JAZZDOR BERLIN 2023

6. - 9. JUNI KESSELHAUS BERLIN

Beginning of June is golden Jazzdor time in Berlin and mostly the first hot summerly week in Germany’s capital 80 km from the border of Poland. Jazzdor Berlin is a side track of the mother festival Jazzdor Strasbourg in the Alsace area with its mixed (and also painful) French-German history. Jazzdor Berlin, a festival navigated and curated by Philippe Ochem through more than 15 years, has turned out as part of a rock solid system of planets meanwhile branching out to Saxon city of Dresden and to Budapest, Hungary’s capital, as such a unique thing in Europe. The Berlin edition always paired musicians from France with musicians mostly from Germany but occasionally sense-making choices of musicians from other European countries. As a main characteristic of Ochem’s curation you see him working with a number of key musicians appearing in shifting and changing combinations opening up new territories and exploit dormant potentials, colours and dynamics.


Pull of the end

To start this report from the end: the conclusion of Jazzdor Berlin 2023 was the epitome of a concert evening - as something from the books. Not only that everything was right and coherent - each of the three performances had its special charm and very own magic enchanting the senses, evoking high spirits and providing deep experiences.

It started with a fabulous performance by Aki. And when you say ‘Aki’, many of you can immediately continue and complete with ‘Takase’. An Aki-performance however, ever has been and still is everything else than predictable. We know pretty well that she has her always delighting way of creating liaisons des cultures et du styles. She always brings in heavy weight and she is commanding in charming and decided manner. What you get is colourful, bright, edgy and full of blooming flowers placed at right spots and well timed momentos as happened at JAZZDOR BERLIN in company with these two deep high strong guys from フランス (Furansu) on violoncello and bass clarinet weaving a magic carpet. And yes, Aki finished with a gesture of a special kind: a deeply touching grand little tribute to Sakamoto.

Couple therapy/Thérapie de Couple is a German-French sextet constellation sometime launched by another party (Jazzahead!) lead by saxophonist Daniel Erdmann and consisting of Vincent Courtois (vcl), Théo Ceccaldi (vln), Hélène Duret (cl), Robert Lucaciu (b) and Eva Klesse (dr). This night in Berlin (and before in Bremen) it showed an enormously strong and dynamic will to play and thereby left a memorable mark on this evening. The compositional specifications of Daniel Erdmann combined with his characteristic understatement in unifying the six voices with their strengths evoked delightful, all around exhilarating sound experience that was collectively appreciated by the audience. It bestowed the festival with a magnificent final point.

As if that wasn't enough French flutist Naissam Jalal provided more than just an interlude to highlights from Aki Takase and the couples therapy crew. With her new program “Healing Rituals” and an astounding double bass-cello line-up (Claude Tchamitchian and Clément Petit) she evoked a clearly to sense high inner emotional seizure of listeners’ souls.

Together with her deeply immersed fellow-musicians she led her audience through connecting ritualistic musical projections in the sense of the healing music of Alice Coltrane along zones of internal and external vibrations. It happened on the basis of a strong inner trust and peace of mind connected with great creative power that deeply transformed the experiential space. Masterfully the passages combined tonal colours and subliminal driving rhythms of the Middle East and India. The interaction of her flute playing (traverso and nay) with the bass of Claude Tchamitichian and the intense cello playing of Clément Petit as well as the the intensity of Zaza Desiderio’s part owed to his masterly restraint and timed drumming were simply of dreamlike quality (in both senses of the word).

It is music that we are in need of in a time of loud attention-grabbing overkill, in times of war and military conflict. The inner calm and attention with which Jalal led through this seance, testified to enormous musical maturity of rank. It was also an extraordinary new way of sharing personal things with the audience.


Backwards jump forward

This year’s planned opening act was a typical example of Ochem’s modus operandi. He gave a carte blanche to wild bassoon voice, Sophie Bernado (without ‘r’) who introduced two wild cards, actress and vocalist Marie-Pascal Dubé, and Pina Bettina Rücker, an artist exploring the sounds of quartz glass bowls, something that many really looked forward too. But, but, tragedy hit Bernado in her lively passionate way of acting: an injury of her hand forced a longer break on her. So, we are still looking forward while wishing her well.

