as a jazz quintet. Occasionally they issued intriguing mixed signals by grappling with the past, as when the antiquated romance of Alessi's cup mute and Berne's dollops of vibrato perched atop dissonant, wide-interval piano plinks. At times, Tom Rainey's extraordinary playing rested on nothing solid, held together by centrifugal forces that could dissipate at any moment. Similarly, Craig Taborn is one of those people who somehow manage to reconcile exacting math-funk with wide-open free jazz and a linear bop sensibility.

Habib Koïté - 28/09/2007@Flagey, Bruxelles

I went to this concert almost randomly. Over here, a Habib Koïté will play a cultural institution like Flagey, which classifies him as World Music (that said, the Touareg band Tinariwen are playing the rock-oriented Ancienne Belgique soon), but back home, I guess he'd be seen the way a rock band is here, or perhaps more accurately, like an r 'n' b band which plays contemporary stuff, but also knows its tradition. Interestingly, the drummer didn't really do the kind of awesome polyrhythmic African stuff you'd expect, but pounded out these dark and slightly laconic beats. Cheap sunglasses boosted his cool quotient.

Like a number of other concerts in Flagey's massive Studio 4, the amplified sound was flattened and muddied (I've been particularly sensitive to the depth-of-field possible when music isn't routed through two speakers since seeing the Free Music Festival and Maak's Spirit at the Vooruit). A lot of the rhythmic filigree that makes up so much of the interest of Malian music - even of a modern one like Koïté's - was inaudible, unlike when I saw Afel Bocoum at the Théâtre Molière, and the balafon sounded harsh, a far cry from its normal raindrops-on-wood timbre. One thing the venue didn't stop, though, was people rushing the stage to dance (or offer lap-dances, several times).

The second half of the concert favoured the slow, quiet and hypnotic one-riff tunes characteristic of traditional Malian music. The drummer moved to calabash and the balafonist to violin (modern and electric, not the ancient one-string kind), as the others slipped, almost instinctively, into the simple back-and-forth dance steps that resemble those of old doo-wop groups, and are just as essential.

Octurn - 27/09/2007@Jazz Station, Bruxelles

Octurn (myspace | website)
Bo Van Der Werf - bs
Magic Malik - fl, voc
Guillaume Orti - as
Laurent Blondiau - tp, flh
Nelson Veras - g
Fabian Fiorini - p
Jozef Dumoulin - Fender Rhodes
Jean-Luc Lehr - el b
Chander Sardjoe - d

Of late, I've been listening a lot to a very rough draft of Octurn's next album, their first live one (I was at one of the recording sessions). It's very amorphous structure-wise, with lots of texturally-oriented interludes, and only a few moments where the band's full forces flex their muscle in collective improvisation or uplifting rhythmic or melodic riff. It is totally unlike their previous (and still fairly recent) North Country Suite, a gorgeously melodic work written by Pierre Van Dormael (who, in the liner notes, thanked Bob Dylan, naturally, but also Nicole Kidman, inexplicably), that could be seen as a sequel to the latter's masterful Vivaces from 2001.

A year after the upcoming album was recorded, things have changed substantially, and generally for the better. Without losing the gentle, soft-focus feel Magic Malik has brought to the band, the contours have grown sharper, more readable, even as interpretative freedom has grown freer. This is quite a feat: the last time I saw Octurn, individual freedom occasionally led to collective chaos, ora too-great density of information. This time the assemblage was carefully grounded, without being too constrained. These clearer structures even lent the music an unusually proggy feel, as when a pastoral tableau was stomped upon by interjections of a pounding one-note tattoo. A meeting-ground was eventually found as the pastoral melody crescendoed and the riff decided to follow the contour of the chords. Not that things have become simple: even when Chander Sardjoe elicits foot-tapping, it can be difficult to get any idea of where the 1 might be.

By doing less, complexity communicated outwardly more clearly, reflecting the better internal communication enabled by an unorthodox stage configuration: Fabian Fiorini, Jean-Luc Lehr and Sardjoe occupied the Jazz Station's small stage, while the rest of the band fanned out in an inwards-facing semi-circle. They took up a third of the club's floor space, giving rise to the unusual sight of patrons and musicians facing in the same direction, looking at an empty space.

I increasingly look forward to Guillaume Orti's contributions. It is unsurprising that he should feel at home in Octurn, since it has much in common with Kartet, a long-running band that includes Sardjoe and Benoît Delbecq. His clear and bright tone almost obscures his radical phraseology: its linearity and clear articulation give it something of a '00s bop aura, but it is tied into ferociously unpredictable knots. And when he cut loose on the anthemic, drum 'n' bass-driven "Flash," avant-jazz was reunited with gritty drive.

Free Music Festival XXXIV - 21-23/09/2007@deSingel, Antwerpen

The Free Music Festival has gained in comfort since its move a few years ago from some back-alley theatre in the center of Antwerpen to the prestigious DeSingel on the city's southern fringe, but, as you'd expect, it just isn't the same. Despite the well-conceived flow of concerts, I'll take a transversal view here. Three themes emerged from this 34th edition: crazy Dutch bands, august first-generation EFI pianists and otherworldly vocalists.

