John Zorn in Lisbon, Portugal (27 July-5 August 2018)

[Sordel]

Night One: Stone Improvisation Night

The original billing for the opening night of Jazz em Agosto, the Lisbon Jazz Festival curated this year by John Zorn, was originally billed as Milton Graves, Thurston Moore and Zorn himself. Due to health issues, Graves was unable to attend, so instead we got seventy minutes of improvised music featuring various configurations of Zorn, Moore, Mary Halvorson, Matt Hollenberg, Drew Gress, Tomas Fujiwara & Greg Cohen.

The concerts at Lisbon take place in an intimate open-air amphitheatre. A capacity audience of a thousand that felt a lot smaller sit on a concrete, semi-circle of seats facing a stage with no backdrop other than the trees and grass beyond which have a vivid & unreal green due to spotlighting. The wind in the treetops added an occasional & not unwelcome accompaniment although a more dissonant element (arguably equally suited to the performance!) was provided by planes flying overhead at regular intervals. Overall, though, the sound quality was very good.

The concert began with Zorn, Moore & Fujiwara: an abstract & aggressive piece designed (as Zorn's openers so often are) to challenge the audience ... which was clearly on-side enough to react appreciatively to everything that was played. Mary Halvorson then led an improv with the two bassists: Cohen plucking and Gress bowing. Only having heard her before I was uncertain how she made her signature sound and I still don't know, although I was surprised to hear her use a looper and can only assume that her distinctive “hiccup” is produced with the help of some sort of pitch-shift. Due to the textural approach of Moore & Hollenberg, it was she amongst the guitarists who provided most of the melodic interest during the evening.

My memory is already hazy on the running order, but I suspect that the next piece was a very “jazzy” improv by Cohen, Fujiwara & Zorn which must have been by some measure the longest of the night. The opening was a furious exhibition of (what I'm going to call) Post-Bop blowing from Zorn that reined in the mannerisms and ended with a drum solo, then a bass solo, then Zorn’s own solo to end.

This was followed I believe by Halvorson performing in a more fluid, scalar style alongside Gress & Fujiwara. Possibly next was a duo of Moore & Zorn where both focused on the chirruping element of their styles; Zorn played the mouthpiece for a while, which I had actually not seen live before, and this felt like the “gamiest” piece of the evening. Then there was a rather abstract piece featuring the three guitarists (I forget what the back line was for this one). It seemed to be going nowhere, but suddenly, led by Moore the three guitarists moved to high-harmonic lines that resulted in a rather magical “music box” coda.

The full sextet provided the concert climax: a slow, unfocused build-up that suddenly found a groove over which Zorn provided some dramatic soloing to the end. The musicians left the stage and returned, at which point Zorn pointed out the half blood moon hanging in the sky above. After that, an unexpected encore felt rather perfunctory.

Overall the concert was interesting rather than stirring, and a very odd choice of evening as a curtain-raiser for a festival. The performers generally did not look relaxed and the downcast, shoegazing demeanor of all three guitarists meant that there was less of the mutual engagement you might expect from a great Zorn improv.

[rodrigo]

Tonight's one of the highlights of the week for me, with Halvorson and then Masada! Looking forward to it. missed yesterday, but will be here for the remainder of the festival.

At what time did you arrive? was there n early queue? I want to have a good seat for tonight.

[Sordel]

Jul 28, 2018 11:29:52 GMT -5 rodrigo said:

At what time did you arrive? was there an early queue? I want to have a good seat for tonight.

Sorry, saw this too late to give advice on arrival time, but in any case the queue formed earlier tonight than last so my advice would have been useless!

Night Two: Mary Halvorson Quartet & Masada

I didn't check timings but the second night's concert was about eighty minutes split more or less evenly between Mary Halvorson's set (basically a live performance of the BoA album) and the original Masada quartet.

I was seated square to Mary, so I had a good view of her pedal feet and that pitch shift technique. Both she & the other guitarist (Miles Okazaki) showed a ready mastery over the material, although as an ensemble they are oddly studious, relying on the music to communicate rather than engaging, even tangentially, with the audience. Zorn & Baron were watching throughout from behind the stage. When Halvorson's set finished her quartet was almost literally chased from the stage by Masada; Joey Baron was evicting Tomas Fujiwara from the drum kit within seconds of his stopping playing, and the change over was one of the quickest I have ever seen.

