Archives for August 2012

TOMASZ STANKO

Resplendent in houndstooth jacket, tight jeans and two-tone buckle shoes,Tomasz Stanko took to the stage and attached a wireless microphone to his trumpet. He offered a half smile to the welcoming audience, nodded to his colleagues and launched into the first of four unannounced pieces that took the Ystad Jazz Festival into the rarified atmosphere of Stankoland, where adventure is the rule. Inspired by free jazz, Stanko achieves creative independence within musical forms, however flexible those forms may be. He heads a quartet of young men who delight in taking chances. They needn’t worry about outpacing their leader in spontaneity and risk; in middle age, he is the chance-taker-in chief.

In Ystad, Finnish drummer Olavi Louhivuori whipped the band through the hour-and-a-half set with the energy of an uncoiling cobra and independence of limbs that might be the envy of an octopus. There was remarkable visual contrast between the dervish Louhivuori, his calm fellow Finn Alexi Tuomarila at the piano, and the Polish bassist Slowomir Kurkiewicz, who has the demeanor and power of a friendly bear. Supporting Stanko, they provide the carpets of rhythms that he rides on forays into and beyond the upper atmosphere. Stanko’s fund of trumpet resources ranges from a low register tone rich as warm honey to shrieks of split notes at the top of the horn. He can be lyrical one moment, demonic the next.

Little that Stanko plays could be called typical, but here’s what happened in one piece: It began with bowed bass and a vaguely Middle Eastern piano and trumpet melody. Louhivuori executed swirling drum patterns as Stanko swooped and darted above Tuomarila’s chords. Kurkiewicz shifted to plucking the strings for a bass solo, the tempo moved up, trumpet and piano did a moment of call and response before executing a tricky unison line, then Stanko was off, alternately drifting and darting for several minutes on shifting currents generated by the rhythm section. Tuomarila soloed at moderate length with free ideas served by controlled technique that reflected his conservatory training. Following a chattering drum solo and a second, short, bass solo, the unison melody line reappeared. Piano and trumpet added a new theme in the form of a phrase repeated several times, and the piece slowly dissipated into silence.

After the last tune, a volunteer in a festival tee shirt presented each of the musicians a large red flower as the audience rose and began the insistent call for more that seems to be a trademark of this festival. The encore, in ¾ time, had a folkish quality whose chord voicings were somehow evocative of Bill Evans. The solos by Stanko and Tuomarila offered assurance, rather than the stimulation that had been characteristic of most of the concert. It was an instance of Stanko’s gift for making difficult music accessible.

MARE NOSTRUM

Hearing Mare Nostrum with half an ear, a listener might think that the group is providing pleasant incidental music in the background. Beneath the trio’s often placid surface are life, movement and an intriguing melding of jazz and classical traditions with the Scandinavian, French and Italian sensibilities of its members. In the care of Jan Lundgren and Richard Galliano, piano and accordion have the harmonic and expressive resources of an orchestra. A daring and deceptively relaxed improviser, trumpeter and flugelhornist Paoli Fresu contributes tonal variety and shares Galliano’s and Lundgren’s crafty interaction. Since their first recording as Mare Nostrum, the three individual stars have deepened their relationship and their music.

Seeing them perform, a listener familiar only with their record began to understand the closeness and interactivity of their music. In the group’s namesake piece written by Lundgren, Fresu sat, foot entwined around calf, intent on Lundgren’s solo as if searching for clues to what he might play when it was his turn. Throughout the concert, Galliano and Lundgren paid similar attention to one another and to Fresu. Fresu’s “Principessa” (sp) and “Valsa di Retorni,” Galliano’s “Chat Pitre” and “Liberty Waltz,” Lundgren’s Vårvindar Friska” and “Love Land” all benefited from mutual interest in which group results seem to matter as much as individual solo performance. That is a phenomenon not unknown but relatively rare in small group jazz that is primarily a soloist’s art. Comparison with the Modern Jazz Quartet comes to mind.

