NORTH SEA JAZZ 2011
By Sebastian Scotney
Photo by Matthijs Hakfoort www.moodphoto.eu
The Dutch have a wonderfully descriptive word: ‘gezellig’. To pronounce it, you have to gurgle from the back of your throat. Once at the beginning, and again the end.
It means a combination of ‘friendly’, ‘sociable’ and ‘happy being together’. It can describe a person, an event, even a place. Being ‘gezellig’ lies at the heart of the Dutch character, and explains why they’re so good at living so well side-by-side with each other – 16.5 million of them live in only 36,500 square kilometres – and at giving parties.
Photo by Matthijs Hakfoort www.moodphoto.eu
North Sea Jazz, now in its 36th year, must be the biggest jazz party in the world, the best demonstration anywhere of what it means to be ‘gezellig’. It is a vast and complex operation. Its thirteen stages range from one which has a capacity of 60 (The NRC Jazz Cafe) to the main arena which holds 9,000. The organisers were expecting 70,000 people last weekend, plus 27,000 to see the sell-out late night gigs by Prince, over the three days in total.
One unavoidable truth about the festival is there is so much going on at any one time that you’re bound to miss out on far more than you can possibly get to see.
There was so much jazz to be heard that I took the radical decision not to join the scrum, even for press tickets, for headliner Prince, and not to stay up into the small hours. My experiences both of the festival and of Rotterdam were full-up and full-on – I doubt I could have done more.
From the jazz world, I got to see the many of best in the world: John Scofield John McLaughlin, Mulgrew Miller, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter… The chance to see quite so many great artists in one place makes NSJ an unmissable one-stop sweet-shop.
John Scofield brought a jazz supergroup with him: pianist Mulgrew Miller, impeccable bassist Scott Colley and inimitable drummer Bill Stewart. I’ve never heard Scofield play with so much respect for his fellow musicians. There he was, as listener and band member, not just as soloist. Scofield’s blues-inflected, forward-driving grooves are infectious. But Mulgrew Miller is a bandleader and major figure in his own right who has a strong and very different musical character. He took on the accompanying role with unbelievable panache and discretion, inhabiting flawlessly the same register as the guitarist, finding magical places to simultaneously be present and hide completely in the textures. And he would progressively probe, search and suggest with each solo during the course of the set. That exploration started to find its objective, to reach land with life-affirming emphasis and conviction.
Photo by: Eddy Westveer www.eddywestveer.com/
I checked out the emigre Brit John McLaughlin with his ideal band Fourth Dimension which consists of Gary Husband mainly on keyboards and laptop but briefly on drums, Camerounian bassist Etienne Mbappe, complete with his trademark black silk gloves, and drummer Ranjit Barot. McLaughlin was mostly content to solo serenely over the incredibly powerful rhythm engine and range of colours behind him. He looked fulfilled, in his element, complete.
I shan’t forget Chaka Khan in a hurry. With a mic dripping in sequins, she was giving the full howl treatment to Richard Rodgers’ ‘My Funny Valentine‘, before moving back to her normal high-octane funk-soul-disco territory. Equally stuck in the mind is Sir Tom Jones, doing his bit for the Welsh Tourist Board with the spiritual ‘Didn’t it Rain, Children’. And I had a moment of simply not getting it: I watched in incredulity as a few thousand happy souls danced riotously to Snoop Dogg filling a vast room with F-words and totally incomprehensible encomia (or were they instructions?) to his bee-yatch.
There was a lovely moment, at the start of Sunday afternoon, when a Brit could be touched with quiet pride. Two great emigre Brits were playing softly, discreetly and beautifully. Dave Holland, who lives in the US, was making sweet sounds on arco bass, while John Surman- an adoptive Norwegian – whispered on soprano sax, both setting up a mood for oud player Anouar Brahem to join in. A gentle, magical way to prepare the ears for more aggressive onslaughts later in the day.
Photo by Eddy Westveer/ www.eddywestveer.com
The tiniest venue in the Festival hosted a Q and A by one of the most talked-about jazz musicians of today, poll-winning alto player Rudresh Mahanthappa. Mahanthappa, of Indian extraction but a product of Colorado and Berklee (and Croydon, my spies tell me) is one of the most articulate musicians on the scene, an innovator with a febrile intelligence, a great turn of phrase when he talks, and above all intense joyous musicality when he plays. His whole family are academic scientists – ‘I’m a scientist at heart,’ he said. And he had an original take on how what he achieves represents nothing less than the onward march of history: ‘We (Indians) are no longer just replacing your hips or preparing you for Y2K. We are taking a full, active part in cultural life.’
He explained symmetrical rhythm and interval patterns, and got the audience to clap the rhythm of an infectiously groovy tune called ‘Blackjack’. Mahanthappa revealed, eventually, that the reason for the title was because the tune is in 21/4. (4 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3 + 4). I went later and heard the beginning of a storming set by his Samdhi project with guitarist David Gilmore. An album of this music, due out on ACT Music in October, is an exciting prospect.
Star trumpeter Dave Douglas brought a lively three-trumpet outfit, in which, rather than keeping the limelight, he was constantly challenging the other two trumpeters to out-think and outplay him. His sparring partners were well-contrasted. Italian Enrico Rava is one of the great trumpeter-composers, urbane and stylish. Avishai Cohen (not to be confused with the bassist of the same name) is a young and highly inventive New York player with technical armoury to spare and ideas and energy in profusion. And on piano, the ultimate unpredictable enlivener: Uri Caine. A perfect jazz festival band; high-energy and fun.
