Jazz

Bassist, singer, songwriter, who is from Portland. Amazing talent! She went to PSU at age 16.

The marquee attractions at the Portland Jazz Festival this year were avant-garde legends Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, but I instead gravitated to the appearance made by Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen and his impeccable trio.

Gustavsen is as marked a contrast to Taylor as would have been possible to find. While the latter has made his living banging the keys atonally and abrasively, Gustavsen's touch is as delicate and melodic as an antique music box. With bassist Harald Johnson and drummer Jarle Vespestad complimenting Gustavsen's style no less than brilliantly, his first three albums - each of them absolute gems consisting of all original material - exemplify the ECM label standard of muted, meditative, improvised music.

Vespestad's nuanced, percussive interaction with Gustavsen was something to behold throughout the performance. During the intensely soft interlude between the first two songs, "Tears Transforming" and "Sani", Vespestad took this sympatico - and the ambient dynamics at hand - to another level entirely by touching the tip of one of his sticks vertically to his cymbal and drawing it across or circularly, thus managing to 'trap' the reverberations of the pianist's notes and create a kind of acoustical feedback. Switching frequently between brushes, mallets, and sticks, Vespestad relied heavily on suggestive cymbal tappings to create nearly as much palpable color to the music as either of the tonal instruments; indeed, it was like listening to someone paint. Johnsen's bass was played with a similarly empathic understatement, yet perhaps in part due to the room's weak acoustics, it lacked resonance and seemed less essential a foil for the pianist.

The trio leader's stage presence, meanwhile, was interesting to regard. When he took the microphone to annouce the band and songs (referring to two of them as 'hymns without words'), his voice was virtually as hushed as his playing and one had to strain to hear him. At the piano, however, Gustavsen presented a striking visual contrast to the subdued quality of his sound - albeit much in congruence with its obvious soulfulness - putting the whole of his torso into every phrase and often writhing up off the bench like one of those floppy, inflatable props used to attract attention at car dealerships. Theatrical analysis aside, the sublimity of Gustavsen's style was amply displayed on every piece. His compositions and playing - for instance, "At a Glance", which came midway through the set - are at once ethereal and grounded, speaking to a feeling or feelings shaded well beyond any one specific delineation; in other words, of a nature which can lead a listener to hear and experience vast ranges of intangible emotion from one passage to the next, let alone within any given chord. The group was no less effective when it veered into somewhat more forceful terrain, as on the Mediterranean-flavored "Where We Went", with Vespestad continuing to fill in just the right amount of space left between Gustaven's chordal inferences. The level of insightful improvisation and sustained feeling at this point in particular was exceedingly high.

The one complaint I could issue with the group itself would be with the length of its performance, which clocked in at around 75 minutes, including a surprisingly brief encore (the as yet unrecorded "The Other Side of Tango"). There was no doubt the players gave all it had while on stage, but surely the set could have been extended to include at least two other pieces. Given the steep festival pricing and the amount of trouble I'd personally taken to view the concert, this truncation left me feeling a bit disappointed upon leaving.

The other disappointments to be dispensed with have nothing to do with Tord Gustavsen. The festival does a good job of attracting big names, but at least in the case of Gustavsen, it demonstrated a profound lack of foresight by placing the group in the Scottish Rite Theatre, a boxy, angular place with terrible acoustics. The forte and signature of Gustavsen's approach is his often extreme quietude, but this venue rendered the finer points of this muted subtlety far too inaudible. It would seem almost paradoxical to put it in those terms, but there surely is a way to get this sound across better than it was presented. It did not help, of course, that the fits of compulsive chain-coughing, which almost always accompany a live performance requiring a backdrop of silence, overruled any number of feathery notes emanating from the stage. And while most in the audience were appropriately appreciative of the depth and warmth Gustavsen's trio has projected, I was amazed at how many saw fit to get up and walk in and out between songs - and there was an appallingly large contingent of disaffected patrons which paraded unceremoniously out of the hall immediately as the group had left the stage for the first time. The members returned for the encore in less than thirty seconds, yet still the exodus ensued, with some even applauding feebly as they filed out, evidently hoping to beat the 6:00 Saturday traffic.

I could not help but feel totally confounded by this behavior. Part of it, I have to think, is due to lack of respect and name-recognition. If many of these people had been told that someone with the stature of Bill Evans or Ahmad Jamal was performing, they would have stayed nailed to their seats for the duration. This, on the other hand, not having been approved with the proper media fanfare, all seemed like so much casual wine-tasting for more than a few in attendance. The identification of jazz with this type of oblivious, country-club set is a large reason why the form suffers to attain credibility in the larger critical mass, a point highlighted by the bare-minimum mention the festival had received in both local newsweeklies (nearly all of it focused on Coleman and Taylor). The Mercury - though I should consider the source - led off its obligatory handful of paragraphs by stating that jazz has long struggled against its own irrelevance, but that we should go see Ornette because he's one of the last "innovators" who hasn't died. In this supremely narrowed though commonly held conception, jazz, by virtue of having long defined itself through a linear storyboard of evolution and metamorphosis, has apparently ruined its chance at surviving in a contemporaneous sense because it has simply run out of new leaders to take it in new directions. This view has no room for emergent individuals like Tord Gustavsen, who express a fresh and singularly unique musical voice without being overtly conscious of either adhering to or eschewing pre-existing forms - yet for the crime of failing to "breaking new ground", are lumped in with the rest of the guilty "irrelevant". That's a damn shame, because Gustavsen's music, much like the array of ineffable sentiment it evokes, does not actually correspond to such any such ready-made categorization. Being Norwegian also doesn't help his cause - and unlike with Evans or Jamal, there is no Miles Davis around to distinguish and stamp him with approval. And no real chance for him to get the artistic recognition he richly deserves in a culture which is given to either distrusting contemporary jazz or patronizing it for all the wrong reasons. Hopefully he gets his due in Europe.

Oscar Peterson Trio – The Berlin Concert
DVD review by Noah Peterson

This is release of footage shot from a 1985 concert. Oscar Peterson on Piano, Neils-Henning Oersted Pederen on Bass, Martin Drew on Drums.