Among the highlights: in “Love Land,” the fleetness of Fresu’s undiluted bebop solo on flugelhorn; the ensemble’s unity in Quincy Jones’s theme from “The Getaway,” with the composer looking on from his box seat; the audience’s palpable concentration during variations on Ravel’s “La Mer l’Oye;” the encore, “I Wish You Love,” in which the group generated a blues atmosphere and surprising tempo changes.

Perhaps because he was playing in his own town, but equally likely because was playing so well, Lundgren’s solos generated sustained applause. Anyone witnessing Galliano’s virtuosity is unlikely to walk out making accordion jokes, and anyone truly listening to Mare Nostrum is unlikely to think of what they do as background music.

One of the premier events of this festival was the appearance of a pair of world-class Swedish pianists separated in age by 34 years. One is a cultural hero of his nation. The other is reaching that status. 46-year-old Jan Lundgren, artistic director of the festival and a resident of Ystad, greeted Bengt Hallberg, 79, onstage for a concert back to back on 9-foot grand pianos. Hallberg was the pianist on the legendary 1953 record sessions that this festival’s honorary guest, Quincy Jones, arranged for Clifford Brown, Art Farmer and a group of Swedish all-stars. He was known then, and has been since, for harmonic resourcefulness, the fine shadings of his keyboard touch and a stunning melodic gift.

In terms of those facets, Lundgren has been correctly identified as Hallberg’s successor. However, to describe his current relationship to Hallberg as that of student to master—as a reviewer of the Friday concert did—is to dismiss Lundgren’s growth and development over the 18 years since his debut. One of the leading jazz pianists of his generation, he has demonstrated his individualism in his own trios as well as with such major figures as Bill Perkins, Herb Geller, Benny Golson, James Moody, Putte Wickman and Arne Domnerus.

Having worked together several times since Back To Back, the album that established their occasional partnership, Hallberg and Lundgren have achieved an easy camaraderie that flows through their music. Hallberg’s touch is firmer than it used to be, possibly in compensation for a hearing difficulty, but it is still the envy of pianists everywhere, for reasons evident in the opening “All The Things You Are” and the Hallberg original “Autumn Walk.” They alternated two-piano pieces with solo performances, one moving to a throne-like chair at the rear center of the stage to listen to the other. In his first solo turn, Lundgren created a medley of Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss” and Quincy Jones’s “The Midnight Sun Will Never Set,” which he dedicated to its composer, sitting in a box seat nearby. Hallberg alone played his composition “Back-Inside,” which had a melodic affinity with popular ballads of the 1920s and ‘30s—”Blue Turning Grey Over You” came to mind—but a subtle modern harmonic sensibility.

Lundgren’s second individual medley began with “’Round Midnight” and ended with a “Yesterdays” in which he managed to strongly hint at Art Tatum without being an imitator. Together on “Autumn Leaves,” Lundgren and Hallberg conjured up counterpoint filled with contrary motion that made the performance a standout moment in a standout concert. That led the audience to a standing ovation and the rhythmic clapping that demands an encore. Following the presentation of sunflowers, the pianists played the Bach “Siciliano” and, after a second standing ovation, a rip-roaring blues.

Compact and organized, the Ystad Jazz Festival is nonetheless too loaded with music for anyone to be able to hear more than a generous sampling. Here are a few samples.

CLAIRE MARTIN

Ystad artistic director Jan Lundgren introduced the group as The Claire Martin Band. Whether or not that is their official name, it makes sense. Martin is the leader, but it is apparent that pianist Gareth Williams, bassist Laurence Cottle and drummer Kristian Leith regard her as more than—you should pardon the non-PC expression—a chick singer with a rhythm section. From the “Killer Joe” intro of “Be Sure You Can Get Back Out” to the fast “But Not For Me” encore with its “Sonnymoon For Two” riff, Martin functioned as if she were an instrumental performer. Not that she scatted more than incidentally, but the rhythmic and tonal qualities of her performance had spirit and band interconnectivity more common to horn players than to singers.

