EXPLORE DONATE SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH All About Jazz Home » Articles » Live Review
2 RECOMMEND LIVESTREAM! Borealis 2020
Tue, Jun 23
A Life Is A Long Song - For Al Jarreau By MARTIN Hamburg.stream LONGLEY Hamburg, Germany, Germany April 4, 2020 20:30 Sign in to view read count
Borealis Bergen, Norway March 6-8, 2020 LEARN MORE
Borealis means 'northern,' so we must be in Norway, for this festival of experimental SHOWCASE music, which has been running in rainy Bergen since 2004. Even though, perhaps, the foundational musical forms of this long weekender lie in the moderne, compositional, new music zone, the G-Drive G1 USB 3.0 4 TB ekstern programme incorporates marked ratios of harddisk jazz, free improvisation, punk rock, and electronic music (this latter tipping more towards club and dance oor manifestations, rather than creeping along academic corridors). These forms are not nailed onto the forehead of avant-garde expression. They
WD My Passport Ultra USB-C are in ltrated like a benign disease, streaked ekstern harddisk 4 TB (blå) with their own uorescent colours, in thin, BUY NOW jellied slices of alternate styling. As if this wasn't a suf ciently open-hearted surgery, Swallow Tales Borealis also welcomed dance, video, lm By John Sco eld and performance art, hand-stitching the disciplines. FEATURED VIDEO 4 895 § Mostly from London, the singer INFO On the sunny side of the street On the sunny side of the street Elaine Mitchener and her all-star improvising group g aEXPLOREve a performanDONAce of TEher Sweet SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH Tooth, combining music and movement. She chose well, inviting out Jason Yarde (reeds), Sylvia Hallett (voice, violin, accordion) and Mark Sanders (drums, percussion). The BIK theatre is an old school, high-vaulted joint, with an appealing acoustic, the kind of venue that makes it easier for performers to go out a-wandering into the audience, which of course, these four did, taking various routes, On The Sunny Side Of The Street at various times, around the rows, up the Featuring the music of Emilia Vancini stairs, and from front to back. The lighting was also suitably evocative. It was soon to become apparent that the Borealis approach FEATURED ALBUMS to visual framing was invariably sensitive to the surroundings of its host haunts. Afan's Dance SIMON DEELEY Yes, Sweet Tooth concerns the slave trade, with particular reference to the role played BUY NOW by England, so we might expect Mitchener's vocal output to be fraught, but too often she Brasiliana tended to go too far towards controlled AL DANIELS screams and shouts, while her accompanying musicians took the subtle path, using their BUY NOW instruments to wash the whole space with continually shifting sound relationships. Collective Expression Thankfully, Mitchener's core sound was more BOB GORRY free jazz than free opera. Hallett's underplayed, devilish singing was more BUY NOW effective, as it almost became inseparable from her skating string or breathing bellows Swallow Tales activities. Yarde's baritone saxophone JOHN SCOFIELD belched down from the gallery, then Sanders descended the stage-side stairs while BUY NOW playing them with his sticks. Mitchener ran down the central aisle, and we were all suddenly in the asylum. She kept some of her Ad movements sparse, accentuating breath sounds, moving through a sequence of promenading duos with the three players, intoning a list of sold slaves, and their market pricings, decided by their age and health. Sanders boomed kettle drum, Hallett lilted on accordion. Eventually, all three of Watch the best of Adult Swim on HBO Nordic the players took time on long bamboo sticks, becoming a sub-group of percussionists. HBO Nordic Stream Now
In the Kode 2 venue, electronics and dance conjoined, the latter crawling towards PREMIUM performance art in some of its moves. Choreographer Ole Martin Meland created Øy (island, in Norwegian), which had an immediate Clockwork Orange feel, transposed to a hybrid zone of disco-techno contortions. The twosome of Smerz sat nonchalantly at the mixing desk, triggering harsh cutthroat beat-bursts, but in turn, operating as reclined singer-songwriter balladeers, garbed as if they were working on a hotel reception. Catharina Stoltenberg sat, Zeeteah Massiah legs-crossed, microphone held casually, voice / vocals singing coolly from the desk, softly against hard electro-gristle from Henriette Motzfeldt. The duo also spent some time on violin and upright piano. EXPLORE DONATE SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH The Carte Blanche dancers invaded the expansive performing oor as if they were at a nightclub, professionals suddenly deciding to take over the room. They stood rooted whilst quivering, jerking or spasming, they ran around on imaginary missions, they completely colonised the area. All of them took individual tangents, but intersecting at regular node-points. It looked like improvisation was encouraged, revolving around the chosen 'character' of each dancer. WEEKLY NEWSLETTER They all made good use of their knee- protectors. Enter your email address SIGN UP NOW There was a point where the performance Get More Of A Good Thing! wound down into what appeared to be its Our weekly newsletter highlights our top conclusion, slowing, dying, opping, but then stories and includes your local jazz events it began to intensify by degrees, moving calendar. closer to performance art, as breeze blocks were hefted around the oor, water transferred into buckets, a long-hair dip RADIO resulting in sopping oor-slapping, head turned side-to-side, and then ultimately, a handy pneumatic drill appeared, to make rubble out of the blocks. These actions created a tension of lost control, as the audience might have wondered whether the dreaded health/safety regulations had been well and truly dismissed. Carte Blanche were moving close to the edge, to the audience, physically, and to the limits of previously WORLD OF JAZZ experienced choreography. Big Bands, Orchestras And New Sounds Several arts venues surround the octagonal With Bob Osborne lake of Lille Lungegårdsvannet, so it was only a few steps from Kode 2 to Landmark, for a late night eight-speaker electroacoustic triple bill. Nina Pixel had a cello by her side, but only used it in the most vestigial manner, presumably to sample string-stroking residues. This Slovakian artist kept her sonics subtle, but was cruelly interrupted by what was surely a crashing laptop. Although she'd played for a while, it still seemed like coitus interruptus when she was taken by surprise, music abruptly cut.