Saadet Türköz is a Turkish singer born of Turkmenistani parents. Her singing was completely astounding, but its reception suffered from a culture gap that Martin Schutz's acoustic and electric 'cellos could not quite bridge. It was like watching a foreign film, but without the subtitles: hard work, even at its most thrilling. Moments of fevered glossolallia that sounded like parallel universe Louis Armstrong scat-singing had me laughing in delight and sheer disbelief at what I was hearing. Other passages employed a more Asian, austerely dramatic kind of oratory style that were particularly difficult to relate to. If Sainkho Namchylak's were to be defined as non-idiomatic, Türköz was most definitely idiomatic.

Compared to Türköz, Sainkho Namchylak's singing could be considered non-idiomatic, as she wandered from Die Zauberflöte to "Crazy Frog" and many less identifiable points in between and beyond. She performed with drummer Eric Thielemans's A Snare Is A Bell project, which can consist of just him, but in this perfomance was a quartet. For roughly half the set, Thielemans played nothing but a steady snare drum roll, while Jozef Dumoulin did even less on piano. That left Namchylak and Peter Jacquemyn with lots of work to do, but lots of space to do it in. The bassist's bowing found a lot of common ground with her, an affinity perhaps explained by the former's Kowald-ian penchant for throat-singing. Even as Thielemans and Dumoulin progressively loosened the initial constraints, overall the piece didn't seem to amount to much, as if the initial premise had handicapped their efforts rather than focused them.

What is the natural sound of the trumpet? After Peter Evans's concert, that was a difficult question to answer. Like Türköz and Namchylak, Peter put the naturalness of any sound in doubt. Sometimes even simple gestures sufficed to deconstruct sounds usually taken for granted: when he inserted his Harmon mute's stem, I couldn't help but wonder why so few trumpeters do. Just because Miles Davis only used the buzzy stemless sound, doesn't mean everyone else has to. Watching Peter simultaneously circular breathe, blow grainy texture and clear notes simultaneously, it can be hard to get beyond the sheer technique of it all, not that I felt much need to, anyway: the sheer thrill of witnessing the creation of trumpet sounds never heard before was enough. To hear him play in more overtly "musical" contexts, check out Sparks, Mostly Other People Do The Killing ("Andover" is the tune I recommend), Carnival Skin, the May entry in Reuben Radding's 12 in2007 series or his own hard-hitting quartet's debut album, soon to be released on Firehouse 12.

Following tradition, Fred Van Hove opened the festival, this time in a first encounter with Jim Black and Peter. Three generations of improvisers, clearly with different concerns. Black is perhaps best known for punkish, off-kilter grooves, but here he reveled in quieter sounds: I've never seen anyone look so happy to shake a tiny bell. While never bad, this set suffered from the bane of many a first-time meeting: in only a few instances wasthe whole more than three individuals each doing their thing. As Van Hove rubbed his piano's strings for a sort of slide guitar effect and Evans trilled on piccolo trumpet, I imagined the mating calls of Venusian tropical birds. Later on, Black allowed himself to build up a head of steam, Evans sank back a little and a collective groove coalesced. Those moments were fabulous, but all too rare. Some in the crowd may have been more underwhelmed than me, as, for a while, loud snoring was heard.

Alexander Von Schlippenbach's solo sets opened the second and third days with interpretations of his Twelve Tone Tales repertoire. The first one featured a Monk's Casino-style medley of concise Monk readings. Von Schlippenbach concentrated on rapidly and radically reconfiguring the melodies, without ever letting them drift out of sight. The Monk section was surrounded by more overtly twelve-tone-inspired works, which served to highlight the ways in which the two weren't all that distant, despite the totally different cultural, rhythmic and melodic contexts. The second set was a breath-taking tour de force into which the pianist held nothing back. By often keeping a strong bass function in the left hand, he somehow managed to distantly evoke ragtime, stride and boogie-woogie in an abstract but very physical way.

The two-piano duet of Benoît Delbecq and Fabian Fiorini was a beautifully serene oasis in a mostly boisterous festival. The two tones and styles were complementary: Fabian Fiorini had a full sound and effusive spirit, while Benoît Delbecq was more impressionistic, his touch slightly veiled, his notes coming as if through a mist. They clashed as easily as they collaborated, oblique beoppish lines were splashed atop free rumbling, Delbecq's sophisticated prepared piano percussion laid foundations for playful divagations, for a set that was wide-ranging yet unostentatious. Whereas Von Schlippenbach had folded serialism into jazz, these two had a greater sensuality: rich, solemn chord progressions mutated into simpler, more soulful motifs. But when the set ended with "Misterioso," they showed that even thirty years on, Monk continued to be a springboard for avant-garde jazz.


Misha Mengelberg embodies comedy: his hat, his walk, the way he slumps over the piano and plays with one hand, even his ballooning stomach are all funny without even trying. The ICP Orchestra put ironic, muddy swing/circus music alongside thorny contemporary string music, made use of improvisation, composition and conduction (cellist Tristan Honsinger's turn in front of the band was a riotous highlight that involved imitating a rabbit), let rip some earnestly burning horn solos and roved the stage to produce antiphonal effects (especially effective when coming from backstage and making a great case for the superiority of unamplified music), or combined three clarinets in unison at full blast to create ear-bending overtones. And they did all this effortlessly, as they should, after having been at it for 40 years.