There was a surprising amount of affection being thrown around during the Masada set, with hugs exchanged and the sense of friends meeting after a while apart. Zorn began by praising the amphitheater, saying that it was known amongst musicians to be one of the best open-air venues in the world, which struck me as laying it on a bit thick. The performance, as usual, was full of spontaneity with lightning-fast responses to Zorn's conducting (although I think that at one point Dave Douglas missed a cue to repeat a line of the score). It was vintage stuff: not as hot as some of the live recordings but incredibly tight on the gamier material.

Predictably, this was a great concert lapped up by the enthusiastic audience, who gave a standing ovation.

[Sordel]

Night Three: Zorn Documentary, Jumalatterat & The Hermetic Organ

Events moved to The Gulbenkian Foundation's Auditorium 1 on Sunday evening for what seemed like a half day of queuing occasionally interrupted by musical events. The first up was the “second movement” of Mathieu Amalric's ongoing documentary about Zorn, and the filmmaker gave a brief introduction in French in which he explained the project. Not having seen the first movement I felt somewhat at a disadvantage but while the editing and camerawork were rougher than I would have liked the footage captured was very enjoyable and at times quite revelatory. The scenes where Zorn works with Marc Ribot on Masada heads, or with the JACK Quartet on “Necronomicon”, gave a real sense of his attention to detail as a composer. On the performance side there was, in particular, some great footage of Tyshawn Sorey. After an hour of documentary the audience was sent back to its queue.

Auditorium 1 had looked for all the world like a cinema when we left it but had undergone a transformation by the time we returned: the backdrop had been removed to reveal a glass wall providing a striking view of waving trees outside the venue. This provided the mise en scéne for Jumalatterat, Zorn's song cycle for high soprano & piano. Barbara Hannigan - slight of frame, high of cheekbone - could easily have mistaken for a vocalist cast for her physical type alone, but her performance quickly showed how wrong that suspicion would have been. The demands of the piece (rather predictably including Sprechsgesäng, whispering & some thorny Modernist passages but also calling for some high, high passages and various “extended” techniques) are extraordinary and her completely committed performance, unassisted by microphone, made a powerful argument for the piece. I felt that Stephen Gosling’s piano part was underwritten by comparison: some of the naive, consonant lines belong elsewhere in Zorn's oeuvre and some of the prepared piano touches (such as muting) felt more like they were included for novelty. Nevertheless, it was a powerful half-hour and received a thoroughly deserved standing ovation.

After a 90-minute break and some more queuing we returned to find that a large pipe organ bathed in blue light had appeared against the backdrop of trees. I'm a sceptic when it comes to both The Hermetic Organ and Ikue Mori's electronics so my expectations were low. In the event you could argue it either way: either the electronics detracted from the seeming purpose of the series, which should be to highlight the sounds possible with organ alone; or, they enhanced the organ part by adding another layer of strange sound. I’m not sure which way to jump but I suppose that, in itself, means that the addition of Mori was valid. The piece, with its brief encore, was more abstract than the earlier published improvisations, but I can't say that it won me over, despite the very enthusiastic response of the audience in general. I did see one woman walk out mid-concert, which may also be considered an accolade of a sort ...

[rodrigo]

The documentary was an improvement over the previous installment, I enjoyed it more. The vocal+piano piece was the highlight of the day for me, I concur that the piano part was underwritten but it complemented nicely with the vocals.
As to the Hermetic organ, this was the third for me, and I look at it more in terms of a performance piece than a musical concert per se. I think the venue and the organ are an important part of it, and in this case it wasnt as impressive a part as it was in Paris or at the Met. Ikue was just there doing her thing, wasnt particularly moved by it.

[redhook]

We are back from Lisboa and thanks Zorn and all of the other musicians for this 3 Days. First Day without M.Graves but different improvisations in stone art. Great to hear Zorn on his saxophone!!! in good combinations (trios etc.) More from the ,,Stone Ensemble '' please...Mary H. was great and amazing..a little bit too short ( 1 hour).

Second day: M.Halverson + Classic Masada,no words,it was fantastic. 70 minutes--

The film from M. Amalric-very good but i hope we see in future the hole material from 2006 on....

First time for us we see the organ concert inkl. ikue. good vibrations and many people in the audience. so we had a great time in lisboa including the mouraria, graca etc....

