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September 6 , 2006
ECM Festival in Belgium
From September 29 to October 1, Dinant Jazz Nights-Belgium presents its 9th Festival, dedicated to the ECM label.
Three day festival passes were sold out within a few days but passes for one or two days and single concerts are still available at FNAC shops in Belgium and from the festival website:
www.ecmfestival.be and www.dinantjazznights.org
As the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, the Belgian city of Dinant, set in the centre of the Walloon region, has long been a place of pilgrimage for those interested in tracking the history of jazz to its more unlikely sources.
Since 1998, the city – equidistant from Brussels and the Dutch and German borders, and only 50 kilometers from the French border – has also hosted the Dinant Jazz Festival which, drawing both an international audience and an international cast of artists, has made the case also for the city’s contemporary importance in the development of the music.
This year the festival’s concerts are held in three locations – the Dinant Cultural Centre and two churches: the Dinant Collégiale, whose foundations are from the 7th century and the church of the Leffe Abbey, established in 1152. The three venues are within a few hundred metres of each other.
The programme
The festival begins on Friday, September 29, with Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble in the Collégiale, the first time they have played in this church, renowned for its exceptional acoustics. The Garbarek/Hilliard combination has continued to grow in the twelve years since "Officium" was released. The first stirrings of the collaboration used medieval polyphony as a starting point, with Garbarek’s sax as a freely moving “fifth voice”. By the time of “Mnemosyne” (1999) the repertoire spanned 22 centuries, from the “Delphic Paean” of Athenaus to the “Estonian Lullaby” of Veljo Tormis.
Garbarek: “A lot of my work involves performers from different cultures, and I consider this collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble comes from a different culture – if not geographically, then certainly in the sense of time. In our best moments I think we’ve managed to give something new, something unheard of before.” Increasingly – and over the course of hundreds of concerts – the Hilliard Ensemble have also joined the improvisational process...
The reinvention of early and baroque music is also one of the themes of lutenist Rolf Lislevand, whose Nuove musiche project is presented in the church of the Leffe Abbey on Saturday, September 30. A Norwegian who studied in Switzerland, lives in Italy, teaches in Germany and leads a band featuring Spaniards (the Norwegian component being boosted by Terje Rypdal’s old bassist Bjorn Kjellemyr), Lislevand is a natural polymath and polyglot who started his career as a jazz guitarist. Today he plays archlute, baroque guitar and theorboe, in his own emancipated way: “For years people tried to play early music as closely as possible to the way it was played at its time of origin”, Lislevand explains “But that's a philosophical self-contradiction. The first question is whether it's possible to replicate the performance of a musician who lived centuries ago…” Quite radically, Lislevand is “waving goodbye once and for all to early music's authenticity creed.” His vibrant re-castings of baroque music sometimes veer into episodes reminiscent of Celtic music or flamenco, as he opens up the material. Lislevand has had a long association with the great Catalan viola da gamba player Jordi Savall, and Savall’s daughter Arianna plays triple harp and sings with the Lislevand Ensemble. Another frequent Savall associate, percussionist Pedro Estevan, contributes deftly minimalist hand drums.
The first concert in the Dinant Cultural Centre presents French pianist François Couturier with his new quartet project, Nostalghia: Song for Tarkovsky, giving the Belgian premiere of pieces from the new album of the same name. The work is conceived by Couturier as an hommage to the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86). Couturier: “I have tried to represent specific emotions linked to the universe of this director – to his films, of course, but also to some of his favourite actors or composers. Or even to the very original way he plays with shades of colour.” A most imaginative tribute, ideally suited to ECM’s widescreen production aesthetics, “Nostalghia: Song for Tarkovsky” , provides an apt musical corollary to the director’s work . Most of the featured music is composed by Couturier, periodically drawing inspiration from Bach, Pergolesi and Tarkovsky’s countryman Alfred Schnittke. But there is also space for improvisation. Unusual band line-up brings together Couturier , accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier and saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché (all of whom have been appeared on ECM discs by Anouar Brahem) together with Rosamunde Quartet cellist Anja Lechner. Reactions to the group’s earliest performances have been entirely positive.
Closing Saturday’s show is the Tomasz Stanko Quartet. The defining voice of Polish improvisation for almost half a century, and one of the most individual trumpeters in the history of modern jazz, Stanko has reached a new worldwide plateau of popular acceptance with his current group, featuring Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz and Michal Miskiewicz – as heard on “Soul of Things” and “Suspended Night”. The quartet recently completed a third album "Lontano", material from which will form the basis of the Dinant concert.
