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Copenhagen Jazz Festival 2018: The Community SeriesAt Koncertkirken

By HENNING BOLTEAugust 19, 2018

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KoncertkirkenCopenhagen Jazz FestivalCopenhagenJuly 13-14, 2018

It was a flying visit of two days at this year's Copenhagen Jazz Festival with its 1500 concerts during 10days. But with so many concerts spread over the city even two days demands serious decision-making andcrisscrossing town. I was primarily focused on the concert-series of musicians collective The Community atKoncertkirken venue. This article will deal with concerts from that series only. Other concerts such as JakobBro Quartet, SÏN (Tim Berne, Kasper Tranberg, Petter Eldh, Peter Bruun), The Living Room(Soren Kjaergaard/Torben Snekkestad/Thomas Strønen) feat. Percy Persglove, Korpset, Fiil Free, LUX(Fred Frith/Lotte Anker/Magda Mayas/ Heike Liss) and Lillinger/Dell/Westergaard/Kjægaard/ Snekkestad willbe dealt with in another article.

Memory FlashesApart from a lot of biking through the city, there was the special experience of staying at the old HotelAstoria directly at the square of Copenhagen central station. It took some effort to learn how to switch onthe lights in the hotel room at night, which, I learned was due to Danish heritage listed regulations thatdon't allow replacement of a lot of fittings in the rooms and the building. The building was designed as astation hotel for the Danish State Railways by Ole Falkentorp, who had started his career in the StateRailways' design office before forming his own practice. The hotel was built between 1934 and 1935 as thefirst luxury hotel in Copenhagen. The revolving doors at the main entrance, the first in Denmark, thewooden room doors and many other details are still present, and one of the luxury rooms has beenmaintained exactly as it was in 1935.

There are a lot of special memory flashes of these two days. Among them the kindness of Lars Thor Jensenof Jazz Denmark, the beautiful long sustained tones of saxophonist Lotte Anker, the percussion work ofJon Christensen, the (quite different) groove seizing moments of Mia Dyberg and Signe Emmeluth, thevisceral bass playing of Asger Thomsen, the shadowy sounds of drummer Dre Hocevar, the intensities andcosmic blue moments as well as the moments of hesitation at the concert of Jakob Bro's quartet, the fieryenergy of Lillinger e.a., the walking energy of Peter Gannushkin, the inspiring talks with Nigel Slee of JazzNorth from Leeds, the almost frightening killer energy of Petter (Eldh) and Peter Bruun, the rhythm sectionof Django Bates' Beloved Trio and many more.

The CommunityKoncertkirken is a wonderful Copenhagen venue in a church building in the Nørrebro neighbourhood atBlågårds Plads. As many other Copenhagen venues as well cafes, libraries etc. it takes part with its ownprogram under the umbrella of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

Left-field musicians of the young generation in Europe are often organized in more or less tight collectivesas a way of exchange, mutual support, cross- fertilization and self-organization of business (festivals,booking, recordings, record label). One of these collectives is The Community founded in 2014. TheCommunity, founded by and mainly organized by saxophonist/ conductor Nana Pi and saxophonistMia Dyberg, "is a network and event organization, which is connecting and expanding relations betweenimprovising musicians worldwide—by making events with interaction as the driving force!" From 2014onwards numerous events have been organized. A recent one was a series of concerts at the Copenhagenvenue Koncertkirken as part of the greater 10-days Copenhagen Jazz Festival. The series comprised eightperformances: a solo by Slovenian pianist Miha Gantar, the Nana Pi Extemporary 9 Ensemble, a solo by



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three of these, the solo concert of Dré Hocevar, the Mia Dyberg Trio and Emmeluth's Amoeba.

Slovenian Drummer Dré Hočevar (1987)Dre Hocevar, the man wearing his trench coat like trumpeter Lester Bowie wore his white lab coat, startedhis performance not on the drums but on the piano with wandering sounds with no graspable directionbefore working on the drum set's components. His solo performance became one of a kind. The audiencewas seated in a circle with its back turned to the drum set so that the action on the drum set was notvisible. The audience had to rely solely on its ears, a means to sharpen perception of sound emerging fromHocevar's unconventional work on the drum set, eliciting close listening. Unconventional here means thatHocevar brought forth a lot of sounds you would not expect from or attribute to a drum set. These soundswere not mere spielerei-effects but had an axial place in a greater orchestral whole. In this manner an airyorchestral piece of shifting sounds unfolded, progressing in exciting ways and direction. Hocevar not onlyperformed sitting behind the drum set, but walked around with cymbals and assorted percussion makingwell-dosed use of the reverb of the church's space thereby producing sounds circling around. It wasa(nother) witty and musically valid attempt of this musician to go beyond existing performance rituals androutines.

Dré Hočevar is an important part in the series of drummers giving new shape to the instrument like Swissdrummers Lucas Niggli and Julian Sartorius, Belgian Karen Willems, French Sylvain Darrifourcq and US-American drummer Tyshawn Sorey. As a band leader he has already made his mark with some bold albumsinvestigating new territories Motion In Time (Lajna, 2013), Coding of Evidentiality (Clean Feed Records,2015), Collective Effervescence (Clean Feed Records, 2016), Transcendental within the Sphere of IndivisibleRemainder (Clean Feed Records, 2016) and Surface of Inscription (Clean Feed Records, 2017).



