Nelson presents highlights from the 2011 Jazzahead festival in Bremen, Germany. Over the last six years this has become a major international convention for the jazz industry and its fans, and a showcase for mainly European jazz
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another el cheapo borrowing from the EU eh ..... still a chance to catch up with the european industry is .....ahem ....According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. -
from the Jon3 newsletterThe holiday season may have ended but we're going on a European tour this week. Switzerland, Turkey, France, Scandinavia, Finland and Germany are all on the itinerary, with Australia thrown in as a wild card. Quarter-tone accordions and toys are some of the strange delights to be featured, as we listen in on some of the best new jazz the continent has to offer.
It all comes to you via the annual Jazzahead festival in Bremen, Germany – a coming-together for jazz fans and industry bods alike to hear and discuss the future of European jazz. Judging from tonight's music the prospects are strong and, at times, weird, as the opening piece from Finnish pop/punk/free-jazz trio (yes, it is possible) Elifantree attests.
Our first main set comes from Finnish musician Kalle Kalima and his group K-18. This week's studio guest, Jazzahead delegate and Jazzwise editor Jon Newey, describes their music as going 'from haunting to lashing', with Kalima's guitar, a host of effects and, yes, that quarter-tone accordion, creating music that is by turns atmospheric and driving.
Berlin-based sextet Transit Room, an appropriately trans-European group, perform our second set. They describe their music as a 'modern-day, urgent scream' - the blurring of composed and free music, and the emphasis on unusual textures, is really contemporary.
And we end up in France, via the Land of Oz and outer space, the homes of our final band's namesakes. The fantastical connotations of Ozma (look it up!) feel entirely appropriate for this electric quartet's music – the traces of fusion and M-Base are just more of the endless influences that, on the evidence of tonight's programme, are making European jazz more fertile than ever.
microtonal accordion?According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. -
I prefer the gospel accordion... The Gospel Accordion to St Calum de JazzbolandComment
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