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Last North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague!


Bluerein

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Hello all,

Just finished my 3 day stroll through the halls, cellars and tents of the Congresgebouw in Den Haag where the 30th edition of the NSJF was held. This was the last time it was here (I live 3 minutes walk from the building). Next edition will be in Rotterdam.

Because of the 30th aniversary the organisation invited the Keith Jarrett trio to do a special concert before the festival (on wednesday). It was the first time I saw any of them (a)live. Needless to say I was exited to do so! And not disappointed. This was one of the best sit down jazz concerts I ever saw (in my 18 years of jazz loving/seeing/playing). I have all of the trio's CD's so I was prepared but they really knocked me out (down? what's the word).

Luckily thursday was a day to recover from this event........

Friday (the first real festival day): Andrew Hill Big Band.......great but very abstract. Good to see him in fine condition although he didn't play much, just directed the band.

John Scofield Quartet (Chris Potter, Denis Irwin & Bill Stewart): Saw the CP band last year (with Stewart in it) and was underwheled. Not inspired etc. But this was a different cup of tea! Scofield pushed all to their limits and it was a great show. Bill Stewart was in top form and you all know how that sounds.......

Stefano di Battista (Parkers Moods): Great but a little stiff compared to the elastic Scofield group. The bassist Roberto Bonaccorso was great and the others played fine (E.Legnini,A.Ceccarelli).

Last thing I tried to see was the Dave Holland Quartet with Herbie Hancock, Jack DeJohnette and Chis Potter. Tried because I was so tiered I fell asleep (shame on me I know...). The flashed I did hear were OK but not the sum of the total which it could have been.....

Saturday: Dave Holland Big Band......I have no words to describe this band. So fantastic! Everything is perfect. Soloists are great (Mark Turner, Robin EUbanks, Alex Sipiagin to name a few) the arrangements are spot on and the execution is so scary precise it almost sounds like an edited studio performance so tight and secure they played. The new drummer Nate Smith is a revelation too. I never heard his name let along saw him play but that will surely change because he is reallt great.

David Sanborn Group: An old time favorite of mine (yes I know, can't help it) with TL. Carrington, Don Alias, Christian McBride & Gil Goldstein. Also fantastic! I think McBride plays almost better bass guitar than acoustic upright (on which he is great as well of course). Nice mix of old songs (Lotus Blossom by Grolnick, Relativity) and songs from his last 2 records (Senor Blues etc.).

Soulive: What a great show these cool cats from NYC have. And great music! A shame they didn't sell too well for Blue Note. Let's hope they do better on Verve. Groovy with great arrangements and solo's of the Sax and trumpet.

Sunday (with my wife...): A bit of Roy Hayes Fountain of Youth (kinda boring).

Steps Ahead reunion: also an old time fav of mine. With Mainieri, Mike Stern, Richard Bona, Steve Smith and replacing Michael Brecker who is serious ill in hospital: Bill Evans. Great to hear all the old songs again live. Pools, Beiruth, Trains, etc. super and over the top.

Joss Stone: What a great voice this 18 year old has....amazing. Super band with jazz guitarist David Gilmour who I saw two weeks ago in the Village Vanguard with Don Byron. A real nice way to finish the festival........

Sorry for the long posting but you can stop reading anytime.....

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I'm in North Sea Jazz Friday and Sunday in different concerts:

Friday:

- Andrew Hill, yes, very free, almost William Parker Little Huey comes to my mind.

- ICP Orchestra, the european side of jazz.

- Henry Threadgill Zooid, great rhythm, strange combination: sax, tuba, acoustic guitar, drums, oud, cello, with tuba and cello changing to trombone when Treadgill on flute.

- Perico Sambeat, the spanish sax with Mehldau and Rosenwinkel

Sunday:

- Paal Nilssen-Love / Ken Vandermark duo, not the best Vandermark posible, but Paal and his wall sound is the star here.

- Don Byron Quartet, good on clarinet, strong Giant Steps, but not really on tenor sax, ominous Body and Soul.

- John Zorn Acoustic Masada, what a band, the best moments of my weekend, with Zorn really impressive.

- Randy Weston African Rhythms, a classic.

And what a nice city Deen Haag.

Cayetano.

Sadly, I'm in Madrid again.

Edited by cayetano
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Here's what I thought, not sure it's worth the effort as my writing tends to be way too long-winded.

