It’s a mixed-up kinda day at the Gent Jazz Festival, decides Martin Longley.
Gent Jazz Festival: Part Six
Bijloke
Gent, Belgium
Friday’s three-set Garden Stage residents were Dans Dans, a trio whose name doesn’t really connect with their music. Rooted in Gothic rock, surf music, post rock and free jazz alike, their guitar/bass/drums instrumentals juddered between all of these styles, often within the space of a single composition. Guitarist Bert Dockx also had a collection of cassettes laid out at his feet, often played close into his string pick-ups, providing another facet to the pieces, a crackling, lo-fi graininess.
The listener could hear what was desired, as influences. A jazzhead might discern Sonny Sharrock, a garage band fan could gather up the wreckage of Link Wray. A dark rocker would doubtless hear Gallon Drunk. This was an imaginative booking choice, not fitting in conceptually with the day’s surrounding fare, but rather offering a hidden respite, a dangling down into the chasm of doomy twang, scratchy riffs and effects pedal overload. As the three sets progressed, Dans Dans got harder, deeper and more distorted.
Friday’s fare was a varied spread, lacking the specific focus of the preceding day’s acts. The main stage was assaulted by the highly energetic BadBadNotGood, a Canadian act who spring from the piano trio concept, but arriving more from the multi-keyboard direction of Medeski Martin & Wood, stripling descendants who are equally attuned to current electronica, jazz fusion and general funking groove sounds.
Keyboardist Matthew Tavares jolted between Korg and Prophet, the extended tunes always delivered in virtuoso fashion, benefiting from an innate rapport between players who are clearly meshing every day, gigging all the time. All grown during a mere three years of existence together.
Their standards are more recent than most, as they re-configured works by Flying Lotus and TNGHT, stretching them into prog-jazz work-outs. Impressive though all this action was, they really blew it due to drummer Alexander Sowinski’s terminally tedious crowd-hectoring. He just could not cease bullying us to jump around, scream and otherwise transcend the sweltering heat conditions in the tent. Repeatedly, in-between every number. Generally, it’s always desirable if a combo simply prompts audience movement via the skills of their beat-making propulsiveness, not by the insistence of their nagging.
It seemed perverse that the extremely quiet Danish singer and pianist Agnes Obel should follow BadBadNotGood, at the headlining point of the evening. Her music demands close listening, calmness and concentration, which might have been challenging so soon after all that jumping around. Fortunately, and surprisingly, the crowd were very attentive and largely hushed, even though it was an all-standing situation, and late into the beery night.
Greater numbers had arrived, so perhaps many folks had purposely come to catch Obel, bringing themselves freshly to a concert listening state. Obel has expanded her crew since she last played here at the festival, adding a second cellist, alongside the usual violin. This was almost a throwback to the mood of the previous evening, and this quartet would have been very much at home with its soundtracking ambient nature.
Obel’s songs are not massively distinctive, but she has a real talent for atmosphere-shaping. It was wise to absorb this set in a similar fashion to that of De Biasio, taken almost like a long suite of complementary compositions.