All That Jazz (a summer performance in Frigiliana of the Breuss-Arrizabalaga Quintet) People filed in to sit in the chairs placed out in the small courtyard of the Casa del Apero this warm summer night. Some sat on the low brick enclosure surrounding the palm tree or stood along the second-story balcony above. The group on the wooden platform at the end of the courtyard began to play: Tsukiko Amakawa on piano and synthesizer, Jorge Frías on string bass, Javier Carmona on drums, Markus Breuss on trumpet and flugelhorn, and Pelayo on bass clarinet and alto saxophone. Pelayo, Markus and Jorge also often resorted to a multitude of percussion instruments and toys such as whistles, clickers, sticks to rub or clack together, triangles, cymbals and mariachis. They played with full energy, passion and humor for an hour and a half. Some of the pieces were lyrical, languorous or pensive; others were madly playful, dissonant and mocking, causing me several times to laugh aloud. Several pieces were inspired interpretations of compositions by Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and others. Towards the end of the performance, Pelayo and Marcus, alternating with their horns, brought all the small and large drums into play in African rhythms and themes, which in one piece were answered passionately by some invisible drummers on the balcony opposite. All the jazz artists periodically tore wild animal sounds from their instruments, making them seem as alive as the people playing them, capable of screaming, wailing, singing, moaning, huffing and puffing in exasperation, even snorting and “passing wind.” Jazz is a wonderfully irreverent and high-spirited combination of conscious and unconscious forces and forms: impressionism and improvisation, syncopation and the building, swinging rhythms, fully knowing the formal qualities and requirements of an instrument and then pushing those qualities to their limit so that the instrumentalist is released from the known into the unknown—freedom, flight. Sitting under the stars in the small courtyard while the music worked through my body and mind, contemplating above me the stark contrast of white walls against black sky, I felt the pure poetry of this music and relaxed, letting it do to me what it would. At the end of the evening someone said, “I don’t understand jazz.” You might as well say, “I don’t understand a hawk’s flight, its hovering and stooping for the kill.” Sharon Balentine Wevill
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 06:22:25 +0000
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