Cork's Jazz Fest hosts Kristjan Randalu and Dino Saluzzi at the Triskel

By Philip Watson

Triskel’s annual mini-festival dedicated to the acclaimed German record label ECM moved this year, its fourth, from its regular slot at the end of November to the October Bank Holiday weekend, and a space within the wider Cork Jazz Festival.

If such an integration might possibly have diluted the profile of the event, subsuming it within a much greater whole, it plainly made more sense in terms of taking advantage of the

musical buzz and energy in the city, and potentially attracting greater audiences.

There was certainly a good and enthusiastic house at Triskel Christchurch for Saturday night’s characteristically wide-ranging concert, a double bill featuring a trio led by emerging

Estonian jazz pianist Kristjan Randalu, and a group directed by one of the great masters of contemporary South American music, Dino Saluzzi.

Playing original compositions mostly from his recent ECM debut Absence, Randalu and his star trio of New York guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Mark Ounaskari created music that seemed an entirely natural fit with the label’s long-established aesthetic: lyrical, textured, exploratory, moving from delicate to dissonant in rolling waves and repeating patterns of sound.

The quintet led by legendary 83-year-old Argentinian composer and bandoneon (a type of concertina) maestro Saluzzi was largely a family affair, with Dino’s brother Felix on tenor saxophone and clarinet, son José Maria on guitar, and nephew Matías on electric bass.

The strong ties and connections were more than evident: sometimes this rigorous and complex written music had the feel of a spontaneous Sunday afternoon family session in the country, of tango and folk forms at once ancient and modern, of something vivid, sacred, even dream-like. It was sui generis and utterly captivating. Perhaps it takes a lifetime to play this simply, directly and authentically.

I want to play more, because — and this does not happen in every place we perform — something happened in Cork, something came back to me.

In Saluzzi’s idiosyncratic English it was hard to know exactly what that was, but after an encore that lasted half an hour or more, there were few, if any, in the audience who weren’t fully glad it had.