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Jazzmandu 2005, Day 5: Fusion Of Players Scales The Peaks
by Mark Sabbatini
Since trips to Nepal usually involve mountain climbs, perhaps reaching the potential summit of a jazz festival here at the halfway point is appropriate. A jam session between traditional Nepali musicians and visiting bands on day five of Jazzmandu 2005 got nods from players and listeners as the best performance of the eight-day festival ...
Jazzmandu 2005, Day 4: Taking It To The Streets
by Mark Sabbatini
The crowd started arriving three hours early, surrounding the trio on all sides. Children took in unusual looking and sounding instruments with transfixed stares. Plenty of applause greeted a fast and loose set venturing at times into the theatrical, such as solos featuring cymbals tossed off low-laying brick walls. Norwegian guitarist Bjorn Vidar Solli ...
Jazzmandu 2005, Day 3: Latin with a Nepali accent
by Mark Sabbatini
When it comes to offering foreigners the familiarities of home, Nepal is decidedly Impressionistic. Bakeries from the cities to the high mountain trails sell brownies, burgers and bagels of widely varying appearance and taste, but all blurry renditions of their American counterparts. Not necessarily worse; it depends on how a person feels about eating ...
Burning And Chilling At Jazzmandu 2005
by Mark Sabbatini
Most other places it'd be an ordinary night at a small jazz festival. Here it's culture shock in reverse. The showcase event of Jazzmandu 2005 featured eight bands performing fusion-oriented jazz and Nepali music for seven hours on two stages. Roughly 500 listeners gathered on the lawn of a swanky golf resort on the ...
The Heights Of Nepal's Jazzmandu 2005
by Mark Sabbatini
If there's any question Nepal is a world of its own, ask someone the time. When it's noon in India, it's 12:15 p.m. on the other side of the northern border, as Nepal operates in a time zone independent of every country on Earth. Maybe there's a small effort at rounding off to better ...
Going to Extremes to find Jazz in Greenland
by Mark Sabbatini
It's an icy land full of improvisational spirit and language meant more for ear than eye. But if Greenland's soul is ideal for jazz, finding the music is a challenge - to say nothing of requesting standards like “Inequnartumik Inuusamik." The secret is starting at the right place. The home of sousaphonist ...
The Moldejazz Festival 2005
by Mark Sabbatini
Picture Norway's most famous pianist, so tranquil he sparks controversy, hammering blues and neo-Dixie jams as a sideman in a basement bar. Or a hip-hop star scandalized for atrocious behavior elsewhere finding peace. In the small coastal town of Molde, its biggest event of the year is often a study in contradictions.
The 2005 Keitelejazz Festival in
by Mark Sabbatini
Not many festival directors recommend “competing" events in another town. Or are surprised by a foreigner bypassing the advice and showing up on opening night. At least one so distinguishable due to a lack of colorfully spiked hair. But small-town bluntness and surprise appearances by outsiders represent well the quirkiness and quality ...
The 2005 Aarhus International Jazz Festival
by Mark Sabbatini
As the rest of the world reaches its exhaustion point for Danish jazz, Aarhus is just warming up. About 200,000 people descend on Copenhagen for 10 days in July for more than 500 concerts during the city's world-famous festival. It's a nonstop barrage of everything from all-stars to “unplanned events that spill over into ...
Off the Main Stages at the 2005 North Sea Jazz Festival
by Mark Sabbatini
(Note: This is part of an ongoing series about jazz from lesser-known events and places around the world. Although the North Sea Jazz Festival hardly qualifies, this article focuses on performers getting the “small print" treatment - and sometimes not even that - at the bottom of the schedule. Big-name acts were deliberately avoided - with ...
