Own voices, foreign voices: The Jazzdor Festival in the Kesselhaus

When musical progress flagged, the age of combinatorics began. Everything can be combined with everything, and the artistic task is to develop mixed forms that nobody has heard of before. When this desire for the hybrid was still new, it was called postmodernism. In post-postmodernism, it too has become historical: the ironic citing of the most diverse influences hardly elicits a smile from anyone anymore. Instead, a seriousness has broken out that demands permanent crossing of borders and stylistic openness just as emphatically as it fears unlawful appropriation. This is no different in jazz than in other genres.

Example OURS In German: the bear. The four-piece French band led by violinist and mandolinist Clément Janinet, which opened the 15th Jazzdor Festival Strasbourg – Berlin on Tuesday in the Kulturbrauerei’s Kesselhaus, makes no secret of what its acronym stands for. Spelled out it means: Ornette Under Repetetive Skies. Two areas that are conceivably alien to each other are brought together here. On the one hand the wild Ornette Coleman, who wanted to use his harmolodic system to undermine all hierarchies of rhythm, melody and harmony in favor of a grassroots democratic musical language, on the other hand the intricately chiseled Minimal Patterns by Steve Reich. However, both are only used in moderation – and hardly ever combined.

Sometimes Janinet’s violin, paired with Joachim Florent’s double bass, turns over the softly pounding and – beating vibraphone of drummer Emmanuel Scarpa and remains in the repetitive. Then again, together with tenor saxophonist Hugues Mayot, who in the hard contoured design of his solos belongs more to the school of John Coltrane, he treats himself to a hymn-like outburst. Janinet – a rare climax – breaks out into a brook-like solo chaconne with pale bowing.

These musicians alternately speak all jazz languages ​​fluently, but they have nothing to say. One at a time, they work their way through ballads and heavy beats, and as they pay tribute to Alice Coltrane, first an electronic tambura is thrown out with a chirping drone, then swinging into a seductively slow 5/4 time signature, finally demonstrating that you can with frenzied walking bass can also be completely different.

The astonishing thing about the “Six Migrant Pieces” by alto saxophonist Christophe Monniot and his band in the second part of the evening is perhaps that they also draw on a multi-stylistic approach, which is just as appropriate to pay homage to Wayne Shorter as it is to play with the Balkan turbo. But what energy, what sovereignty, what authority are at work here. Each of the six musicians speaks with his voice through the compositions and arrangements and enthusiastically follows along.

Finally the bear dances

Jozef Dumoulin wades on his electronically alienated Fender Rhodes together with the wonderful guitarist Nguyên Lê, who has already performed several times with Jazzdor, through peculiar drowning pulling and distorting sounds, while drummer Franck Vaillant weaves a net with bassist Bruno Chevillon, over which Christophe Monniot and trumpeter Aymeric Avice draw their circles. Finally the bear dances.

If you can learn something from these concerts, which are almost as different as night and day, it might be that you shouldn’t overestimate the aesthetic approach, especially in jazz. Each individual, not to mention the sum total, is able to transcend it through their own personality. It’s not just a question of tone and physical presence. It depends at least as much on a carefully developed instrumental vocabulary, which brings the aesthetic level of development back into focus. Jazz country France has a lot to offer.