Two other, slightly younger, Dutch Dadaïst ensembles followed. Luc Houtkamp's POW Ensemble, featuring guest Joseph Bowie, had at least three things no other band in the festival had: a tap-dancer, a woman who wasn't a singer and a lo-fi conception of electronic machines as "contraptions" rather than "sleekly-designed lifestyle enhancements" (even though there was an Apple laptop on stage). The ramshackle ensemble started with dry ping-pong-balls-on-vibrating-horizontal-bass-drum randomness, but then rollicked through improv-distorted new wave/Tom Waits blends and electronicised Fats Waller. The people left happy.

Michiel Braam's Nopera consists of a rhythm section, a string quartet and three singers. Like a next-gen ICP or Willem Breuker, hilarity and incongruity stripped away the trappings of seriousness, but left the foundations of well-written and -performed music. There was self-deprecating opera in some of the singing and most of the acting, but also bouts of gospel diva belting, tango merged into soul jazz, astringent pointillism crushed into ragtime. South African saxophonist Sean Bergin was used mostly as a singer, but also took a few excellent solos on curved soprano.

Spring Heel Jack closed out the festival, fell outside of my three themes and was the only concert I didn't see in full. After a few times through cycles of silence/white noise/silence I had had enough: the improvising trio of clarinetist Alex Ward, pianist Pat Thomas and drummer Paul Lytton were essentially doing what they might have done had the Spring Heel Jack guys not been there. Which might as well have been the case, as they seemed to hardly do anything at all. It was pretty disappointing, so I left after half an hour.

Gretchen Parlato & Lionel Loueke - 20/09/2007@Flagey, Bruxelles

Gretchen Parlato - voc, perc (website | myspace)
Lionel Loueke - g, voc (website | myspace)

Lionel Loueke is a giant of a man whose gentleness doesn't equal complacency. Alongside catchy rhythms, sing-song melodies and showmanship deployed singing a bass line and tongue-clucking percussion while playing not-simple guitar parts, he has a hard-nosed sense of abstraction that ranged from scattered bop lines to near-avant noise-making. His every intervention in this intimate concert was hopeful, luminous, thrilling. I've raved about Loueke's solo album In A Trance before. I won't hesitate to do so again.

It was my first encounter with Gretchen Parlato and she left me with mixed feelings.
Parlato's voice had the kind of gentle attack and limited tessiture and dynamic range that I tend to associate with Brazilian singers, so it seemed logical that they tackle a number of bossa novas. As her expressive nuances weren't always convincing - a crucial element, for her kind of voice - her singing often seemed to meander.

On somber material, however, she could be mesmerising. Rodgers & Hart's "Spring Is Here" was issued in a regretful sigh beyond fatigue, and demonstrated her ability to create a slow, charged, stark atmosphere. The set's first tune emphasised the contrast within the duo between Loueke's sharply articulated rhythm and sheer physical presence, and Parlato's more semi-rubato, ethereal approach, creating great tension by hinting at incompatibility and deftly avoiding it.

Bert Joris Quartet - 14/09/2007@De Roma, Antwerpen

Bert Joris - tp, flh (myspace)
Dado Moroni - p
Ira Coleman - b
Dré Pallemaerts - d

Bert Joris is not the kind of trumpeter to blow you away with volume or chops. He is a veteran now, but early in his apprenticeship, Joris felt an affinity to the likes of Art Farmer, Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham and has continued to cultivate a different kind of power, based in precisely aimed cantabile lyricism and emotionally expressive shadings. During this concert, he never sought to dominate his sidemen or soar above them, but always let himself be almost submerged by them. That he never quite was gave his playing much of its appealing sense of controlled vulnerability, along with a buttery flügelhorn and slinky Harmon mute.

As last time, "Magone" was a highlight, Joris's movements between the centre and the edges of the pocket creating a delightful tension. The leader's greatest moment of the night came at the end of the second set, with the first few choruses of "I Fall In Love Too Easily." The arrangement paired the trumpeter first with Moroni, then with Ira Coleman, and in the nakedness of the contexts his every nuance was perfect, delicate and infinitely touching. Earlier, Coleman had sparked the concert's first moment of grace, with an unaccompanied introduction to "To Philip:" a thick tone, a wide array of techniques (such as when his left hand evoked an oud by plucking on the neck) and gentle precision were transparently deployed in service of a beautiful, deep musicality.

De Roma is a pittoresque old theater/cinema that is semi-dilapidated, or, more precisely, recently semi-renovated. The vast ground floor was strewn with wooden tables, creating an atmosphere equal parts Cinema Paradiso (as Oana noted), a jazz club and a beer hall. The quartet's repertoire, entirely original apart from the standard mentioned above, complemented each element of this combination, with Moroni's take on Maiden Voyage-era Herbie Hancock, the funky soul-jazz of "Science and Signatures" and the encore of "Benoit." The latter is a light-hearted tune based on a composition by the Flemish 19th-century composer Peter Benoit, set to an old-fashioned bounce. Antwerpenaars know the original, but don't necessarily know where it comes from, which, according to the liner notes to the Brussels Jazz Orchestra's The Music of Bert Joris, the trumpeter's setting of it is meant to describe the following scene:

Imagine yourself standing atop the Antwerp cathedral early one morning, overlooking the waking city.The wind softly stirs the carillon, and while a nighthawk loudly makes his way home, life slowly gets into gear...