Martin handled the altered rhythm, melody and chord changes of “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You” with easy command of the difficulties the arrangement presented. She applied the same performance concentration to pieces by Esbjörn Svensson, Michael Franks and The Doors as to classics by Cole Porter, Johnny Mandel and Jimmy Van Heusen. Notably in control of her deep register to color the meaning of lyrics, Martin interpreted Johnny Mercer’s words to “I Thought About You” as poetic expression. Cottle, an electric bassist who brings acoustic qualities to the instrument, followed in solo with intriguing lines on the chords of the piece.

When it is their sidemens’ turn to create, musician-singers pay attention, which encourages the audience to do the same. In Joshua Redman’s “Lower Case,” Martin concluded her initial chorus and turned to Williams (pictured), listening intently during his improvisation. The Welsh pianist is a soloist of considerable accomplishment, but on this afternoon, the rhythmic and chordal inventiveness of his comping for Martin was his greater attribute. Leth, a Danish drummer, had an intriguing skin-on-skins hand drumming solo on the rumba rhythm of “Too Much in Love to Care.” In a tribute to Shirley Horn, whom she credited as an early inspiration, Martin sang “He Never Mentioned Love” with the air of wistful regret that Horn also gave the Curtis Lewis song.

One aspect of Martin’s performance that is not directly musical enhances her music; she uses her eyes in ways that underline the messages of her songs. Employed to excess, the effects of facial expression would be annoying, but they seem to be attributes of a natural actress and add subtle meaning to her art.

KURT ROSENWINKEL

This festival holds concerts not only in the grand old theater downtown, but also in restaurants and clubs in several precincts of Ystad. Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and his Standards Trio played in a central area of the luxurious Saltsjöbad hotel that overlooks the town’s long white sand beach. Rosenwinkel, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Jeff Ballard performed for an audience filled with young listeners attracted by the group’s growing popularity. Opening with Clifford Brown’s blues “Sandu,” they worked through a set of standards, as billed, but mostly jazz standards. “At Long Last Love” was the only one from the Great American Songbook. In it, Rosenwinkel reeled out chorus after chorus, the trio’s empathy and time growing tighter as his inventiveness intensified.

Rosenwinkel launched Charles Mingus’s memorial to Lester Young, “Goodbye, Porkpie Hat,” with an unaccompanied introduction followed by a long solo that developed into a sustained vamp on a single chord to the end. Ballard transfixed the listeners with a kaleidoscopic solo on Joe Henderson’s “Serenity.” Okwego’s dancing, lunging bass line energized the trio in Clare Fischer’s “Pensativa.” A master of the abstracted beginning, Rosenwinkel slowly worked his way alone into Horace Silver’s “Peace.” He concentrated the time feeling through several choruses before Okegwo and Ballard joined him. Ballard supported Okegwo’s solo with a filagree of brushwork and cymbal embellishments that had the two smiling like schoolboys getting away with something. Rosenwinkel took the piece out alone, coloring it with more of his abstract chords.

The encore was a heated version of Bud Powell’s “Dance of the Infidels,” highlighted by an exchange of four-bar phrases executed by Ballard and Okegwo in an exhibition of time-play that had one member of the audience laughing out loud.

Oh —— that was me.

The 250 listeners of a certain age who filled Per Helsas gÃ¥rd on Friday got what they came for—reassurance that solid mainstream jazz is alive and well in Sweden. The courtyard surrounded by venerable half-timbered buildings rang with the brawny music of three of the country’s best-known tenor saxophonists, Nisse Sandström, Krister Andersson and Bernt Rosengren (left to right in the second photo). Framed by walnut and pear trees as clouds drifted and birds swooped chirping in brilliant sunshine, the trio of saxophonists justified their billing as “Swedish Tenor Kings.” Their repertoire was a stockpile of standard songs and jazz originals long favored by modern traditionalists, from the riffs of “Blues Up and Down” and “Lester Leaps In” to ballads including Thelonious Monk’s “Ask Me Now” and Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me.” Andersson, featured on the Monk piece, soloed with respect for not only the angular beauty of the melody but also the harmonic structure’s invitation to quirky individuality.

