Cork Jazz Festival reviews: ECM links bear fruit at Triskel
The Oded Tzur Quartet at Triskel for the ECM concert at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane
If the Triskel was a haven for jazz listening all weekend, things began on Sunday with the venue being a haven from, well, jazz itself. It was a day of tribute at the venue to the ECM label, on the occasion of founder Manfred Eicher’s 80th birthday, and first up, a programme that was intended to showcase the composer Tigran Mansurian and involving a trio of Hanna Weinmeister on violin, Anja Lechner on cello, and Anna Gourari piano. This, however, was jettisoned when Weinmeister suffered a foot injury, reducing them to a duo, and thus, a new programme, with the decidedly unjazzy pairing of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann to the fore.
Not that this was reason to complain. Schubert’s A Minor Sonata, nicknamed the “Arpeggione”, after the guitar-like instrument it was written for but which hardly anyone plays nowadays, was the centrepiece. As with much of late Schubert, it’s a case of every silver lining has a cloud: the moments of brightness, of passion, are intertwined with poignant melancholy, with rumbles of discord from deep in the piano.
It’s a beautiful piece; right from its heart-wrenching opening bars, it conveys what is so often the mood with Schubert: a poignant awareness of the transitory flow of life, how its moments of joy and beauty are inevitably accompanied by a sense of their very fleeting nature. On a Sunday of the jazz festival, with the clocks gone back, well, it felt very relatable indeed.
But perhaps even more fitting for the weekend that’s in it was a selection from the Paul Hindemith suite, 1922. Like the year that gives it its name, this is a piece redolent in modernity, bringing baroque and jazz elements crashing together in a startling way. A truly raucous sound of the 1920s jazz age is transported into the room, but in a dramatically transformed way. Both Gershwin and TS Eliot would approve, you felt.
The ECM connection continued into the evening, with a double bill of the Oded Tzur Quartet, and, no strangers to Cork, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio. Saxophonist Tzur is a student of the bansuri, a kind of Indian flute. He seems to breathe out the most gentle of melodies, which his wonderful band picks up with a studied, minimalist air. The sense of integration between the instruments is exquisite, as each is foregrounded before seamlessly passing what’s being created before our ears to the next soloist. The effect is of a fragile beauty, of incipient tunes hovering on the cusp of crystallising, of a group not afraid of lingering notes, near silences.
As a band leader, Tzur is happy to nod to Nitai Hershkovits on piano, Petros Klampanis on bass, and Johnathan Blake on drums, or even hop from one foot to another, as they embellish the tunes he softly lays down. An extraordinary showcase of what a saxophone quartet can do.
After this, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio are more obviously tuneful, but it’s none the less beguiling for that. Incredibly, it’s almost 20 years since Wasilweski’s first ECM release; his delicate lyricism and fluidity remain his hallmark. Here, Herbie Hancock’s 'Actual Proof' probably provides the best moments for Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass and Michał Miskiewicz on drums to shine. But the most extraordinary moment takes us back to the day’s classical opener, with Wasilewski’s gorgeous take on a Bach keyboard variation.