Flemish Jazz Meeting - 08/09/2007@Vooruit, Gent

The Flemish Jazz Meeting is essentially a showcase to hip foreign concert promoters to what's happening in Flanders (though not all musicians involved were Flemish, and a few were even Dutch). It's an insider thing, somewhere between a pageant, a super-market and a mail-order catalogue, that's not even listed on Vooruit's website - I got in because I won a ticket (and, thankfully, I was in excellent company). Five bands each got a short set of generally three songs each.

Robin Verheyen Narcissus Quartet (myspace)
Robin Verheyen is maturing out of his wunderkind phase (the challenge, I guess, is to move from impressive to meaningful), no doubt helped by spending a lot of time in New York. Taking off from the more abstract end of '60s bop, they played a single, continuous improvised piece that may (or may not) have incorporated some written material at some points. The quartet moved from colouristic rubato and free-form to a percussive climax and finally slipped into a slow-burn time feel that perpetually threatened to be overturned. Verheyen was mostly above the fray, urgent and slashing on soprano, gentle and thoughtful on tenor. I still find him a little cold, but at least he's working hard to push his music outwards.

Narcissus Quartet - "Wudalianchi"


VVG Trio + Jozef Dumoulin (website)
This was a surprise. On the VVG's first two albums, the open-mindedness was implicit, but the music remained melodically-oriented and neatly organised even at its most improvisational. The three pieces they played here came from a brand-new album I haven't heard yet, and brought in a denser group sound as well as electricity (in the form of an electric bass and pre-recorded sounds). On the third piece, after having looped a sort of sneezing sound that was both funny and irritating, Bruno played with and around a pre-recorded version of the song's melody. The inflexibility of the recording was artfully embedded into a loose almost-groove in an intriguing and unusual way.

The most satisfying piece, though, harked back to the old days. In Gulli Gudmundsson's "Too Soon," against a pre-recorded backdrop of Sigur Ros-ian slow-moving strings and the rustling and plinking of drums and piano, the bassist and Bruno played and played around an elegiac melody.

VVG Trio - "In Orbit - the blast one"


Jef Neve Trio (myspace)
Back again so soon? I'm not complaining. "Sehnsucht," a piece of Schubert-inspired brooding, has become a staple, and in it the jazz looseness and the classical melody sit down and chat like old friends. The other two pieces managed to imply bustling activity and barely-contained enthusiasm even in their quietest moments. Jef is in such a fertile patch right now, he's like the Lil' Wayne of Belgian jazz.

Jef Neve Trio - "Nothing But A Casablanca Turtle Slideshow"


Maak's Spirit (myspace)
Quite clearly, Maak's Spirit is the closest thing Belgium has to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their usual theatricality was enhanced by a low-budget light show made up of neon lights and studio projectors strewn across the stage and operated by someone sitting next to the drums. The great concert I saw last spring had been based on the compositions from their latest album, but this time they improvised freely and delighted in humourously poking at standard codes of conduct. The dynamic range was vast: they projected more loudly and more harshly than everyone else, despite Laurent Blondiau (trumpet) and Jeroen Van Herzeele (tenor) and Eric Thielemans (drums) not being miked, but ended with a silence (and in near-darkness) caressed only by Jean-Yves Evrard's unplugged electric guitar strumming.

Maak's Spirit - "Strange Meeting"


Flat Earth Society (website)
A big band that draws the raw energy of Duke Ellington's jungle music into a contemporary complexity and an absurdist sense of humour: a growling wah-wah trumpet solo ended up being accompanied only by a coffee mug. To draw a really blog-centric comparaison, FES is an Industrial Jazz Group with a lot more institutional support and regular work.

Introducing the last of the three pieces, the clarinetist, leader and composer Peter Vermeersch mentioned a cameo by Joseph Goebbels. This turned out to mean FES's accordionist repeatedly interrupting the band, first to instruct them, in German, to play with less swing, then with a flat-footed two-beat, then with less chords and so on, until they were reduced to a single staccato note blown in unison. By that time, the docility with which the Nazi's orders were followed had become a little troubling. It was uplifting and poignant, then, when the musicians (the Goebbels impersonator and Teun Verbruggen, in his third appearance of the evening, excepted) filed out from behind their music stands to gather in a semi-circle at the front of the stage and attempt to reconstruct a quiet, swinging music.

The only album I have of theirs is fairly old and not nearly as good as what they played here, so no MP3.

Jazz Middelheim (Day 5) - 19/08/2007@Antwerpen

Every time I go to a festival and see the people, the tents, the setting (idyllic or not), the scramble for seats that haven't been "reserved" by means of jackets or cordoned off for VIPs that only show up for the headliner, the mind-numbing excess of music, the crush of photographers at the lip of the stage (Volume12 was apparently amongst the mob and got some nice, crisp shots out of it), the food stands and the picnicking, I ask myself why I put myself through it at all (maybe I attend the wrong festivals). Two years ago, Jazz Middelheim was for Wayne Shorter, this time it was for Ornette Coleman.