When Charlie Parker recorded Miles Davis’s “Sippin’ at Bells” on tenor saxophone rather than his customary alto, he inspired a generation of young tenor players, including Sonny Rollins. That part of the tenor tradition was on display in the Per Helsas gård version of the tune, notably so in the tenors’ exchanges with the Danish drummer Aage Tanggaard. The rhythm team of Tanggaard, his fellow Dane pianist Ole Kock Hansen and the Swedish bassist Hans Backenroth were impressive in solo as well as in support. Hansen’s choruses on John Coltrane’s “Blue Train” were a highlight of the session. A straightforward stylist whose solos communicate assurance, Rosengren’s de facto leadership was evident as he set a “Lester Leaps” riff with Tanggaard. The drummer’s nearly constant smile seemed a metaphor for the group’s pleasure at working together. In addition to his fine soloing, Sandström contributed as a genial and informative master of ceremonies.

When they want more, European audiences set up rhythmic clapping, an unyielding insistence that brooks no resistance. It brought the band back for an encore, “Just Friends.” Following a round of testicular solos, the piece and the concert ended with an extended tag ending of simultaneous improvisation by the three tenors. It was the most adventurous collective playing of a satisfying set.

As the schedule attests, Sweden’s Ystad Jazz Festival is programmed tightly. Over a quick lunch, Iouri Lnogradski of the Russian magazine Jazz.Ru observed that it would be technically possible for a listener to attend everything, but at the price of exhaustion. Rather than sprint from site to site sampling, one must choose. Here are reflections on two events.

Thursday evening, Eliane Elias and her quartet illuminated the Ystad Theater with performances of modern music of her native Brazil and the jazz of the United States, her alternate home for the past three decades. Elias exhibited the seamless style in which she has developed as a superb pianist in the Bud Powell tradition who also sings expressively. With her husband Marc Johnson on bass, guitarist Rubens de La Corte and the propulsive Brazilian drummer Rafael Barata, she opened with a Gilberto Gil song whose title I may have misheard as “Lachada de Bacisa.” Title aside, the vitality of the set opener put the capacity audience in her corner. Elias further endeared herself to them a few bars into “Isto Aqui O Que È” when she raised her hand, halted the band and said, “Let’s start over. Too fast.” Satisfied with the new tempo, she and the quartet demonstrated the rhythmic unity that has made them one of the tightest working bands of the day.

Both facets of Elias’s talent shone in “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Her unaccompanied piano introduction, at once rhapsodic and rhythmically insinuating, led into a vocal in English etched with a trace of what remains of her Brazilian accent. The quartet gave the piece a tag ending that flirted in passing with “The Girl From Ipanema” and highlighted the subtle connection among the rhythm section, particularly between Johnson and Bata. The leader gave “So Danco Samba” a solo opening—long and laced with chord treatments reminiscent of Powell—that set up a fast quartet performance. No hand went up this time. Grins and exchanges of glances made it clear that this was the right tempo. A highlight of the set was the title tune of Elias’s current album, “Light My Fire,” combined in a medley with her composition “Incendiado.” She was taking us, she said, from a request for combustion to full involvement.

The late concert Thursday brought together Swedish trumpeter Anders Bergcrantz with American tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and drummer Victor Lewis in an international power quintet that also included Bergcrantz’s fellow Swedes Robert Tjäderkvist and bassist Mattias Swensson. The temporary Ystad night watchman (see the previous item), Bergrantz left his nocturnal assurances on the tower of St. Mary’s Church and led the band through more than two hours of music guaranteed not to let even the most jet-lagged listener doze off.