Photo by Matthijs Hakfoort www.moodphoto.eu
Then a supergroup, featuring Marcus Miller on bass and Wayne Shorter on sax, completed by Sean Jones on trumpet and Sean Rickman on drums, played a through-composed suite based on Miles Davis‘ music. It is very early days for this project, and while the tunes were familiar and every dreamlike utterance from Wayne Shorter had a final, sublime and poetic quality, there was a slightly tentative, rehearsal-ish air about this ensemble, which is bound to solidify as the material gets more familiar.
Photo by Eddy Westveer www.eddywestveer.com
This one was personal. Having had nearly two decades of my career involved with Belgium, I have spent a large part of my life wanting and waiting to hear Toots Thielemans and his regular trio. The Belgian harmonica-playing legend is now 89 years old. He has performed with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Benny Goodman. He has, unsurprisingly, had bouts of illness, but still plays with a joy and clarity which made a standing ovation from every single person in a packed house inevitable and completely natural.
He began his performance with the purest expression of being lucky to be alive one could ever want to hear, Dave Brubeck‘s gorgeous tune ‘In My Own Sweet Way‘. There was multi-layered symbolism here; Brubeck himself has just turned 90. And Thielemans does play sweetly. And with wonderful rhythmic looseness. All of the songs Thielemans played in this set had some significance in his life, from the theme to ‘Midnight Cowboy‘ – he played on the original – to the best-known tune he wrote himself, the classic ‘Bluesette‘. Unforgettable.
THE VIRTUAL BUZZ
The limitations of what one can get to see means that one is constantly comparing notes with others, and overhearing strong enthusiastic sentiments – that prevalent spirit of being ‘gezellig’ again. Dutch singer Kris Berry had a lot of critics reaching for superlatives. I heard a whole train compartment of friends still wired from having just heard Trombone Shorty. There was a palpable buzz about the late-night encounter on Friday between Pharaoh Sanders and Robert Glasper‘s regular trio. I did hear a little of Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau‘s duo from a distance and, communication-wise, it was right up there with what they produced in the much more intimate Wigmore Hall in London last year. Redman’s charisma as performer simply travels more yards than ordinary mortals – he feels closer than he is.
Kubuswoningen (Cube flats). Architect: Piet Blom
ROTTERDAM: CITY OF ARCHITECTURE
In addition to the festival, this press trip showed off the City of Rotterdam. A local once told me, ‘Here in Rotterdam is where the Dutch make the money. They then decide how to distribute it in the Hague. Then they spend it in Amsterdam.’ Rotterdam is one of the main ports in Europe, a place with a very particular buzz. I got a sense of the sheer scale of the port by arriving at North Sea Jazz via the North Sea itself on an extremely comfortable Stena Line car ferry.
You don’t spend long in Rotterdam before discovering about what happened on the 14th May 1940. Heavy bombardment destroyed the old city centre in its entirety and killed over 800 people. Fires raged long after. But the aftermath has seen a flowering of innovative architecture, with a decisive presence of architects in the process of creating the new city and a desire to renew and to go on renewing. A small group of us was taken on a tour on sturdy bright green bicycles by a highly-knowledgeable young architect. He showed us one of the more wacky developments, Piet Blom’s Kubuswoningen (cube flats). He showed us landmarks whose design is inspired by the marine heritage such as the Erasmus Bridge and the lighting on the Schouwburgplaats.
KUNSTHAL
Clever use of different materials prevails in the modern art gallery Kunsthal, which is the signature building of Rotterdam’s most famous modern architect Rem Koolhaas. The gallery will host a major Stanley Spencer retrospective from September 2011 to January 2012, with support from the British Council. (www.kunsthal.nl)
We were also taken to RoTown, an intimate rock venue where you cross the steel stage – on which Smashing Pumpkins and Arctic Monkeys appeared early in their careers – which is also the walkway into the garden. A clever piece of venue design.
If all the modernism becomes too much, there’s always the historic university town of Delft with its perfectly-preserved centre with 17th century merchant houses and tree-lined canals. It’s just ten miles away. The city of Vermeer and of Pieter De Hooch is the perfect contrast to Rotterdam.
North Sea Jazz is unique in its all-encompassing scale. The small and homespun co-exist comfortably alongside the corporate and massive. Wristbands are everywhere – I met one friend who had amassed four. Food and drink prices are quite steep, even a glass of water costs EUR 2.40. I was also told that Rotterdam has a dearth of cheap chain hotels, although this is likely to change with a few new projects coming on-stream.
But in the end, it’s all about the music. And on that score, the sheer scale of North Sea, the freedom to make one’s own choices, to make individual pilgrimages to hear so many of the greats gathered in one place, to create one’s own festival experience from a mass of possibilities, can leave no room for complaints.
Sebastian Scotney
Sebastian will be Michael Wilson’s special guest on Welcome To The Weekend on Friday 15th July at 6pm to talk more about the festival.
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The North Sea Jazz Festival 2012 at Ahoy Rotterdam will be held on 6th, 7th, 8th July. www.northseajazz.com
Sebastian Scotney travelled to North Sea Jazz by Stena Line as the guest of the Dutch Tourist Board in London www.holland.com/uk/Tourism.htm and Stichting Rotterdam Marketing (www.rotterdam.info). For more details of architectural bike tours, see www.rotterdamarchiguides.nl
Eburon Holland (www.eburon.nl) publish a very clearly laid-out guide ‘Here’s Holland’, Ed. Sheila Gazaleh-Weevers, which has grown out of a guide produced since the 1970s and is in its ninth edition.