Christophe de Bezenac (sax & electronics); Chris
Sharkey (guitar); Eve Risser (keyboards & vocals); Yuko Oshima (drums);
Paul Miller (audiovisual projections).
(Review by Steve H/photo courtesy of Ken Drew.)
A jazz hating friend of mine has just visited New
Orleans where
he encountered the music in its birth place and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the
experience. I patronizingly informed him that the sort of Jazz he was listening
to belonged in a museum.
Quite where Sunday night’s performance at The Bridge Hotel ‘belonged’ to was
anybody’s guess.
The upstairs room was kitted out in
such a way as to resemble a cross between Miss Haversham’s dining room and a
venue for an early Halloween party. The room was in darkness and suspended from
the ceiling in various strategic places were white drapes which were used as
multiple screens to display the dazzling
audiovisual art of Paul
Miller. The stage itself looked like a section of the control room at the Cern Hadron Collider littered with computers,
keyboards and miles of cables. The band took the stage and proceeded to perform
an unbroken set of manic electronic experimental music accompanied by a
kaleidoscopic interactive light show. Keyboards, vocals, saxophone and guitar
were all embedded in a constant computerized whirlpool of beats and sci fi
effects. The brutal and ferocious drumming of Oshima was a particular
highlight. Personally, I feel this type of music would be far more appropriate
if staged at somewhere like The Tusk festival
(held next month at The Star and Shadow in Newcastle http://tuskfestival.com/). It was an exhilarating experience but
I am not entirely convinced that I was attending a jazz gig. Do four musicians
frantically improvising primarily with electricity constitute jazz no matter
what the eventual output sounds like ? As a piece of modern performance art it
was commendable but for those attending with no prior knowledge of what to
expect it may have left them at best bemused and at worst misled. This gig
really did push the boundaries even of this most eclectic art form. Perhaps if it had been billed as
Frankensteinian Punk Jazz meets Kraftwerk Electronica no one could have
complained if it didn’t quite transport them form Newcastle to New
Orleans.
Steve H.
2 comments :
Ah shit! I missed it!
Great review Steve. One thing rankles...your suggestion that New Orleans jazz resides in museums. No it doesn't, it is alive and well, played all over the world from Preservation Hall to the Oxbridge Hotel in Stockton on Tees (the New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band, Thursday nights). Is swing dead? Nope - you should have been at Hoochie Coochie on Sunday. Is bop dead? Nope - Jazz Café last Friday. Is free jazz dead. Nope - it just smells funny. Jazz Lives!
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