Martin Longley continues his quest for higher percentages in Belgian Trappist brews.
Gent Jazz Festival: Part Two
Bijloke
Gent, Belgium
Local quartet Medes opened up on the Friday afternoon, with their final number topping its predecessors, rockin’ and twangin’ courtesy of guitarist Artan Buleshkaj, with taut and pointed soprano saxophone from Nico Boulanger. It’s a shame that it took them until the end of their set to serrate their edge.
Over on the main stage, the Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan was fronting his band, moving on from his mostly solo performances of earlier years. The resulting music couldn’t be further away from his sparse beginnings, operating on an obsessively dense prog-jazz level of hardened repetition and gratuitous cleverness. Complex compositions can frequently be exhilarating, if the listener can discern a pulsing organic core at their heart, but Hamasyan’s hurtling pieces lacked the pliable soundscape of most minimalism, leaving little room for manoeuvre. This was doubtless a deliberate strategy, as he soon contrasted with a delicate piano solo, casting a glance back to the setting that introduced him to the jazz stage.
Soon, electro-beats were mingling with the ethereal vocals of Areni Agbabian, the leader’s current enthusiasm being to mix the mechanoid with the diaphanous. Then he entered into a hardcore piano trio stretch, and when the band returned, all was hardness personified, frequently sounding too worked out in its musicianly solidity. For the encore, there was another shift, as Hamasyan evacuated darkly ripped blobs of bass from his electronic rig, introducing another fresh element in an already diverse palette of sound.
Trumpeter Avishai Cohen enjoyed the Friday three-set Garden Stage stint, and shouldn’t be confused with the other (bass-playing) Avishai Cohen, even though a few folks did so, particularly as the latter has been a Belgian festival regular. Cohen spearheaded his Triveni, a pliable threesome dedicated to the parrying attack of post-Ornette nimble-stipple, with bassist Yoni Zelnick and drummer Nasheet Waits forming a tight team of abstract voyagers. Doubtless accustomed to longer sets, Cohen appeared slightly unsettled by the brevity of his three appearances, but adapted on the hoof. The three-part concept is sound, but some performers need to check their festival programmes before arriving at the site.
It wasn’t immediately noticeable that the unfamiliar Taxi Wars act was to feature dEUS frontman Tom Barman, the singer and guitarist of Belgium’s best and most influential rock band during the last two decades. Taxi Wars is an alternative vehicle that collides jazz and beatnik rapping, creating a hybrid that’s reminiscent of Tom Waits in his early years, before the mid-1980s dawning of his Captain Beefheart fixation. This is amusing, as Don Van Vliet was surely one of the principal guiding lights of the dEUS style.
The other three-quarters of the band were more significant in the jazz arena, with saxophonist Robin Verheyen fronting the instrumental contingent (Barman had left his guitar at home, concentrating on verbals alone). A hectic rush of free-form clatter ensued, Barman growling into a choice of two microphones, one set to a dictaphone scramble. Another influence contender would be The Lounge Lizards, not in the verbals, but in the nocturnal moon-howlings of the music. Several song-poems mentioned taxis in their couplets. What is this obsession? As overheard by your scribe, Barman alienated a few folks with his preening, narcissistic rock star body language, but these were clearly beings not privy to his dEUS history.
Those of us who’ve followed Barman’s career were more receptive, although it could be seen what was meant, when his collection of stances (including nonchalantly lighting up a drooping cigarette) bordered on self-parody. Nevertheless, Barman can carry off this image effortlessly. His vocal delivery possessed a matching intensity, syllables speedily shot out with hipster grace. Maybe the cumulative effect of the material over an hour had a growing sameness, but the style was so strong that it was valuable to hear the entire set as some kind of rap-rock, free-wheel suite, peppered with saxophonic releases to mess up the palette.
As with Tigran Hamasyan, the trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf can be found in radically divergent live states. Previously, he’s given completely solo performances with his modally-extended horn, but lately is more likely to be found surrounded by a forcefully amplified band of rockin’ compadres. For the Gentfest, Maalouf’s ensemble was even larger than usual, with a complete three-piece trumpet section, which he sometimes joined, when not spouting his own solo constructions.
Extreme contrasts were also a winning tactic with this bunch, veering from delicate strokes of faint sound up to a ridiculous Arabo-rock-funk bombast. Maalouf would goad the riffing syncopations right up to the edge, then introduce a cutting solo at just the right moment to push a piece towards an even higher level. One of the trumpeters, Youenn Le Cam, also played the Breton binioù bagpipes, adding an incongruous element to some of the tunes, creating an uncertain frisson of North African bleating, in reality emanating from the deep root system of northern France.