First day, 8th of July, Friday: Ibrahim Ferrer (PWA Zaal), ICP Orchestra (Mondrian Zaal), Henry Threagill's Zooid (Mondrian Zaal), Brad Mehldau solo

(Rembrandtzaal)

As a result of late making up of our minds and late booking, we stayed at not the nice little hotel by the sea, as I did the last time, but at a chain-style

hotel. The nice thing about this hotel was its location, it was within 15 minutes' walk of the congress center, where the festival is held. Not only that but you walk through a really nice area, which includes the street that houses most of the embassies. The festival is moving to Rotterdam as of next year so it's a shame that more people won't have the chance to walk through the nice parts of The Hague not to mention Scheveningen.

The music, then:

Ibrahim Ferrer "Mi Sueno - a Bolero Songbook" - So I hadn't had high hopes for this seeing that it was Ferrer's band and the only other name in the band

familiar to me was bass player Cachaito Lopez (it was a nine piece band augmented by, if I got that correctly, a Dutch string quartet), but my girlfriend really wanted to see it and I thought, well, it'll probably be fun if nothing more. The short it is that I had a very good time and the piano player, Roverto Fonseca, was the star among the instrumentalists - yes, he does tend towards the stock-Cuban-flash-licks and does play to the crowd but even then I think he has good taste, imagination, and technique to pull most of the stuff off with flair. The other soloists, horn section, I could have done without as soloists, really, especially Javier Zalba when he played the soprano saxophone. But, again, when they were playing the charts and with the drummer, a percussionist, and backing vocalist Idania joining in with a hand-held percussion every now and then, all kicking in it was very good butt-shaking fun. Most of the material was mid-tempo and not straining Ferrer's voice, in terms of range, and I think it was good judgment on his part to do it this way - I think he only played one ballad and Dos Gardenias, as a quasi-ballad, as an encore. All in all, I'm very glad we went.

ICP Orchestra - They started with the string trio, of Mary Oliver on violin, Tristan Honsinger on cello and Ernst Gleurm on bass, improvising which was

joined very shortly afterwards with Michael Moore, on clarinet, and they went on improvising around some framework for a while before sliding into a tune, at which point the rest of the horn section joined them - Wolter Wierbos on trombone, Thomas Heberer on trumpet and Ab Baars and Tobias Delius on reeds (the band is rounded up by Han Bennink on drums and the mastermind Misha Mengelberg on piano). Let's see what I can remember - Mary Oliver conducted and improvisation, which was fine but not more, they played Rollo II, and some new material, from what I could tell. Now the mixing wasn't particularly good and you know with Han it's always going to be a problem so as little as he played anyway, it was difficult to hear Misha in the ensemble passages. So, most of the playing served to confirm my overall impressions of the players while on the whole the music left me disappointed: Honsinger is still coaxing the same licks, Glerum is solid and holding the stuff together, Ab Baars took a long and raucous solo which did absolutely nothing for me and for me he's the least interesting soloist in the band. One of the two highlights was a Wierbos/Delius improvised duo section, during which Wierbos deconstructed/reconstructed his trombone and Delius matched him blow-for-blow and more on tenor - Delius has a nice tone and so much control over the horn, plus it really is a hoot to watch him play. The other highlight was Moore's ballad feature, forgot the tune - was a standard iirc, actually all his solos were good. Michael Moore has a heavenly tone both on alto and clarinet and he too has lots of control over and freedom with his phrasing. He played both the melody and soloed gorgeously. Heberer took one solo during which he played rather characteristically, bebop and pre-bop vocabularly imbued with his steely and pinched tone and behind the beat playing - it was ok but nothing special. During the few minutes in total that I could make out his playing, Misha was interesting and searching and Han made sure to play a few loud and fast solos - the notable thing is he can still pull them off pretty effectively.