[Sordel]

Night Four: The Rite Of Trio, Nova Quartet & Asmodeus

Monday night began in Auditorium 2: a smaller, studio-style performance space which was three-quarters full to see a non-Zorn act from Porto. Although this was a comparatively young band they were impressively tight playing music of the stop/start chop & change variety: a good match for a Zorn festival. The drummer, Pedro Alvez, was creative enough to be a future star and his timekeeping through the complex structures was impeccable. Unfortunately they decided to end their set with an art song performed by a young female vocalist and, frankly, it was just terrible: like bad King Crimson from the early 1970s (and, btw, I like King Crimson, so my disapproval should tell you just how bad it was!)

For me the Nova Quartet is a sweet spot in the Zorn universe - having just the right blend of challenge with virtuosity and life - so I was looking forward to their set in the headlining concert at the amphitheater. This was a Bagatelles concert and the material fits the ensemble perfectly, sounding very similar to the soundworld of the first two albums. The wild energy of the performance seemed to be whipped up by a wind which grew in power throughout the concert and an enthusiastic audience applauded the solos before giving a ready standing ovation to the band.

Not being a particular fan of Marc Ribot or the original Asmodeus album I wasn't expecting so much of the second half of the concert, but - conducted pitilessly by Zorn in what he revealed to be his final stage appearance of the festival - we were about to get its highlight so far. If you dredge the lake behind the amphitheater you can probably find a couple of pair of Kenny Grohowski's sticks because he was losing them a lot as Zorn pushed him further & further. The composer was almost daring the band to miss the heads, and Ribot's concentration was at times palpable, but the ferocity of the performance was unflagging and its precision was extraordinary. It will be difficult to top this in the nights that remain.

[Sordel]

Night Five: Simulacrum

We skipped the early evening Ikue Mori film, not because I wasn't interested to see it but because queuing at 5pm for an event at 6.30pm followed by another two-hour wait for the day's main concert seemed like a crazy way to spend my time.

I'm not a huge Simulacrum fan although I've enjoyed the albums well enough. In particular, I have doubts about Matt Hollenberg since he always seems rather imprecise. That may be a feature of his dirty pedal configurations but his stage demeanour rather bears it out. In the event, though, (and led by Grohowski's authoritative patterns) the band was tight enough, not least on a nice reading of “Inferno”, possibly my favourite track from their repertoire. I found a single-artist set from such a thrash-oriented band rather unremitting, but the concert (at a little over an hour) was enjoyable enough and Simulacrum received the customary standing ovation from a less-than-capacity crowd.

[Sordel]

Night Six: Robert Dick, Kris Davis Quartet & John Medeski Trio

Night Six kicked off with the smallest audience of the festival so far: for a recital on contrabass flute by Robert Dick. I have Dick's latest album so the wackiness wasn't entirely unexpected, although in the flesh the strangeness of Dick's techniques was even greater than it is on the recordings. When he was vocalising directly into the mouthpiece, there was a definite temptation to laugh, but the warmth of the audience reaction clearly touched the flautist and the concert certainly scratched an itch for the avant garde that the festival had not hitherto been providing.

In a noticeably warmer amphitheater (temperatures in Lisbon are dramatically escalating) Kris Davis's quartet provided the evening's first set of Bagatelles. Davis (whom I was seeing for the first time) is a rather “strong reader” of Zorn in that her lyrical & fleet-fingered acoustic jazz style smooths out the deliberately angular edges of the material. Against this, Mary Halvorson on guitar seemed to be providing an extra helping of pedal effects which, for me, did not always sit comfortably in the arrangements. The result was an absorbing but ultimately unpersuasive half hour.

John Medeski's third night in a row saw him on organ again, with the flamboyant Calvin Weston on drums and Dave Fiuczynski on electric guitar. This set was very much in a “jazz-rock” vein and the trio was very well balanced: in Simulacrum Grohowski appears to control the momentum of the music, whereas here any of the three could take control. Fiuczynski is a staggering talent: not only in terms of his scale work but also in his awe-inspiring use of wah pedal & whammy bar. Weston's extrovert performance style made a good impression at first but his unwavering reliance on splash cymbals to provide every climax became grating by the end. I felt that I had been watching a very interesting concert by a band that did not especially interest me, and a lacklustre encore didn't help. Overall it was a concert that I was glad to have attended, but not the best showing for the Bagatelle heads.