John Chantler presented a piece that was closest in feel to trad electroacoustic, working at the mixing desk, dispersing sounds more noticeably around the space. Your scribe found himself in the unusual position of sitting to the side of this Australian's laptop, thus observing the visual progress of the digital tracking.
From South Korea, originally, cellist Okkyung Lee works in many areas, this time playing her instrument alongside a laptop composition, heavily effected, and not always distinguishable, as each contribution merged. Even though all three of these players have worked within academic electroacoustic portals, their resultant works CONTEST GIVEAWAY had the EXPLOREcharacter of beiDONAng letTE out in the SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH populist territories of dance music or noise/drone zones.
The next morning, at the frighteningly early hour of 11am, it was an uphill trek to the newly-reopened Natural History Museum, and even higher, to its top-roost room in the tower, a refurbished woody retreat that has been closed to the public for a century. Now, it will open on special occasions, such as this ELIGIBLE WINNERS: 5 | DAYS REMAINING: 6 performance by Ensemble Avgarde, in a programme of new composition from Prize: Choose Any Three Of These Seven Ropeadope western Norway. Releases
Sponsored by Ropeadope The best piece was "Align 2.0," by Gunhild Seim, it's slow time hinting at a march, with whistling tones, a sparse skitter of drums, a SIGN IN TO ENTER huf ng bassoon, and a lurching accordion Ad motion. It sped up, waddling, with cutting ice-clarinet, trilling with a slow-circling breath, sandblocks gently rubbed. Almost as good was Marius Neset's ""Wildlife," which gave this concert its title. The full ve-piece was employed, with marimba, cultivating a darker, melancholic folk-tone, accordion Watch the best of Adult Swim on HBO Nordic leading a village party. Neset crafted a pastoral, spring sound, capering with its HBO Nordic Stream Now visual senses alert. The bassoon played on percussive qualities, and the marimba took the lead ow, the composition being enjoyably traditional, in the end. Neset was in the house to take the applause, standing next to the room's towering pillar of carefully bricked tomes.
On the Saturday early evening, Saint Jakob Church hosted a gig by YrrY, a trio of one female singer and two dudes sharing a massive bass drum, with a tendency to load up a massive number of found objects onto its stretched skin, in the name of both sound and vision. The best of the four premiered works was the climactic "All We Own/And Now This," by Eva P tzenmaier, where the threesome took the skin-load-up concept to its ultimate conclusion, piling up a teetering sculpture of objects, topped by cushions, boxes, umbrella and pram. Here was another manifestation of the Borealis attention to visuals, lighting, and surprising actions.
Next, at Studio Bergen, the BIT20 Ensemble were led by composer Knut Vaage, with his new work, "Hybrid Spectacle," featuring a large cast of acoustic players, funnelled through the electronic processing of John Hegre. An insistent, frantic riff grew amongst the strings, caught up by the horns, marimba and harp adding colour. Hegre lurked at the rear of the auditorium, making sample capturings, formulating a bathyspheric groaning. Three screens switched between altered images of the real-time performance, and graphic constructions, soon to be overwri tEXPLOREten by repeatinDONAg laserTE scribbles. All SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH of this was quite ambitious and quite successful, but in the end, a factor of true innovation was absent, making the piece seem a touch too lengthy, and not quite uniting its diverse aspects.