Jef Neve Trio
Jef Neve - p (myspace)
Piet Verbist - b
Teun Verbruggen - d

The M.C. ran down Jef's accomplishments, insisted on the word "philharmonic," and my resentment grew: must the audience really be reassured of the social worthiness of the music they are about to hear? Would they be less accepting of it if Jef had not won lots of prizes or not had the top-selling Belgian jazz album of 2005 (and, according to a press release, of 2007)?

The actual music was as magnificent as ever, and demonstrated its continued evolution. Gladly, the seven song set was made up exclusively of original (and mostly unrecorded) compositions: their shape-shifting, mischievous and romantic ways have always been far more vivid vehicles for Jef and the group than their takes on standards. Indeed, the uniqueness of this music is becoming ever clearer, from small gestures like the odd, fleeting shapes Jef used to accompany the bass solos, to the larger ones, such as the broadly-written story arcs the drove each piece. And between the two poles, there was Teun's liquid groove, whose details shifted around so continuously that it became almost amorphous.

For a long time, the immediate point of comparaison for Jef has been Brad Mehldau, and he'd be the last to deny the influence. However, I'm increasingly hearing that of Keith Jarrett as well (which undoubtedly has as much to do with my own listening as with the music itself) in the mix of vamp-based pop/blues, mainstream bop (the hard-edged '90s kind), heart-tugging melodies and classical clarity. A section in "Nothing But A Casablanca Slideshow Turtle" (which is as wacky as its title: it begins with a Hanon exercise gone psychedelic and shoots off from there) that featured the heaviest percussive playing I've ever heard this group do, also pointed in this direction. Whereas Mehldau and Jarrett inject everything they do with A Great Significance, Jef did all this in a spirit closer to Jacky Terrasson's playfulness.

every year i love this less and less

Nicolas Thys & The 68 Monkeys
Tony Malaby - ts
Andrew D'Angelo - as, bcl
Ryan Scott - g
Jon Cowherd - p
Nicolas Thys - b (myspace)
Nasheet Waits - d

Thys called up some heavyweight New York friends for a set that ended up looking better than it sounded. It started promisingly, with D'Angelo and Malaby climbing to a dual scream atop a steady vamp. Their mindsets were compatible despite their very different styles: D'Angelo, rocking violently back and forth, raced ahead with a tone that always seemed on the point of bursting, while Malaby, nearly immobile aside from a twitching leg, hung back with a calmer, slower-building power.

The steady vamping, as melodic as it was rhythmic continued, in pretty much all of Thys's compositions, but the overall mood felt a little too smooth, despite Waits's characteristic churn and the front-line interweaving. It was only at the very end that Thys's bass solo turned the mood from appeased to soulful.

Bert Joris Quartet
Bert Joris - tp, flh (myspace)
Dado Moroni - p
Philippe Aerts - b
Dré Pallemaerts - d

The Brussels Jazz Orchestra's The Music of Bert Joris is an absolutely great album of Joris's compositions (and soloing) that I cannot recommend enough. His quartet has just released a new CD, and it's with its title-track, "Mangone," that the concert really took off. The understated 4-bar vamp and the steady ticking of four-to-the-bar rim clicks allowed Joris's sensual phrases to hang in uncluttered air. The sense of stripping away the superfluous to arrive at a pure melodic core is central to Joris's playing, and emerged fully when he played fluegelhorn on an almost-ballad. Despite its quality, I didn't listen to the whole concert because I wanted to rest my ears before Ornette Coleman came on, but the crowd went wild for its local hero.

Ornette Coleman 3 Bass Quintet
Ornette Coleman - as, tp, vln
Tony Falanga - b
Charnett Moffett - b
Al McDowell - el b
Denardo Coleman - d

Most miraculous to me about this performance was that it made music mysterious again. How did they decide to begin and end? Why the trumpet, now, the violin, later? How was the inscrutable relationship between alto and the rest determined? With his spoken introduction, Coleman offered a seemingly simple answer to all these questions, and others besides: "If you follow the sound, we'll all be in the same room."

The three bassists mostly kept themselves out of each other's timbral range (Falanga and Moffett swapping bowing duties, Moffett judiciously applying Milesian wah-wah pedal as Coleman played trumpet, McDowell chording in the upper register), but three improvising bassists is never going to be easy for the listener to follow, so perhaps Denardo's steady, but not unsubtle, pummeling is meant to act as a counterweight to that tangled complexity.

The habitual (though always spine-tingling) encore performance of "Lonely Woman" (no improvisation, just an interpretation of a melody well-suited to a bass-heavy setting, as the original recording already featured that amazing bass thrum) highlighted a second outstanding aspect of Coleman's mysterious music-making. His tone and melodic playing have a conservative beauty that is startling in the context of the rough and tumble of Denardo's high-octane drums and the three-bass mêlée. I once read somewhere that Coleman was unhappy with the way the classic Atlantic quartet albums were mixed, because he wanted the instruments to be more equal in the mix. Here, though, it is difficult not to hear him as above the fray, even as he pushes and pulls against it. It is often said that musicians mellow as they get older, but I wonder if it is not rather that they are rid of all extraneous elements. Everything Coleman played sounded essential, in any case. The crowd roared.

