Tame me, I’m a Steinway

What is a piano, or better: a grand piano. A monster with an iron frame, soundboard, sound post and steel strings with a pulling force of up to 160 kilograms each, which adds up to a good 20 tons. As serene as it is on the outside, one does not necessarily suspect which forces are at work in it. In the hands of experienced trainers, it likes to do anything to disguise its enormous inner workings. Sure, it can race and roar. But it can also sing and hum, and when it engages in open-heart surgery, the surgical utensils sometimes make it clink and rattle so gently that it almost feels sorry for you.

To be able to experience all three in one evening at the start of the Berlin Jazz Festival in the Pierre Boulez Saal is not often. The singer is the Swede Bobo Stenson. With him the word of the humble giant comes to mind. In how many traditional and less traditional constellations he has not already let his calm voice sound and yet has never fought his way into the ranks of the pianistic world stars: It was probably his greatest humiliation that in the mid-1970s he was the ingenious, but capricious Keith Jarrett ousted. With his trio, however, he has unwaveringly created his own universe, and the ageless freshness of his playing does not show the 77 years that he has now counted.

This music is highly melodious, even intoxicated with beauty, characterized by a high degree of inner agility. A motif by Charles Ives, a theme by Sibelius, a Slovak wedding dance, a piece written by Don Cherry for the West African kora – this is the material from which it is woven. In the contoured merging of Stenson’s piano with Anders Jormin’s double bass and Jon Fält’s drums, she develops a magical density in which every detail takes on importance.

Substance and show

Stenson’s touch culture and solo inventiveness, Jormin’s confidence in intonation in arco-flageolet passages and Fält’s surprisingly quiet accents combine with the greatest possible freedom. Just like Fält, without touching his percussion arsenal, whipping through the air with his broom, staging theatrical finger strokes, catching a singing bowl behind him, the bell of which he immediately emits again with his heel, or tinkering around in a small steelpan, is a pleasure that the substance never reveals to the show.

Not that Tyshawn Sorey, the drummer of the Vijay Iyer Trio, artist-in-residence at the Jazzfest four years ago, was inferior to him in terms of sophistication. But at the other end of Bobo Stenson’s finely chiseled music, he lights up a restless ember that the album, released in spring, deliberately calls “Uneasy”. Stoically in his corpulence he edged out blow by blow: a Bud Spencer of the drums, who one would not trust his energetic reaction speed so immediately.

What is inwardly turned in Stenson here pushes outward with all its might. The over-transparent is transformed together with Linda May Han Oh’s virtuoso bass into collective energy – and pure volume. As a concept and ensemble performance, that is no less impressive. However, if Iyer’s solos were to be removed from the whole with his powerfully stacked blocks, a lot of pentatonic formulas would be left over.

In between, much more brittle and dissonant, but no less appealing, the freely improvising duo of the Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler and the Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva. Sound pattern exploration, expansive and on the spot. Pale and radiant, dull and majestic. Shifting fields, micro-events, abrupt breaks. It is not a question of development, but of the almost cubist approach: 100 ways of looking at a tone from all sides.

Draksler, who can only manipulate her instrument mechanically, has a harder time than Santos Silva, who breathes, breathes, stutters and whines with the prepared piano. And then she takes a music box and puts it in the bowels of the grand piano, buzzing pensively, while Kaja Draksler tries to find the brightest possible notes in the top octave: two big children who can hardly believe their luck with what they have just discovered .

In the Arte Concert Jazzfest stream