Südtirol Jazz Festival 2024

Südtirol Jazz Festival
Various Sites
Bolzano, Italy
June 28-July 7, 2024

The Südtirol Jazz Festival started in 1982. Despite the fact that its lineups rarely include big-name artists, this annual event is neither small nor unambitious. Whereas most jazz festivals are located in one town and sometimes in one venue, Südtirol spreads itself far beyond its base in Bolzano, Italy. There are concerts all across the South Tyrol region. And while many festivals run for only a few days, Südtirol goes for ten. It is primarily known for three things: its long history; the beauty of its settings for music; its mission as a showcase for experimental European jazz.

The northernmost province of Italy contains some of the most spectacular vistas on earth. Wherever you are in this part of the world, the simple act of looking up often takes your breath away. Steep mountains tower all around you. The human eye can perceive more shades of green than any other color. This evolutionary trait is especially useful here. The mountains are many variants of green: jade, teal, lime, olive. The geometrical terraced vineyards are emerald. The non-geometrical stands of trees are, of course, forest green.

The 2024 edition of the festival presented 50 concerts by 41 bands in 37 venues. Südtirol's allegiance to the European scene is genuine. Very few musicians from outside Europe appeared. The commitment to experimentation is also real, and takes many forms. There are not many jazz festivals where you are more likely to hear something you have never heard before. "Jazz" is in the festival's name, and it is the most appropriate term for the program's dominant overarching genre. But "jazz" here makes room for punk, noise, rock, R&B, folk, blues, classical and world music. "The blurring of boundaries" is a phrase that has become a cliché in jazz criticism. At Südtirol they mean it.

It is also an event where the music's relationship to its physical environment is both intimate and interactive. Over the years, concerts have taken place in meadows at 6000 feet in the Dolomites, on moonlit ledges in stone quarries, and in clearings deep in the woods. There is a fondness for locations that were never intended for music, such as barns, warehouses and remote alpine "refugios" (mountain huts).

An example of a surprising choice for a concert setting was Bunker H. Early in the festival, Sofia Jernberg and Mette Rasmussen performed there. Bunker H was originally an air raid shelter, built by German Nazis in World War II. It was excavated from the base of a mountain in Bolzano. To get to the concert, you picked your way through a long, cold, dimly lit tunnel. Eventually you reached a space with a stage and rows of plastic chairs under the arc of a low rock ceiling. The first sounds of the concert were startling, long wordless tones from Jernberg, in a voice that was operatic in its penetration but fluid in its pitch. Rasmussen's fierce eruptions on tenor saxophone at first seemed entirely separate from Jernberg, but soon you perceived that the two were indeed listening to one another, and that the calls of each provoked responses, however free, from the other. They are both seekers, committed to exploring their respective instruments as sources of pure sound, for the purpose of opening new possibilities of expression. In the austere environment of Bunker H, their joint investigations seemed to spring from a shared consciousness and a common domain of feeling. The darkness within the encroaching rock walls got into the music. The acoustics of the tunnel were supportive of their collaborative creative process. When one of them produced a sound, the tunnel held on to it for a moment before the reverberation died away. (It all made you wish that some Nazis in Hell could have heard the music, and learned that their air raid shelter had been repurposed.)

A very different place to put music was Parkhotel Holzner, on the Renon plateau, 4000 feet above Bolzano. You got there by cable car, from which the views, as you ascended, were transcendent. On a sun-splashed morning, pianist Olga Reznichenko played with her trio (bassist Lorenz Heigenhuber, drummer Maximilian Stadtfeld), under a huge tree on the hotel lawn. (From the edge of the lawn, you gazed out on mountains succeeding one another into infinity.) Reznichenko often began her original pieces with stark, blocky chords and minimalist themes. But her songs might venture anywhere. When she improvised she frequently interrupted herself, as she felt the need to replace a melodic form with a new one. Sometimes she landed on two or three notes that she repeated until they became mantras. (At such times, the birds in the tree above her were playing more notes than she was.) Reznichenko is an unconventional pianist who is yet in touch with the great jazz piano trio tradition. For all her surprising sudden turns, her right hand often arrived at streams of classic pianistic lyricism. As for her surprises, she makes them sound like they have been there all along, waiting for their moment. She is from Russia but has lived in Leipzig for 12 years. In 2023, her trio was nominated for the Deutsche Jazzpreis, the most important jazz award in the German-speaking world.

This report is based on a visit to the last seven days of the festival. Concerts began at 11 a.m. and ended long after midnight. The performances by Jernberg/Rasmussen and the Olga Reznichenko Trio are two memories that stand out in an immersive week-long musical experience. Here is a selective list of some others:

An excellent opportunity to compare two separate attitudes toward avant-garde jazz was provided by two septets who played on successive nights in Parco Cappuccini, a park in Bolzano. One band (called Day by Day) was led by 28-year-old German alto saxophonist Fabian Dudek. The other (called Shake Stew) was led by Austrian bassist Lukas Kranzelbinder. The former was the true wild hairy raging avant-garde beast. The latter was also uproarious but less threatening. Shake Stew's emphasis on hypnotic Middle Eastern rhythms and Afrobeat grooves made its challenging music more approachable. As it happens, both bands contained two bassists and two drummers. But Shake Stew had three horns (trumpeter Martin Eberle, tenor saxophonist Johannes Schleiermacher, alto saxophonist Yvonne Moriel), whereas Day by Day had Dudek and two keyboard players (Felix Hauptmann and Olga Reznichenko). Yes, it was the same Reznichenko who had performed a refined, erudite acoustic piano trio concert at Parkhotel Holzner earlier that same day. She is an artist with range. Dudek's music was huge and often thick, but Reznichenko somehow found openings where, on Fender Rhodes or Roland AX-Edge, she inserted her original ideas. The sheer quantity of sonic phenomena generated by the seven players in Day by Day induced shock and awe. In the middle of it all stood Dudek, a compact man in horn-rimmed glasses, looking calm and thoughtful as, around him, his band unleashed the hounds of Hell. At chosen moments he raised his saxophone and emitted brief blasts, or spattered fragments, or made jolting intervallic leaps, or trilled maniacally. Sometimes what he played coalesced into long singing lines so strangely exhilarating they made you think of Ornette Coleman. While Shake Stew, with their addictive rhythms, was a crowd-pleaser, Day by Day performed the most viscerally powerful concert of the last seven days of the festival.

Südtirol always sets up some residencies. This year bassist/vocalist Ruth Goller, vibraphonist Mirko Pedrotti and drummer Daniel Klein isolated themselves for three days in an "agriturismo" called Stanglerhof, then presented the fruits of their labor at the facility's gourmet restaurant. Goller is known as an outcat, but what this trio played was accessible and attractive. If it was dinner music, it was very high-level. Pedrotti unwound long, sinuous vibraphone lines over the swirling polyrhythms of Goller and Klein.

There was an 11 a.m. concert almost every day. Because there were also late concerts every night, some festival attendees, including your present correspondent, were known to point out that 11 a.m. is a brutally early hour at a jazz festival. But even the most sleep-deprived had to admit that some of the most fascinating music took place in the morning. In addition to Olga Reznichenko's concert at Parkhotel Holzner and the Jernberg/Rasmussen performance in Bunker H, there was a warmly received set in Roner Distillery by theremin artist Pamelia Stickney and guitarist Peter Rom. The quietly yearning cries of the theremin are among the most haunting sounds in music. Stickney (one of the few Americans on the program) is a virtuoso of this odd instrument that is played without physically touching it. Rom's warm chords were background for Stickney's soft keenings. The distillery contained a hospitable space for music, with gigantic oak barrels double-stacked around the walls.

Also at 11 a.m. were two rewarding chamber ensembles. They played in small spaces high up in the mountains. Both groups were trios with a bass and two horns. Fumagalli, from Switzerland, appeared in a museum that had been a silver mine. HAEZZ (two Austrians and a Czech) performed in a barn with the audience sitting on hay bales. The trumpet player with HAEZZ is Martin Eberle, who appeared later that day with Shake Stew. He is another artist with range. With Shake Stew, he helped whip the crowd in Parco Cappuccini into a frenzy. With HAEZZ, his lyric grace recalled Chet Baker. HAEZZ was a concise, air-tight ensemble that rendered rapt, hymn-like, dead-slow songs—in a barn. They were one of the delights of the week. Fumagalli was more extroverted. At times they made a bass, a trombone and an alto saxophone sound like an orchestra.

Another band that merits mention is a quartet that calls itself ØKSE, which is Danish for "axe." They were a gathering of diverse talents that did not always cohere but that produced some singular moments. Petter Eldh is an A-list bassist in Europe but he mostly neglected his bass and wailed on various little boxes and devices. Mette Rasmussen's tenor saxophone was the most axe-like instrument in the band. She hit hard enough with it to generate shock waves. Two of the rare Americans at the festival were in ØKSE. Savannah Harris is a coming star on drums. She is the complete package: quick, clean, and forceful. Val Jeanty, listed as "sound chemist," introduced a wide variety of electronic aural stimuli into the mix.

There were a few bands that disappointed. One was Lúna, a quartet with three Finns led by guitarist Sigurdur Rögnvaldsson of Iceland. They played on the grounds of Parkhotel Mondschein in Bolzano. (Full disclosure: The crowd at this free 6 p.m. concert was large and seemed OK with Rögnvaldsson's generic 1970s-style fusion.) On the lawn of a beautiful Bolzano institution, Parkhotel Laurin, the Nils Kugelmann played a thin, lightweight set.

But what was most notable about the 2024 edition of Südtirol was that a festival built on newer names, that dared to expose its audience to so many new experiences, that challenged assumptions about what jazz is, had so many more hits than misses. In 2023, a new troika had taken over artistic direction of the festival. They are Max von Pretz, Stefan Festini Cucco and Roberto Tubaro. For many years, these three had worked directly under Klaus Widmann, a physician by day in Bolzano. Widmann is a legendary figure who was the festival's artistic director from 2000 through 2022. He was known for his fearless musical sensibility and his gift for finding emerging jazz talent. He liked to assemble interesting young players into bands that had never played together before. It was the musical equivalent of combining volatile chemicals and throwing in a match. The new administration of co-artistic directors has retained the festival's daredevil ethos. But von Pretz, Cucco and Tubaro seem less inclined to assemble jazz laboratories. Most of the groups that appeared in 2024 had spent some time together. They were further along in the collective creative process. Their adventures often yielded new art.

The Südtirol festival is a place where you can get glimpses of where jazz, the most unpredictable of art forms, is going.

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