"The Good Life" was included in the set-list (along with a Bach prelude that drew some laughter and some stuff from Sound Grammar). How could you not love this tune, even though the tumbling section in the middle was absent from this rendition?

Os Meus Shorts - 20/07/2007@Le comptoir des étoiles, Bruxelles

Nico Roig - g
Joachim Badenhorst - bcl (website | myspace)

Le comptoir des étoiles has become the place for young jazz musicians in Brussels to perform and hang out. With three performances a week, it's making it possible to hear what twentysomethings here make of this whole jazz thing (especially as entrance is free). I kind of feel bad about not getting down there more often.

Os Meus Shorts performs the compositions of Nico Roig, a Barcelona expat. They are wide-ranging and very short, (sometimes) sharp shocks. The basic premise is somewhat diluted, however, by their practice of bundling two or three pieces into medleys. This is unfortunate, from my point of view, because the unsettled tension consistently "too-short" performances could create is lost. For example:



That said, there was much to savour, from disassembled-clarinet-dipped-in-water wackiness to hard-driving noisy blues to effusive melody and tortuous guitar lines. I spent much of the second set outside chatting with some Italian girls, and when I came back in, I couldn't find a good location (those are in extremely short supply at this particular venue). I figure that's a good enough excuse for the brevity and tardiness of this review.

Feerieen Day 2 - 28/08/2007@Parc Royal, Bruxelles

Feeërieën is a free festival organised by the venerable Ancienne Belgique, and therefore a good opportunity to hear some music I don't know and would never seek out on my own.

The Bony King of Nowhere (myspace)

A soft, dragging voice and soft, dragging songs. The singer was affecting in a lullaby kind of way when he quietly pleaded "Let me sleep in your arms" and got a little Thom Yorke-ish when he fixated on "I taste my own blood," but the comparison ended there. Pretty enough, but the line between being low-key and having nothing happen was crossed fairly soon: all the songs were at the same tempo, built on similar plucked guitar riffs and had identical instrumental climaxes, with stuttering drum cascades. A bit of timbral variety was added when the female member of the four-piece sat behind a keyboard and produced long church organ tones, but the more energetic moments were spoiled by a horrendously inappropriate snare drum sound.

The Partchesz (myspace)

Better-known, as the female singer is from Laïs and the male singer/guitarist from Zita Swoon. They put on country singer accents and sang country songs, but it mostly felt hollow and irritated me, perhaps because I don't listen to country music. The first song swathed the tune in electronic buzzes, drum pads and a heavily reverbed guitar solo, which made it palatable, but further songs were more straight-forward, so we left midway through.

Klinkende Munt Day 4 - 07/07/07@Beursschouwburg, Brussels

Ah, dear old Klinkende Munt (reports from previous editions), where a saxophonist's wails compete with the cries of children running around, where bass solos coexist with the chatter of grandmothers eating shish kebabs and where a bandleader's announcements compete with the general indifference of the free festival crowd. While a less numerologically significant event than The Boredoms' 77BoaDrum, at least we were lucky enough not to have any of the usual weirdo drunkards drop by.

Atomic (website)
Fredrik Ljungkvist - ts, cl
Magnus Broo - tp
Havard Wiik - p
Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - b
Paal Nilssen-Love - d

I've been listening to the Norwegian-Swedish Atomic for a few years, since their first two albums Feet Music and Boom Boom. Several of its members, Paal Nilssen-Love and Ingebrit Haker-Flaten (the first time Frederik Ljungevist pronounced the bassist's name, he made it sound like an adventure) in particular, are among Ken Vandermark's many regular collaborators.

Like a few other Scandanavian bands such as Exploding Customer (myspace), Firehouse or Jonas Kullhammar's (myspace) Nacka Forum (myspace), Atomic is very much attached to the idea of being recognisable as a jazz quintet, but injects into that format lots of post-free jazz American avant-garde language that prevent things from simply chugging along. I just got The Thing's (Nilssen-Love, Haker Flaten and Mats Gustafsson) Action Jazz, which, though more given to open blowing, could fit in with the others. In Atomic's case, even when they get boisterous, the free playing is always embedded in an overarching structure, made visible when the band shifts gears in tight formation (is that a mixed metaphor?). Interestingly, they all sound fairly American to me, in any case far removed from any "sound of the fjords" clichés and other elements that I tend to associate with European jazz/improv (to be really simplistic about it, maybe it's just that they all swing, in some way or other). They are what I like to call "hot jazz for a new millenium," but most of the time I have enough sense to keep that appellation to myself.

