Is that still free jazz, or is it already nonsense?
When Sven-Åke Johansson's "Overture for 15 Fire Extinguishers" was performed at the Jazzfest Berlin, the acoustic output was definitely low: there was a little hissing, pattering briefly in the catch basin, then it rattled and sputtered, until soon the last foam and that the last of the CO2 from the extinguishing pistols dripped and puffed.
This is really music that anyone can play at home without much practice.
But of course you don't.
The audience at the sold-out Berliner Festspiele was delighted that the pioneer of European free jazz was doing it for the child in every listener and viewer and loosened it up for a long evening.
Johansson's bow at the conductor's podium was not his only one during this 59th edition of Jazzfest.
A focus was dedicated to the native Swede, who lives in Berlin, and there was no shortage of focuses this year: Free jazz itself was highlighted, as was the American tradition of spiritual jazz, and as a reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, dedicated a whole program section of the connection between jazz and East and Southeast European folklore.
Sound explorers in England's spiritual tradition
If you wanted to hear all three focal points at once, the best thing to do was to go to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.
Then, ten minutes before the concert, a man who looked like a Yorkshire village schoolteacher rearranged his woodwind instruments, a second man in a hoodie, whose long gray beard looked like he usually shakes at heavy metal festivals, carried one in his fragile-looking viola on stage, and when a third, rather inconspicuous gentleman finally took his place at the piano, it became apparent that one should never judge by appearances: the village school teacher was none other than the great saxophonist John Surman, also a freelance Jazz pioneer, but more than that, the son of an Anglican minister, a sound explorer deeply rooted in England's spiritual tradition,
Together with the violist Mat Maneri, who is rooted in the New York avant-garde, and the Romanian pianist Lucian Ban, they performed pieces from their album "Transylvanian Folk Songs", a "re-imagination", as Ban said, of those folk songs that Béla Bartók performed collected in Hungary and Romania for over a hundred years.
Three musicians merge into one
But what Ban, Maneri and Surman made of it wasn't folk music, it wasn't jazz, it was pure dream music, it was sounds of floating, universal beauty.
As strong as the individual musical personalities of this trio are, it seems pointless to emphasize Surman's unmistakable saxophone and clarinet sound, controlled with extreme precision even at the age of 78, Maneri's art, a world in the spaces between the tones in which past, present and future seem to touch, or the reserved subtlety of Lucian Bans - rarely has one experienced how three musicians merged into such a unit and opened up a space that told of the naked realities of earthly life ( "The Song of the Dowry"
Béla Bartók once played with Benny Goodman, and if you wanted to listen to classical references in addition to the references to the folk traditions of jazz, you could make out quotations from the etudes by György Ligeti in the concert by the Estonian pianist Kirke Karja.
Karja, like all the other musicians at this multifaceted and tasteful festival, was never interested in exhibiting technical skills, but rather – also a very contemporary question – how to generate maximum energy with the limited resources of a piano or a trumpet .
His own powerhouse has always been the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, who was honored with an honorary prize from the German Record Critics during the festival, and his lyrical berserkism in a concert with drummer Hamid Drake and the outstanding Moroccan gimbri player Maâlem Mokhtar Gania once again and despite demonstrated in his eighty years.
In the shadow of the ancestors
Matana Roberts showed that jazz is also a form of historical search for traces with her somewhat piecemeal “Coin Coin” project, which explored her own family history and Black History in the United States in general.
"Shadows of the forgotten Ancestors" was the name of a Ukrainian-Romanian project around the singer Maryana Golovchenko, and the playing of the young saxophonist Isaiah Collier was reminiscent of the not so forgotten ancestor John Coltrane.
However, a secret main figure of the festival was another, not much older saxophonist, the Frenchman Pierre Borel, who also lives in Berlin.
He was involved in a total of four projects, including the captivatingly ironic Umlaut Big Band, the Polish folk band Lumpeks and the hyper-complex yet highly energetic quartet Die Hochstapler.
And last but not least, he operated one of the fifteen fire extinguishers.
Fortunately, unlike that of his big band colleague Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, he had no jamming.