On Sunday October 1, the duo of Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner performs in the afternoon at the Leffe Abbey church. Although they have yet to release a duo album (their first duo disc is scheduled for 2007) the Argentinian bandoneon master and the German cellist have collaborated regularly for more than a decade. Primarily a ‘classical’musician, Lechner has also long been intrigued by aspects of improvisation in diverse traditions. It was her interest in tango nuevo that made the Rosamunde Quartet’s “Kultrum” collaboration with Saluzzi possible. Her duo concerts with Dino have been described by Jazz Review/Penguin Guide editor Richard Cook as “As close to perfection as any music-making I can recently recall.”
Dino Saluzzi has been recording for ECM since 1982 in all kinds of contexts – solo, duo, in his Saluzzi Family Project, as a guest with Tomasz Stanko etc – in all situations he remains a spellbinding storyteller. He is proud of the fact that he is essentially a self-taught player, coming from the oral tradition, and his goal is a music that can express itself unambiguously and with feeling: “Art doesn’t need muscles, doesn’t need the force created by power or fame. Let’s get back to simplicity, reduce complexity, renew the possibility of dialogue…”
Gianluigi Trovesi and Gianni Coscia perform in the Dinant Cultural Centre on Sunday afternoon. Both of Trovesi/Coscia’s ECM discs have had liner notes by Umberto Eco, no less, a sign of the esteem in which the witty Italian reeds/accordion duo are held in their homeland. Eco praises their “knowing provocative music....They are always shifting to some point where the listener doesn’t expect to find them.” The two old friends – Trovesi from Nembro, Coscia from Alessandria – share a disdain for artificial distinctions between supposedly highbrow and lowbrow art and they know that great music can as easily be found on the street as in the conservatory and that all forms or valid vehicles to carry a musical argument or, simply, to have fun with. Jazz, folk, classical music, popular themes, film music – all of it is slyly embraced by Trovesi and Coscia.
Although pianist Tord Gustavsen’s emphasis on quietude and contemplation partly reflects Scandinavian directions, in many respects his trio is the least “Nordic” of all the Norwegian groups on the ECM roster. Its big influences are from early jazz, from gospel music, from the blues, from Afro-Caribbean music, and from such singers as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. These earthy influences, filtered through a European sensibility that has also been touched by the impressionist composers, gives the Gustavsen Trio its special cachet. The group sound is mellow, caressing, sensual. Tord’s melodies are strong and irreducible – heard once they remain in the mind. The music’s clear structure allows Gustavsen, bassist Harald Johnsen and exceptionally resourceful drummer Jarle Vespestad plenty of room to move. Tord’s albums Changing Places and The Ground, respectful of roots in U.S. jazz, can be considered a quiet protest against current chauvinistic or nationalistic ‘Eurojazz’ trends
The festival closes with what might be considered an archetypal ECM project. Manu Katché’s Neighbourhood band was assembled by the French-African drummer with Manfred Eicher as a one-off production project originally and has gone on, like so many projects before it, to be a popular touring institution. The group incorporates three-quarters of the Tomasz Stanko quartet (Stanko, Wasilewski, Kurkiewicz), but plays a music of much sunnier disposition, built around Manu’s tunes and his loping grooves and mesmeric rhythm patterns. On saxophone is Norway’s Trygve Seim, who recently replaced formative influence Jan Garbarek in Manu’s group. Although Katché is perhaps best known for his numerous collaborations with rock musicians – Peter Gabriel, Sting, Robbie Robertson, Joni Mitchell etc – jazz is a priority for him and some of his earliest contacts to jazz improvising were via ECM albums. Manu himself has been a contributor to ECM discs since 1990 when he appeared on Jan Garbarek’s “I Took Up The Runes”.
ECM Cover Exhibition
ECM’s exceptional album cover art, photography and design have also played a role in establishing the label’s identity. ECM art has been addressed in numerous essays and exhibitions over the years and formed the subject of the critically-acclaimed book “Sleeves of Desire” (1996). At the Dinant Exhibition Centre, a retrospective of ECM album covers will be on display from September 28 to October 22.
"ECM has consistently produced sleeve designs of enigmatic and austere beauty. The label’s packaging exhibits the finest characteristics of European modernist tradition...Ignoring design trends, the label has maintained a visual identity and stylistic voice that perfectly articulates the distinctive European aesthetic of the music ".
Eye Magazine, The International Review of Graphic Design
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