On the set's first piece, solos were sandwiched by heads, but each one received a radically different treatment: rumbling mid-tempo swing for an explosive Fredrik Ljungkvist, a quasi-dirge for a thoughtful Magnus Broo and a langourous ballad feel for Havard Wiik to subtly disrupt with dissonance. Themes were stated in conventional front-line unisons, but Wiik almost never comped or played lines in a regular manner. Instead, he covered vast expanses and created dense, rippling textures. On the set-closing ballad "Kerosene," he split the difference by first doling out chords under the saxophonist's tender, soft-focus solo, and then engaging Nilssen-Love in a duet that gathered dark clouds before growing into an all-encompassing storm.

As the concert progressed, the repertoire increasingly broke away from traditional forms in favour of more involved, ad hoc ones. Paal Nilssen-Love toned down his usual busy, powerful playing for a quiet feature that had clarinet and trumpet tones floating underneath and between his desolate cymbal screeches and distant mallet hits. Later, Ljungkvist got into a Jimmy Giuffre-ish mood, issuing terse fragments that got loud in very short spurts.

On "Two Boxes Left," a deranged, absurdist fanfare theme gave way to a twittering front-line dialogue that stopped to allow Haker Flaten to shred his bow his a furious, high-register arco solo accompanied by comically short, Ljungkvist-conducted punctuations from the rest of the band. It was like a sudden injection of Dutch comedy - a Southern glance in an otherwise Westwards-looking set.

Byron Wallen (myspace)
Byron Wallen - tp, conch, fl
Julian Siegal - ts, bcl
Larry Bartley - b
Tom Skinner - d
Boujemaa Boubul - voc, guembri, perc,

Byron Wallen is a fluent British trumpeter, clearly steeped in the hot-blooded hard bop of Freddie Hubbard and others, but also willing to explore sounds both harsher and more exotic. His front-line partner Julian Siegal preferred to keep a more even-keeled tone as he spun harmonically involved lines. On "Merry-Go-Round," the two intertwined melodically over a sunny beat like a Gerry Mulligan Quartet gone Carribbean.

For part of the set, they invited Boujemaa Boubul, a Gnawa musician, to join them on guembri, qraqeb and occasional singing. His characteristic dancing, polyrhythmic 6/8 grooves created a new baseline for the group, but also a new challenge. Wallen slipped naturally into this new context: he emerged from the groove and used it as a reference even when he freed himself from it, and added flute and conch shell to the more prayerful moments. Wallen's current album, Meeting Ground, is apparently about jazz-Gnawa fusion and his playing truly made the meeting happen. Siegal, however, stuck to his harmony-oriented playing and ended up sounding pasted on to the music, rather than a part of it. His more textural bass clarinet fit in better, though.

Jeremy Warmsley (myspace)

Jeremy Warmsley's dramatic pop put elaborate construction, literary lyrics and lots of falsetto leaps in the place of catchy hooks and a memorable voice. Songs had titles such as "The Young Man Sees the City as a Chessboard" and content such as accidentally watching pornography (he said pornography, not porn - the distinction seemed important) on French TV ("Which is easy to do," Warmsley stated in his defense), played in a four-handed piano arrangement, which must be a rarity in the world of indie-rock. Words created uncertainty by their content as well as their quantity, as in "I Keep the City Burning for You," where he sang:

I keep the city burning for you
Beacon to guide you home
Furnace to keep you warm
Smoke to poison your lungs

All the ingredients of a great relationship, then.

They did ecstatically rock out on one tune. The strange thing about it is that I developed an unusual physical reaction: I sneezed throughout the song, then stopped as soon as it did. Perhaps it was a sudden, temporary (I hope) allergy to ecstatically rocking out?

While I've never been a fan of oversize hip hop clothing, neither can I understand the show-your-socks-small jeans indie guys like Warmsely wear. His bassist, who I'd issue a blipster warning on if I worked for the NY Times, was supremely cool, though.

Gary Lucas was scheduled to perform with a DJ at 12:15 AM, but in a sign of encroaching age, I didn't feel like waiting.

Monné-Solsona Quartet - 30/06/2007@Jamboree, Barcelona

Vincens Solsonna - g
Joan Monné - p
Giula Valle - b
Ramon A. Rey - d

A strange happened when we returned to the Jamboree for the Monné-Solsona Quartet's second set: they played the exact same set-list again. It's not as if the house had been turned out: the guy at the door stamped our hands as we stepped out for air specifically so that we could get back inside without paying. So I have no idea what they were thinking. That said, I have equally little idea why guitarists play like Vincens Solsona did, either: that slightly echoey, unrelentingly bright, treble-only tone is one I have little affection for, especially when coupled with lots of fast lines relatively bereft of rhythm and Pat Metheny-lite ballads. Thankfully, the rest of the quartet was more interesting.

When the guitar laid out, the trio gained in impact and rhythmic cohesion. Joan Monné's playing wasn't terribly interesting harmonically or melodically, but it was lively and intricate. Ramon A. Rey had an interesting style that distributed busy polyrhythms all over the kit. Giula Valle was the real musician of the bunch, though, leaving in some rough edges and really interacting with her bandmates and trying to push them. Her composition, "Love Song," was the most interestingly-constructed original of the repertoire, as its ostinato-fuelled, almost Reid Anderson-style rock song intensity suggested a rather... vigorous personality. How out-of-step she was with the leader was highlighted whenever Solsona attempted to accompany one of her too-rare solos: he was painfully ill-at-ease and square.