Henry Threadgill's Zooid - This must've been the most disappointing concert of the festival, but it had more to do with the sound than the playing. Still,

it's the second time I can remember when I walked out of a concert due to frustration (the first was Jonas Kulhammar Quartet at last year's Kongsberg Jazz Festival). Zooid is Threadgill on alto sax and flute, Jose Davila on tuba and trombone, Dana Leong on cello and trombone, Liberty Ellman on acoustic guitar, Tarik Benbrahim on oud, and Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums. They all did quite a bit of reading, following the sheet music, throughout but I felt sorry for the oud player in particular, who barely took his eyes of the sheet music - though he still checkout out Ellman for cues every now and then. My first problem was the immense, disturbing, bass in and harshness of the overall sound - the cello was hurting my ears and so was the trombone, not to mention Ellman's guitar which was borderline bearable, and I'd never heard a flute sound so aggresive. Perhaps such a sound was Threadgill's preference, though I doubt it, but it sure demanded an immense motivation to overlook these and focus on the music. As for the music, Threadgill had the band play the multi-layered grooves way too long for my taste and most of the soloists didn't sound all that comfortable while navigating Threadgill's compositions. Each song was preceded by an unaccompanied solo by one of the members, my favorite was Dana Leong's cello introduction, and later on in that piece he also took a memorable trombone solo, was my favorite moment during the concert, I think. I will still check out the band's album through e-music but I must say that the sound sucked big time, and they didn't sound all that together, and I had the impressions that only rarely were the soloists able to play with the level of abandon that leads to full expression or more interesting, developmental, solos. Still, Kavee and that cello/trombone player I'll be watching closely.

Brad Mehldau Solo - So what happened was that Mehldau was scheduled to play two short - North Sea Jazz allocated 75 minutes to each act and Brad's were 45 minutes each - solo sets early on in the day and since we had opted for Ferrer, we would have missed our chance of seeing him play. Well, while watching the announcement screens right Zooid, I noticed that they were announcing another Mehldau set at Rembrandtzaal at 12.00 - just before Perico Sambeat Group, which was featuring Brad and Kurt Rosenwinkel. Perhaps this was a last minute call and Brad had agreed to play yet another set or perhaps he played only one set earlier, I don't know. The hall was totally packed, to full capacity in terms of standing, seated, and sitting on the floor crowd. Brad played a number of songs of the recent Live in Tokyo album, which I don't have, Knives Out, Paris from his Places - in a medley with a Jobim song, River Man, Countdown, and perhaps another tune or two. Most of you, I assume, know how Brad approaches playing solo - to me it's fresh and interesting to hear him play the same tunes in different performances because he always seems to build up on different aspects of the composition, yes he'll mostly build from the melody and elaborate

and place it in a different background, what he's doing with his right hand mostly, in many different ways but he also builds from the rhythm or he harmony of the tune. So he's at least trying to do something substantially different each time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but at least this particular night he had the good taste to keep it short when it wasn't really working, or when he hadn't more to say. All in all, this is another concert I was very happy to have seen. Even though it could have been better, I was happy to see Mehldau taking chances to do something different and setting up challenges for himself.

We had intended to go see Tomatito for the last slot but went with Mehldau. However, since Mehldau's set was short we still had about half an hour to go see the Tomatito Sextet. Alas, we were informed that the Dakterras was already full so much so that they wouldn't let anyone else in - and this is a large hall with plenty of standing space, so I'm guessing it was a good show.

Didn't have much time to do browsing through the disc stalls the ones there don't have much of interest to me anyway, i.e., they mostly have the major labels which I can find pretty much anywhere, and the prices are not all that cheap either. Still, I meticulously worked my way through a 5 euros sales rack and came away with Greg Osby's Further Ado and Ben Allison's Peace Pipe. Oh, and I also picked up Wayne Shorter's Footprints Live! (counting on you Pete C) and Bobby Hutcherson's Oblique (if Micael Schaumann's even half-right, I should be quite happy with this) - for 10 euros each.

More, second and third day reports, to follow soon.

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Thanks for the reviews guys! It is ten years since I went to the NSJ festival. I'm sorry to hear it is moving from Den Haag as I have been planning another visit for some future year. Well, I have never been to Rotterdam so that could be a new experience for me. What is the reason for the move to Rotterdam? I thought this festival was quite important for the city.

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Yes David it's very important for the city but.....the big hall (Statenhal) is going to be torn down to be replaced with apartments and businessunits (?). The festival needs a big hall as you can understand so the city offered to close down the road (which is a very important drive through road) and place a massive tent on it. Still the organisation decided to move it to Rotterdam (I guess they got the location for free over there). A real pitty and a shame but money rules also in Jazz (how strange)

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More and lengthier stuff on the concerts we saw on Saturday,

Second day, 9th of July, Saturday: Dave Holland Big Band (Dakterras), about thirty minutes of Krakatau (Carel Willink Zaal), and Vijay Iyer Quartet (billed as Vijay Iyer Quartet featuring Rudresh Mahanthappa) (Carel Willink Zaal).

