Cork Jazz Festival reviews: Jakob Bro leads ECM extravaganza at Triskel
Jakon Brio with Thomas Morgan on bass, and Joey Baron on drums in Triskel for the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Darragh Kane
Sunday of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival is ECM Artists and Collaborations day at Triskel, continuing the centre’s near-decade-long association with the venerated German jazz and classical label. Up first from that stable is a duo from both sides of the house: the classical guitarist Zsofia Boros and Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim.
The pair’s first outing was in Hamburg at the 80th birth of ECM’s founder Manfred Eicher. Since then, they have had a chance to spend time together honing their collaboration. The result was music to soothe the soul, and perhaps even the body after two days of festival revelry.
First, a piece called ‘Trails Crossing’ has Seim’s superb technique to the fore, as he elicits gliding, breathy notes from his instrument in an improvised part, and Boros sparely plucks her guitar strings. She is more to the fore on Seim’s composition 'Beginning an Ending', her tremolo playing bringing a slightly Spanish flavour.
The pair make exquisite and delicate music together. Any shifts in tone and colour seem like a pebble thrown into a pool, reverberating and rippling wide. An airy version of ‘A Day in November’, by Leo Brouwer, is a highlight, before Boros switches to the ronroco, a small South American guitar, and a selection of compositions from that part of the world.
At one point, Boros plucks a note, and asks the audience to repeat it. Soon, the entire church is vibrating to the hum of that note, as Boros follows the audience. It’s an invitation to a kind of musical meditation, she says. Though she need not have said anything: this was always music at its most meditative.
The sax-led Oded Tzur Quartet was a highlight of the festival last year, and from that lineup for the second of Sunday’s Triskel trio came Nitai Hershkovits, this time for a solo performance.
Whereas most players learn piano through classical and come to jazz later, Nitai Hershkovits’s path has been the opposite: he began with improvisation on the keyboard, only exploring classical later. The two traditions are melded wonderfully in a stunning opening 25 minutes of uninterrupted Keith Jarrett-like improvisation. The first chords have a baroque-like quality, but soon bluesy notes emerge, then we swing delicately, almost into boogie-woogie. But always, the classical idiom is kept, as well as Hershkovits’s extraordinary delicacy of touch.
The rest of the performance is something of a contrast, in form at least, as Hershkovits draws mostly from the relatively shorter tunes on his latest album and first for ECM, Call on the Old Wise.
Among them is the gorgeous melody that is ‘Dream Your Dreams’, a song by Molly Drake, the mother of Nick Drake, herself a pianist and singer. In Hershkovits’s hands this neglected song sounds like a standard we’ve been hearing forever.
Hershkovits also speaks highly of Duke Ellington, not so much as charismatic band leader, but as a gifted composer. For this performance, he selects Ellington’s Single Petal of a Rose, a slow and delicate piece. Ernesto Nazareth’s Ipanema and Ennio Morricone’s il Gatto get similar treatments in a showcase of Hershkovits many gifts.
Triskel director Tony Sheehan referred to Triskel being a “sanctuary from the chaos” on Sunday, and first-time Cork visitor Jakob Bro jokes at the contrast between the Christchurch venue and the surrounding streets as he takes the stage. “We thought we’d landed in the wrong town,” he quips, before pausing to say how nice it was to have, “this … mixture of things.”
The Danish guitar maestro is in town to reunite with Thomas Morgan on bass, and Joey Baron on drums, drawing on their ECM albums Streams and Bay of Rainbows for an enthralling set.
From a player of Bro’s supreme talent, backed only by drums and bass, you might expect a kind of showcase, note piled on note in a display of the virtuoso’s skill, and the electric guitar’s unique musical qualities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bro’s approach is to use his instrument to provide soundscapes, an elaborate and expansive canvas for his two bandmates to draw upon. He does this with an amazing range of loops, delays, pitch changes, reverbs, and distortions. Morgan joins in amid these slowly-building melodies with just enough notes to smooth things along, and Baron adds a few sharp edges to the understated, shifting sound.
Minimalism is the word here, as the trio create a soundworld of lightness, space and restraint. One can only marvel at such a truly world-class trio at the top of their game, and utterly, intuitively, in tune with each other.