Valle's contribution aside, there was a worrying schism between cute head arrangements and the blowing sections that reduced them to mere window-dressing. Still, a nice hall of mirrors effect was achieved on a mash-up of "Evidence" and "All The Things You Are." The first time around, before learning of what, exactly, was going on, I wondered why they were playing "All The Things You Are" with "Evidence"'s staccato phrasing. The second time, I understood that it was "Evidence," but with the chord changes to "All The Things You Are" underneath. It was a little disorienting, but that aside, is there a deeper musical reason to bring these two together?

It looks like I missed David Valdez's visit to Jamboree by a few days, with Libert Fortuny putting on a wild show.

John Zorn: Complete Masada (Day 1) - 28/06/2007@L'auditori, Barcelona

I only got to attend the first of two Barcelona concerts by John Zorn's travelling circus. After all the controversy of David Hajdu's article (cf. Pat Donaher, Peter Breslin and Armen Nalbandian, twice), I was looking forward to some "assaultive noise crafted with meticulous care," to quote David Hajdu, but I got a whole lot more meticulous care than assaultive noise. Each of the three sets provided a distinct view into the Masada songbook, but all seemed to carry formal concerns and stylistic mash-ups nearer to their hearts than the expression of Jewishness.

Bar Kokhba mostly used gently-swaying Latin rhythms and more vigorous free-jazz-inflected ones to underpin the typical Masada minor-key Jewish themes, with a few side-rips into tango and surf music. Zorn kept a firm, if discrete, grasp of the situation from the conductor's chair. The music was both surprisingly easy listening and satisfyingly well-written. Marc Ribot was the standout soloist, for me. On one tune, he created a time-stopping junction between Cuban and cowboy movie soundtrack guitar styles; elsewhere he followed up a driving Mark Feldman solo with floating, distended notes. So soon after seeing him in action with Sean Noonan, it was fascinating to watch him in a completely different context, still managing to bring a vast array of styles together in a completely logical, integrated way.

It's unfair of me to single Ribot out, though. Joey Baron, Cyro Baptista (who I came across outside before the show and thought "Who's that interesting-looking guy in the gray-flecked goatee and red glasses?"), Greg Cohen, Erik Friedlander and Feldman are all exceptional and sensitive musicians. Feldman managed to maintain a strong drive even when he broke away from strict adherence to the band's propulsion and displayed an astounding range of timbres on the last piece, when he went from a very high whistle to half-voiced low-register rumbles.

Despite his massive beard and the "Reggae/Metal/Blues" description on his MySpace page, Jamie Saft's trio (with Greg Cohen and Kenny Wollenson) was the most classically jazz of the three ensembles: it adhered to the usual soloist-accompanist division of labour and head-solos-head shape. Bar Kokhba's attention to form was probably no greater, but in the piano trio context, it was all the more evident: the Jewish themes appeared, dissolved into bluesy solos or furious cascades that emerged from moody fragments, then resolidified. The piano might have been scurrying over a free rumble, but a few unison hits or a collective wax and wane showed that everything was tightly controlled and delimited.

Despite the obvious stylistic differences, this trio didn't work all that differently from, say, Bill Charlap's. This was a little frustrating, but also provided opportunities for a few tunes that actually sounded like real songs rather than the mere running of a scale that some of the Masada compositions seem to be. A couple of tunes reached a "Gymnopédie"-like intimacy on which Saft seemed to hold back each note a tiny bit, to poignant effect. Another combined funky hard bop, a Latin beat and a Jewish tonality to end up sounding like some kind of weird throwback '50s exotica.


Asmodeus provided a radical change to the previous two sets from its very first notes, as Ribot, Trevor Dunn and Calvin Weston simultaneously erupted into an electric roar. Ribot showed that he could play all-out noise and classic rock just as well as all-out melody (along with, I'm sure, all-out changes, though he didn't do it here). Dunn tore into lines derived from metal. Weston was like a man possessed, playing hard-hitting thrash-funk. Despite the volume and my distance from the stage, the drummer could be clearly heard screaming - unmiked - from behind his kit. For those members of the audience who might have missed it, though, he continued screaming as the trio took its bows, after having ended the set with a loud smash of the gigantic gong at the back of the stage. Zorn conducted again, which made plain that despite the energy and volume, conditions were still very much controlled. Indeed, an unaccompanied introduction of Weston's felt like extreme skiing: an adrenaline rush wrapped in pinpoint control.

Despite the high quality of and enjoyment I'd gotten from everything I'd just heard, that last point nagged at me a little. Would a little more looseness have enhanced or weakened the performances? Also, I couldn't help but wonder if the whole Jewish angle really mattered: did it go deeper than those zigzagging minor-key melodies, to serve as compositional focus, perhaps? If they were merely a veneer to loosely unify a wide stylistic range, does that make Hajdu's interpretation of the Brubeck anecdote stronger, or weaker? Because, if Zorn's Masada repertoire isn't really about Jewishness, then why couldn't it include Brubeck? Maybe these questions all have obvious answers that I'm not familiar enough with Zorn's music to answer.

More opinions: Jazzman on days one and two.