Live music: ECM Weekend - Triskel Christchurch, Cork

4/5

Hardwired into the very nature of jazz, right from its earliest beginnings, was a daring and compelling counterpoint between composition and improvisation, structure and freedom, personal expression and group dynamics. Over the course of the music’s past century or so, these forces have been in constant motion, continually being redefined and reimagined, often to thrilling effect and startling transformation.

It was some of these essential elements and energies that were explored during a few nights of fine music at Cork’s Triskel Christchurch, under the banner of the ECM Weekend. The second annual mini-festival dedicated to the renowned German independent record label ECM, the Weekend showcased world-class musicians whose playing miraculously defies genre, geography and generation.

In fact, one of the event’s greatest pleasures was that it was frequently hard to tell where the borderlines between song and soloing, melody and interpretation, began and ended. Written music had the feel of being improvised, extemporised passages the shape of instant composition.

This was never more evident than in the opening evening’s concert, a duo between the German cellist Anja Lechner and French pianist François Couturier. In a series of chants, dances, hymns and laments that owed more to eastern folk traditions than the Western musical canon, the duo roamed freely over sprightly melodies, mournful rubatos and delicate abstractions.

On Saturday, American guitar maestro Ralph Towner’ssolo concert offered similarly wide panoramas, his mastery of pianistic harmonies, glorious glissandos, and rhythms from around the world as captivating as ever.

And the final night’s event, featuring a stellar piano trio led by Marcin Wasilewski, may have been more straight-ahead in jazz terms, yet the Polish group ranged thrillingly from extended driving vamps and jams to quiet introspection – often in the same tune. This was a protean, highly interactive trio equally suited to club and concert hall (and resonant church).

It was the artistic ambition and aesthetic integrity of the ECM Weekend that perhaps impressed the most – live music that was inspiring, clever, accessible, moving and fun. Proudly so. It needed no pop gimmickry, no cheapening of the brand. The sponsors, organisers and programmers of Cork’s other jazz festival might well take note.