Dave Holland Big Band - We were dismayed to see, going in at about 17.45 - an hour before the scheduled time of the concert, that the roof terrace was already more than half full. This, as we were expecting to find seats in the front rows or at least in the middle batch of seats. In the end we got decent seats, a bit too far from the stage for my liking and to the left. The point is that I was expecting the concert to be popular but not this popular. So we sat there for an hour (luckily, I had with me Michel Houellebecq's Platform, plus some rather talkative people behind us so time went by pretty quickly). As far as I could tell the band was the usual line-up but with Mark Turner instead of Chris Potter. Actually now that I check the line-up, it was indeed Mark Tuner who was announced. This was my first time seeing any of Dave Holland's recent ensembles, Quintet or the Big Band, live and compared to many, Dave turned out to be quite talkative on stage - he introduced the players right after the numbers where they soloed, at times along with some short praising commentary, and also went through the names of each again at the end. He also seemed pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest for the early set. They played compositions from both of their records. When Holland announced Razor's Edge near the end of the concert, there was quite a holler from a bunch of guys (I like that one too but they sounded truly exulted and shouted as if they'd just won the national lottery) - Dave was amused and said something like "Thank you, mother."

As for the music, I think I caught them on an off night - and this refers to the solos only. I was looking forward to Alex Sipiagin's and Robin Eubanks's solos but the former turned out to be pretty ordinary and Robin took his solo, first one he might have taken a shorter solo later, on a tune that had quite a bit ensemble work going on behind him and he was mixed low so I could really only hear the forte passages, which weren't many. Antonio Hart took a pretty conventional and unhurried - milking, savoring each note with his round tone and vibrato, yet well played, blues solo. Pretty much everone took at least a solo each but the only two I found out of the ordinary were Holland's solo introduction to one of the tunes, the man still plays very comfortably and I do like his linear conception, and almost all of Steve Nelson's solos. Now, Nelson I thought had made almost the weakest contribution to Extended Play, the quintet's live album, but he was on fire this very night. I should have taken notes, really, but he took a very non-conventional spare, chordal solo on a blues - where both the chords and the timing were as removed from a "blues" feel as possible. On his next solo, different tune, he started the solo by playing an oblique phrase and went on to invert and elaborate it ina multitude of ways and he followed this nice feat by unleashing a barrage of nicely constructed and lengthy double-timed lines - and to my surprise, I could actually hear him play, though less so when he was playing the marimba, luckily he took most/all? of his solos on the vibraphone.

The one thing I don't like about North Sea Jazz is that they schedule concerts for 75 minutes and oftentimes, even if I like the music, it is simply too long for me and I start to lose interest. This was a case in point, and all said, I would've preferred to see the quintet. I'm glad to have seen the big band live but I have What Goes Around on ECM and, at least for now, I won't be picking up Overtime.

Krakatau - This was an Indonesian ensemble of seven. One drumkit player, an electric bassist, a vocalist, one pianist/keyboard player, someone playing bamboo flute and "tarompet" - but also joining in on percussion every now and then, and the remaining two were playing percussion full time. We were there for the last half an hour only (the intention was to secure good seats for the following concert, see below) but then regretted not having walked in even earlier as it turned out to be a pretty enjoyable thirty minutes - except for the first few minutes where we witnessed an ok, but certainly overlong bass solo. So they built nice grooves through the use of the traditional percussion instruments and the wind soloist had some fun playing an unaccompanied solo on the tarompet, I think it was, where he gradually deconstructed the instrument, at the end playing with what was only a tiny part of the mouthpiece - duck calls, baybee. The vocalist, Nyak Ina Raseuki, had a very strong voice she could project really well - being Turkish, I'm used to hearing such open and strong voices but it was still a nice change, as - you might guess - the style of singing, with lots of yelps and hollers, is also different from what you encounter in most other music you hear at jazz festivals. So the last piece, somewhat predictably though not all that worse for it, built to an exhilirating percussion climax and rose the audience to their feet.

