- 314Recommend It!
- 4,740views
Live Reviews
Ottawa International Jazz Festival – Day Seven, June 29, 2005
John Kelman
With the realization that there will always be more music coming at him than he can keep up with, John wonders why anyone would think that jazz is dead or dying.Shahid stayed with double-bass until the encore—a short and surprisingly get-down-and-funky composition that, like the rest of the set, drew from the real breadth of all the players. Then he picked up his electric bass and demonstrated a stylistic link between this group and his performance with David Murray's Gwo-Ka Masters on day three. Tabbal is as at home using his kit as a palette as he is in swing mode and more deconstructed chaos. Powerful, yet equally capable of surprising restraint, Tabbal soloed with the kind of rare imagination that explains why he is in such demand with artists including Mitchell, Murray, and James Carter. Yet it's something of a mystery why he's not better known outside those circles.
Covering a lot of ground—from pure freedom to detailed composition, from powerful anarchy to swing and funk—Mitchell and his quintet found a place for experimental and exploratory jazz at the OIJF. Hopefully the success of this new series will permit future seasons to feature more of the same.
The Belgian jazz octet Octurn—featuring a trumpet, alto, and baritone saxophone front line along with electric guitar and bass, drums, and two pianists (one on Fender Rhodes and the other on grand)—made its mark at the nightly 10:30 pm Studio Series, where festival goers should go to hear groups that for the most part are off the radar, but equally up-and-comers who deserve the attention.
Octurn's long-form compositions revolve around a curious blend of irregular meter grooves, spacious textures from the pianos, and themes from the horns that are more about texture than strong melody. There's often a lot going on at once, and the group is as rooted in progressive rock as it is in jazz, with some compositions demonstrating the kind of defined, orchestrated chaos of seminal Rock in Opposition (RIO) group Henry Cow, albeit with a different textural palette.
Unfortunately, after about half an hour, their pieces start to run together with a lot of the same core concepts in use consistently. Ethereal beginnings led into riff-based and often irregular-metered grooves that provided the foundation for textural horn lines and soloing. While some of the solos were intriguing, most of the players revealed a distinct lack of authority, with two notable exceptions: drummer Chander Sardjoe, whose confident polyrhythmic approach both anchored and dove the entire ensemble; and bassist Jean-Luc Lehr, whose flexibility and fluid bass lines worked in tandem with Sardjoe to create the most compelling aspect of the group. One has to question the reason for guitarist Pierre Van Dormael, a seemingly tentative player who spent more time sitting on his chair taking in the surroundings than contributing anything to the music.
Still, there was something appealing about Octurn. Maybe it was the late hour, maybe it was the abstruse grooves, maybe it was the rich textures. But while Octurn's performance certainly won't go down as one of the more memorable performances of the festival or the series, it was engaging enough at the time to be worth attending.
Tomorrow: Steve Groves, Jon Ballantyne 4Tet; Doug Wamble; and Terence Blanchard.
Visit Octurn and the Ottawa International Jazz Festival on the web.
comments powered by Disqus