Bergcrantz had played with Lewis and with Harper, but the three had not worked together until the Ystad festival. In the backgrounds of the two Americans veterans are bands led by Stan Getz, Gil Evans, Woody Shaw, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis, Carla Bley, Jessica Williams, Max Roach and Randy Weston, among many others. In addition to a panoply of European stars, Bergcrantz has performed with Richie Beirach, Russell Malone and the Lionel Hampton All Star Big Band. He and Beirach are featured soloists in Iphigenia, a new work by his wife, the composer Anna-Lena Laurin. In a conversation the afternoon of the performance, Bergcrantz, Harper and Lewis remarked on the single-mindedness they discovered in rehearsal. They talked about sharing a desire to make what Lewis called “emoting music” and writing new compositions that would help achieve a dialogue.

In the event, again at the Ystad Theater, they reached their goal, and then some. Lewis and Swensson hooked up in the kind of symbiosis that drummers and bassists hope for, creating with Tjäderkvist carpets of rhythm and waves of momentum on which Bergcrantz and Harper rode in extended solos. The energy and muscle were reminiscent of collaborations in bands like Shaw’s, Freddie Hubbard’s and Art Blakeys. Among the highlights: Lewis’s thunderous opening drum announcement of his “Seventh Avenue,” subsiding to a flurry of sticks on rims before a transition to the drum heads; Bergcrantz’s ballad “Fountain of Youth” with its repetition of one note setting up a beguiling melody and the dramatic spontaneous joint solo of Lewis and Swensson; Bergcrantz’s spacious tone throughout, regardless of speed or range, and his and Harper’s force in solo. If there was a shortcoming, it might have been the cumulative effect of concentrated intensity. On the way out, I overheard a listener say, “Man, that was too much music.” Well, consider the alternative.

More later about music heard and that to come.

The only way a town of 18,000 can bring off a four-day music festival is to involve the community. In Ystad, a summer beach haven in the south of Sweden, a staff or nearly one hundred volunteers and a corps of financial supporters work together for months to create Sweden’s only major jazz festival. From the women who prepare food and the retired executives who chauffeur visiting musicians to festival president Thomas Lantz and artistic director Jan Lundgren, the people of the region contribute their skills and money to make the three-year-old festival a success. Like the others, Lantz and Lundgren operate a thoroughly professional event without receiving a single krona in return. Lundgren appears in his more customary role later in the week with Bengt Hallberg in a two-piano concert by the Swedish piano giants.

Last night on the eve of the festival’s opening the volunteers and supporters gathered at Ystad’s magnificent 19th century theatre to mingle over hors d’oeuvres and wine and hear a mini-concert by a unique Swedish singer who lives in neaby Malmö. The theatre, rebuilt in 1894 to replace one that burned, has stage machinery especially designed to allow authentic production of plays from the 1700s. That equpiment was not needed to present Miriam Aida and her trio, who serenaded the Ystad volunteers and guests with adaptations of traditional Swedish folk songs in the samba style of the Brazilian music of which Aida is a master. She, guitarist Mats Andersson and percussionist Ola Bothzén launched the festival with a half-dozen songs that captivated their audience, including people like me who don’t understand more than ten words of the language. Familiar melodies and sensuous rhythms sufficed.

Following the concert, everyone trooped a couple blocks to St. Mary’s church to hear Swedish trumpeter Anders Bergcrantz sit in for the watchman who usually assures the people of Ystad that all is well, as his predecessors have done since 1748. Sounding his horn from all four sides of the church’s tower, Bergcrantz maintained the ancient instituion while embellishing with blue notes and hints of syncopation that acknowledged the festival and its new tradition. Tonight, Bergcrantz follows up with a concert in which his sidemen will include tenor saxophonist Billy Harper and drummer Victor Lewis. Whether they will incorporate the watchman’s customary licks remains to be heard.

Just arrived in Sweden to cover the Ystad Jazz Festival this week. Here’s the view from the hotel window. It’s a tough assignment, but somebody had to volunteer.

Reports coming soon. Watch this space.