[rodrigo]

The best thing that happenned today at tye festival was spotting Trey Spruance in the audience!

Just kidding, but the Highsmith trio was the less interesting group and we got to see the longest concert thus far..

As for the local group playing today, I had to get out in the middle of their performance, the book I'm currently reading was more interesting.

[Sordel]

Night Seven: Slow Is Possible & The Highsmith Trio

I had to laugh at Rodrigo's impressions above because while he's a hard critic he's not far off my feelings.

Slow Is Possible, the Portugese group, were billed as somehow inspired by Naked City but that description made no sense to me at all. For a start they lived up to their name by playing fairly slowly ... not slow enough to be making a point about it, but certainly not fast. The sextet of keyboard, double bass, drums, alto sax, cello and guitar was actually a very nice ensemble, providing a rich sound with all the instrumentalists listening to one another and blending sounds effectively. The band appeared to be led by the rather Ribot-influenced guitarist and went for a style that could be characterised as “_{now we're playing quiet} and NOW WE’RE PLAYING TOO DAMN LOUD”. I actually enjoyed their set (especially the West Coast Jazz piece that ended the main concert) but since Mrs, S. found them boring we left before the encore.

I knew going in that the Highsmith trio was going to be my worst concert of the festival and the heat (over 30 degrees at 10pm) didn't help any. Craig Taborn's fleet-fingered filigree was impressive, but - since the point of the music is rather to avoid melody - it was to little effect. Ikue Mori’s electronics still don't make any musical sense to me. That meant that the main interest for me lay with the percussionist Jim Black (not on the original Highsmith album) whose performance was absolutely fearless. Given that the entire concert was improvised (and - due to the nature of the music - he could not resort to a groove) every move he made carried exceptional weight. I can't say that I enjoyed the concert but Black did manage to tie the textures together and, at times, you sensed the three musicians working together at the higher limits of what was possible for this style of music. I did notice a handful of people rushing to the exits to avoid an encore but the far from capacity amphitheater audience seemed for the most part to appreciate the experience.

[rodrigo]

Incredible concert today, Insurrection. All four musicians nailed it, Hollenberg and Lange interplay was amazing. Really enjoyed it.
The soundcheck was more a rehearsal, they went through almost every song.
On other news, Lisboa sun turned Trey Spruance really red.

[stefanodoug]

Thanks guys for the concerts' report. After reading it, I felt I haven't been attending those kind of shows for too long a time

[Sordel]

Night Eight: Dither & Insurrection

Seeing a game piece performed is always a good time, and I enjoyed the Dither Plays Zorn disc (where's volume 2?), so I was well-disposed to this concert before it ever began. They began with a dry version of Hockey that was dry indeed, with the musical gestures quite clear and no attempt at development. Then they performed a wet version: noisy and powerful but certainly more inscrutable for any audience member who did not really understand the process or performance. A fairly long version of Fencing with plenty of musical found objects came next: enjoyable & accessible for the audience. Finally they performed the slow, layered Curling with its drones and feedback sounding particularly effective in the room. There was no encore, unfortunately, but the concert delivered in terms of variety and interest.

With its gnarly, bagatellian heads and at times agressive sound you could be mistaken for thinking that Insurrection was primarily a hard rock vehicle: the continuation of Simulacrum or Asmodeus by other means. The concert revealed, however, that the band is much closer in temperament to the Gnostic trio or The Dreamers: the music is performed in an easy, cooperative fashion where melodic lines worked a lot better than I-can-go-faster scale exercises. The consistent handoffs from Lage to Hollenberg and back showed both guitarists to best advantage with each having time to think between solo spots. Moreover, this was a band that seemed comfortable with the material and able to communicate it well to the audience: there was none of that introvert downtown-musican-at-work atmosphere here. I'm not sure how much this would come across if you compared a recording of this concert with some of the others in the series: the difference wasn't great in terms of the music performed yet Mrs. S. and I both felt that it was clearly a better concert and one of the highlights of the festival. The audience seemed especially enthusiastic, not least when Grohowski had to fill while Hollenberg changed a guitar string.

[rodrigo]

Amazing Brian Marsella trio! I already was sold, as I love Marsella, and together with Dunn and Wollesen you cannot go wrong. Great set of Bagatelles.
Wondering if the musical quotes in the last encore are especified by Zorn or chosen by Marsella himself. Especially enjoyed the Stravinsky quote