One of her group-members, bassist Joachim Florent, appeared in the de facto opening act, the group O.U.R.S of violinist/mandolin player Clément Janninet with saxophonist Hugues Mayot and percussionist Emmanuel Scarpa on drums, vibraphone and assorted percussion instruments, also documented on the 2022 BMC-release “Ornette Under The Repetitive Skies III”. The title of that release contains a clear indication of the source and direction of the music. To be short: it revealed as a highly energetic flow of steadily climaxing music celebrating the group’s confluent voices, colours and personal characters. Thereby a constant junction of momentum and forward movement was created.

The second group of the first night could be considered as an all-star line-up of high inflammable potential combining Aymeric Avice (tr) with Christophe Monniot (sax), Nguyen Lê (g), Jozef Dumoulin (keys), Bruno Chevillon (b), Franck Vaillant (dr). Would they keep each other in balance and ignite some possible volcanic forces and spraying geysers. Or would they end up in virtuosity games? The Allstar configuration gathered around the lead of stormy resourceful sax master Christophe Monniot in a clear working division mutually feeding each other strongly on bright and sometimes darker themes. So it turned out as a rolling and grumbling, seething and swirling, beautifully fire spitting crater.

Dramaturgy of contrasts

The second night had a fruitful dramaturgy of stark contrasts with a hidden common thread. Élodie Pasquier (clarinets) and Didier Ithursarry (accordion), two new names and in a way a very French duo in terms of instrumentation but also music. They played in a rather deep state of sound coming from various sources. There were lively arabesques but also confluent clouds of sound from their respective instruments. It was a travel through deep valleys of the past to higher plains of contemporary extended sound sorcery of melancholic shadings.

The second group, Electric bassist Olivier Lété’s Ostrakinda with trumpeter Aymeric Avice and percussionist Toma Gouband, was the most rough, physical and far out combination of the night and the festival until that moment.

The third group, a quartet of the two saxophonists Sylvain Rifflet and Jon Irabagon with bassist Sébastien Boisseau and drummer Christophe Lavergne presented its “Rebbellion(s)” program that set in music famous haunting speeches in terms of speech flow, cadence and rhythm by Paul Robeson, Jean Moulin, Olympia de Gonges, Greta Thunberg, Emma Gonzales, Andre Malraux, or accompanied it. After the earlier program “Perpetual Motion” this is Rifflet’s second collaboration with US-American saxophonist Jon Irabagon. It was a wonderful concert with excellent visuals and there should be more of that kind of exemplary work in jazz.

More word-music and Berlin reshaping

A powerful unit hit the stage at the beginning of the third night with more word-music: spoken out by Mike Ladd under being fired by guitarist Richard Bonnet and pianist François Raulin and driven by bassist Bruno Chevillon and master drummer Tom Rainey. Sounds, words, rhythm instruments and voice penetrated each other here to a high degree thereby challenging, amplifying, emphasising and highlighting each other in dynamical entanglement.

Saxophonist Musina Ebobisse (1990) is a young French musician very much in the spirit of Jazzdor. He started his musical study in Strasbourg and continued it Berlin. Now a resident of Berlin, he made his second appearance at Jazzdor Berlin with his quintet with high calibre Berlin musicians, that also had appeared at the Jazzdor Berlin: with Ebobisse on tenor and Olga Amelchenko on alto the group has a strong horn line augmented by Igor Spallati on double bass and well-known and in demand drummer Moritz Baumgärtner and the Swede Povel Widestrand, a strong improviser, on piano. The group provided an even compact as devoured music full of beautiful sonority and fine dynamics fed by uprising driving energy. Their latest album “Engrams” has been released this year on the Jazzdor label.

The beginning of the third night was made by a Belgian-US American axis. Young drummer Samuel Ber and well-known experienced Jozef Dumoulin, a keyboardist living and working in Paris, teamed up with the great Tony Malaby. They operated intricately along edges in a subdued suggestive mode touching but not grabbing or fixing emerging and fading forms and rising grooves. Squirrelling around, it had something of the dynamics of hard to catch shadows. As such it could have been performed at the end of the night, when things may start to crumble and losing weight.

Short resumé

This year’s edition offered and manifested a well-balanced, ausgesprochen stimmiges festival as a whole with a lot of exchange between regions as well as related states. To do and accomplish that on a progressing line is a merit of relevance and importance. And every year again with increasing urgency the question rises why it is not done on that solid level and openness elsewhere in Europe?!

It still seems to be pioneering work …

Text and photos © Henning Bolte