There was a standing ovation demanding an encore. The announcer actually had to make an announcement that the concert was over and apologize and say they needed to clear the stage and get ready for the next concert, if they were to start on time. More than sporadic booing followed for a while but died as you could see staff coming on to the stage. Anyway this was good, and now that I think of it perhaps the whole concert wouldn't have provided as much excitement but I could surely have done with another fifteen minutes. My favorite bits were the percussion duos/duels over the driving foundation provided by the drummer and, iirc, the bassist. And also, we secured very good second row, middle, seats for the next concert.

Vijay Iyer Quartet - So this was the next concert and I had nothing better to do so I sat through the soundcheck - what stood out even as they were soundchecking and basically farting about was that Mahanthappa plays what he plays really as if it were second nature, it just flows so naturally and the control he has over the dynamics is also pretty impressive. Anyway, there was only a mild cheer after the announcer introduced the band, and actually throughout the concert attendance fluctuated around sixty percent, as far as I could tell. Iyer, tongue-in-cheek, said "Hi North Sea, did you miss us?" as he had played as a duo, as Raw Materials, with Mahanthappa in 2004 - I was there and that was one hell of a concert I thought at the time, had to pick my jaw up from the floor after every tune - but I don't know whether they had ever played before that.

Anyway, they played Because of Guns (Hey Joe Redux) from Blood Sutra, as the last tune, and as far as I could tell, all the remaining compositions were from the new release, Reimagining - I remember for sure that they played Revolutions, Inertia, Song for Midwood, and The Big Almost. This was the first time I saw Stephan Crump live and I'm not familiar with his work apart from that with Iyer but I really liked the way he played behind Iyer and Mahanthappa, I think his playing resonates well with Iyer's conception - sidenote: he's one of those bassists who tends to sing, hum, along which doesn't distract me in the least but I guess it wasn't even audible further down the hall. The last tune, Because of Guns, was the only one with an easily recognizable structure and meter and most of the rest I had difficulty counting the basic meter let alone the choruses. But they did a good job of going through the compositions with no major screw-ups (not a minor feat to pull this off live, you'll know if you've listened to Reimagining). Marcus Gilmore took one pretty long but nicely built up solo and in general he did a good job of holding things together - with some help from Iyer and Crump, Crump also had a number of features and while he plays fine either way but I prefer his accompaniment.

As for Rudresh and Vijay, they did their stuff and it was certainly good enough for me - I won't try to describe it but I hope that you're familiar with their music or get familiar soon. You can tell when certain things click and the band or the frontmen just push beyond their usual limits or routines and this happened very clearly on the one tune they played as a trio, without Rudresh, and Iyer took a long solo which had some of the best playing I've ever heard from him - mostly long lines which went on and on and on with many twists and turns. If I remember well, Rudresh, too, looked impressed for a while.

Even though this was the first time I heard the material from the new disc and I might have enjoyed the concert a little more if I had been familiar with the compositions in advance, this was one of the highpoints of the festival for me. Really the thing is this is music that one better appreciates with repeated hearing as there's a lot of interaction behind the solos which are worthy of themselves.

Vijay announced after the concert that they had discs with them not available in Europe - and he sold a bunch, but no more. Anyway Rudresh had Mother Tongue with him and even though I had that and the earlier album, Black Water, I got hold of him to say that I really enjoyed the concert and very much dig both of his albums and so on. Asked him about what else is in the pipeline and he told me about a project with the Carnatic saxophone player Kadri Gopalanth (anyone herad them live?) and also said that he'd really like to put out a duo album with Vijay Iyer, Raw Materials, as they've been playing together for about 10 years with no documentation. I picked up Reimagining from Vijay and chatted a little more with them about just general stuff - and felt bad after a while that I was keeping Rudresh from selling his discs! Next time, I'd really like to see Mahanthappa bring his quartet and play his own compositions - and told him so, hope it happens in the near future.

As it happened, I had already spent too much time after the concert since by the time we got to Van Gogh Zaal to see Richard Galliano New York trio, the hall was already packed and they had the doors closed - so you had to wait for people to leave before getting in. We decided to not wait, and I feel lucky to have escaped the wrath of my girlfriend as this was the one concert, along with Ibrahim Ferrer, which she was interested in after seeing the program. And no big deal really as all the fun we had at Matthew Herbert's Plat du Jour, Masada, and Steven Bernstein's Sex Mob concerts on Sunday probably made up for it. Some more on those three and Hermeto Pascoal soon, hopefully.

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