Venue:
Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne
Date: 04/06/2015
I first saw Tord with a different line up in a double bill with Tomasz Stanko as part of the Melbourne Jazz Festival some 6 years ago. Since then I’ve bought most of his records and never been disappointed. I love that ECM/ European jazz sound. I’ve been struggling to find words to describe it, sparse, chime-like, brooding, evocative of cold landscape or is that latter description just me projecting. Anyway this time he has come back ,as he says, with less hair but a bigger band. He has added sax which is on recent albums and a different bass player.
Happily the drummer Jarle Vespestad remains- beaming with the sheer pleasure of playing and the lightest touch I’ve ever seen -plenty of use of brushes and tapping cymbals so gently they didn’t move. Dragging the end of the stick across them for a soft screech was effective too.
Tord is low key in his introductions, soft and almost gravelly- perhaps due to having done a workshop earlier in the day.
With this quarter the influence of Jarrett’s European quartet,to me, is more in evidence especially when the soprano sax was brought out. Tore Brunborg really does channel Jan Garbarek. I’d have to say I prefer the music without the sax more as it made it sound less like Jarrett’s stuff but I can understand him wanting to embellish the music. Most of the time Tord is far less busy than Keith can be, he rarely cuts loose and, mercifully, no loud humming and singing from this unassuming Norwegian.He tends to have one hand anchored down or even not playing while the left hand works its wonder.
There were two shows back to back last night so we were limited to an 80 minute show -but it was satisfying.
Tord is a bit of a boffin having studied psychology written a paper on the dialectical eroticism of improvisation. As far as I can tell the argument is that tension and release in music> improvisation is equivalent to the tension and release of sex. I may be oversimplifying so if inclined here’s the paper
http://www.tordg.no/dialectics_of_improvisation.pdf
The audience:
Typically diverse jazz crowd good mix of ages.
It made me think..
Just what is it that defines that cold climate European jazz sound?
err that should have been right hand….doh !