Another late night session at Landmark. At rst, Blóm looked like a Norwegian out t, but it turned out that this punk garage combo were from just across the sea, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, north-east England. Also, their rst few numbers made them sound like a standard shouty nihilism crew, but then singer Helen Walkinshaw gradually unveiled a cumulative ascendancy, a ceaseless virtuosity that brooked no pause, as she paced around the club-crowds. Bassist Erika was ostensibly a low-stringer, but we marvelled at the multi-level of lines, including rhythm guitar and solo guitar, all happening in a multi-tiered gush. Meanwhile, drummer Liz McDade piledrove at an intense rate, making precise bombardment punctuations.
MC Yallah also played a strong set, a Kenyan rapper-singer, living in Uganda, and part of the ever-in uential Nyege Nyege collective. The sonics were provided by French laptopper Debmaster, and the combination was successful for a fair portion of time, although their set did sound extra- lengthy, and eventually extra-one dimensional, compared with all the other late night acts over the two Landmark sessions.
Bright and early again, at 11am on Sunday morning, for the beginning of an epic opera called Sun & Sea, created by the Lithuanian trio of Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (director/set design), Lina Lapelytė (composer) and Vaiva Grainytė (libretto). The KMD venue had its lower oor covered in sand, transformed into a complete beach environment, the performers spread out on their towels, mostly reclining as they relaxedly delivered their songs, to a minimalist synthesiser patterning that continually progressed its pulse. This was an opera for those who can't abide with the form, developing via Philip Glass duration, but sounding closest to the softly enunciated works of Robert Ashley, as its songs were nonchalantly expressed, mostly from a supine lounging position. The audience inhabited the venue's upper gallery area, looking down upon the beach scenario, taking moments to locate the next singer, as all of them worked from a attened position. The book cycled around, each song eventually repeating, merging into its surround, so maybe 90 minutes was an ideal time for suf cient reprises, but the audience could have remained until 4pm, if so desired. The most compulsive work was "Song Of Exhaus tEXPLOREion: WorkaholicDONA's SongTE," which came SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH around a few times, performed by an exceedingly relaxed singer on a camp bed, one leg dangled down onto the sand. Outside, a constant downpour that was heavy, even for Bergen, added an extra, natural element of disconnection.
Photograph: Tale Hendnes
TAGS LIVE REVIEWS MARTIN LONGLEY
NORWAY ELAINE MITCHENER
JASON YARDE SYLVIA HALLETT
MARK SANDERS OKKYUNG LEE
MARIUS NESET
SHOP FOR MUSIC Start your music shopping from All About Jazz and through our retail af liations you'll support us in the process.
MUSICSTACK AMAZON HD TRACKS CD UNIVERSE REVERB Rare vinyl LPs CDs, Vinyl, Specializing in Specializing in Marketplace and CDs from Blu-Ray DVDS, high resolution music, movies for new, used, over 1,000 Prime and CD-quality and video and vintage independent membership, downloads games instruments sellers Alexa, SONOS and gear and more
MORE
BY MARTIN LONGLEY BY FRIEDRICH KUNZMANN Moers Festival 2020 Wolfgang Muthspiel At Porgy & Bess: Live At Last! EXPLORE DONATE SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH
BY HENNING BOLTE BY MARK SULLIVAN JazzArt Festival Katowice 2020 - Entering The The Current: Classical To Contemporary & Times Of Streaming Events Beyond
BY MARTIN LONGLEY BY MARK SULLIVAN Borealis 2020 Fabio Mittino At Keep Music Live Project
BY IAN PATTERSON BY JOHN SHARPE Brilliant Corners 2020 London Jazz Composers Orchestra 50 Year Anniversary
ALL ABOUT JAZZ NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT
DONATE
All About Jazz & Jazz Near You were built to promote jazz music: both recorded and live events. We rely primarily on venues, festivals and musicians to promote their events through our platform. With club closures, shelter in place and an uncertain future, we've pivoted our platform to collect, promote and broadcast livestream concerts to support our jazz musician friends. This is a signi cant but neccesary effort that will help musicians now, and in the future. You can help offset the cost of this essential undertaking by making a donation today. In return, we'll deliver an ad-free experience (which includes hiding the bottom right video ad). Thank you.
GET MORE OF A GOOD THING! Enter your email address SIGN UP NOW Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories and includes your local jazz events calendar. EXPLORE DONATE SIGN UP SIGN IN SEARCH
CONNECT FOR PROS Staff Directory Musician Primer Contact Us Musician Toolkit Support FAQ Musician Finder
ADVERTISE DOWNLOAD APP All Services
Rates and Options Place Order
Privacy Policy | We do not sell or share your personal information | © 2020 All About Jazz. All rights reserved.