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Danish-Norwegian Trio Of Saxophonist Mia DybergThe young generation of 'free' musicians can build on their predecessors' achievements. They are nowfree(d) to switch between different modes of playing and thereby create their own voice, bold jumps andsharp furrows of sound and music. This trio of alto saxophonist Mia Dyberg, bassist Asger Thomsen anddrummer Dag Magnusen Narvesen, a Berlin-Copenhagen connection, turned out to be highly energetic, boldand subtle, wild and melodic, far out and far in, visceral with an emergence of deep groove. The triocelebrated the release of its Clean Feed debut Ticket! . It is a trio distinguished by its refined fabrics ofsound and its permeating inner pulse. Its music lives by sensible alternating modes, dynamics, andtemperatures more than by merely forcing it up linearly. It is open improvisation with emergent moments ofstrong rides in the groove as well as moments of lyricism in a newly invented and reconquering strategy ofdealing with different modes of playing. It was pretty stunning how Thomsen and Narvesen effortlessly andnaturally switched between microtonal, atonal and tonal-melodic and riffing modes of playing. Whenlistening with eyes closed a sudden smiling brainwave of "oh, I never heard Paal Nilssen-Love play solyrically" came up. It seems there is some clear continuity here too.

A crucial and mysterious thing is how listeners can or cannot connect to the energy and flow of the music ofopen improvisation. Dyberg seems to be conscious about that and helped it a little bit by referring to herheart beat and invited the members of the audience to focus on their own during a piece. Here is a reactionfrom the audience:

"I loved the tune Mia's Pulse where she took the tempo from her own heartbeat and encouraged us to checkour own to compare while they played to see if we had synchronized."

It is interesting to know that Dyberg used the flow of a human voice as point of departure and inspirationfor the playing of her trio, namely the speaking voice of US-American writer William S Burroughs(1914-1997) with its inescapable dark sonority, crumbled timbre and conjuring cadence. Dyberg mentionsespecially pulse awareness, cut up technique as compositional device and "the silver smoke of dreams." Themusicians used to listen to readings and radio experiments of Burroughs and started to play right awaywhen Burroughs' voice was cut. A reviewer, Andrew Spragg (The Quietus), describes Burroughs' voice ashaving "the quality of one speaking beyond the grave, a croak that is authoritative and ravaged in equalmeasure. It is the voice that creaks out from a dark alley and nests under the skin. It is the voice of a PItrying to catch a final hopeless break, or a radio broadcaster making his last transmission from some strangeinter-zone. It is a voice that possesses the listener, absorbs them, never betraying itself through emotion. Itis control in its purest form, clinical, paranoid and alien. Hiding here, in plain sight, is a voice from the void."This should be enough encouragement to attend a concert of this trio or/and listen to the album.

Danish-Norwegian Quartet Emmeluth's AmoebaEmeluth's Amoeba came from the same planet of open improvisation but in a different elaboration. Danishsaxophonist Signe Emmeluth originates from the Trondheim school—like her fellow musicianMette Rasmussen. Emmeluthis of a different temperament, a great impetuous player pushing up andforward with great force.

Among others she is heading the group Konge with Mats Gustafsson, Ole Morten Vågan andKresten Osgood. The quartet consisting of Karl Bjorå on guitar, Christian Balvig on piano and Ole Mofjell ondrums started with an überhectic passage of headache music to burst after a while into a great explosivegroove. But as it is open improvisation it's not first choice to dash through, caged in the same dynamics.Instead the group went into highly energetic hyper rapid intricate rhythm patterning. It initially seemed thatthrough this acceleration things threatened to muddle and fall apart, leaving loosely tumbling particlesswirling around. The group took the risk and arose, so to speak, as a phoenix from the ashes. It arrived at a



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exploration and a strong survival urge in the wild cosmos of sound.

Referring to the dancing movements of the polyp naval plant the group themselves describe their musicmaking as uniting "Space and chaos, lyrical yet mysterious melodies and fierce dramaturgy ... in playfulplaying, where curiosity is a keystone" (for further details see Eyal Hareuveni's informative review).

ConclusionThe concerts of Dré Hocevar, the trio of Mia Dyberg and the quartet of Signe Emmeluth turned out as threequite clearly distinguished approaches and elaborations of open improvisation. All three are strongexamples of musicians of the young generation giving shape to their very own voices. They act from adifferent life experience in a different production situation with different prospects. Old opposites disappearnew opposites emerge.

Tags )* LIVE REVIEWS * HENNING BOLTE * DENMARK * COPENHAGEN * TIM BERNE

* KASPER TRANBERG * PETTER ELDH * PETER BRUUN * SØREN KJÆRGAARD

* TORBEN SNEKKESTAD * THOMAS STRØNEN * PERCY PERSGLOVE * FRED FRITH

* LOTTE ANKER * MAGDA MAYAS * JON CHRISTENSEN * NANA PI * MIA DYBERG

* DRE HOCEVAR * LUCAS NIGGLI * JULIAN SARTORIUS * KAREN WILLEMS

* SYLVAIN DARRIFOURCQ * TYSHAWN SOREY * ASGER THOMSEN

* DAG MAGNUSEN NARVESEN * PAAL NILSSEN-LOVE * SIGNE EMMELUTH

* METTE RASMUSSEN * MATS GUSTAFSSON * OLE MORTEN VÅGAN * KRESTEN OSGOOD

* KARL BJORÅ * CHRISTIAN BALVIG * OLE MOFJELL

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About Mia Dyberg )Videos Articles Links

Part 1: Wil's Swing (Dyberg) - … Mia Dyberg & Michael Evans - …



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I was first introduced to jazz through my high school stage band. Later my drum instructor gave me some BuddyRich albums. He also took me to a Buddy Rich concert. That's when I really got excited about jazz, and knew thatI wanted to be a jazz drummer

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