Jazzfest Berlin Celebrates 60th in Style

Review, Marilyn Crispell, Joe McPhee, Joachim Kühn, Joe Lovano

By Bill Meyer I Nov. 12, 2024

Pianist Marilyn Crispell tantalized in two very different settings at the festival.
(Photo: Michael Patrick Kelly)

Martin Luther King Jr. gave the opening address for Berliner Jazztage 1964, which was the first edition of the annual event now known as Jazzfestival Berlin. In his speech, he described certain qualities of the music — vitality, joy and a direct connection with the yearning for freedom. This year, the festival celebrated its 60th anniversary with a discerning look back over its history, a typically forward-thinking program, and endeavors that acknowledged the ongoing relevance of King’s message, both in music and deed. John Hollenbeck’s The Drum Major Instinct played a recording of the reverend’s titular sermon twice through, accompanied once by Hollenbeck with a trombone trio and again with a chamber jazz ensemble. And in this year’s opening address, which was projected by video, George Lewis framed the music in terms of identity. The question is not, “What is jazz,” but who?

The festival program’s answer was that jazz is international; there were several groups from Sweden, a big band from Japan and a host of multi-national ensembles.

It is open-minded, as evidenced by the incorporation of Dhrupad singing, rock guitar, club beats, electronic noise and diverse pop and folk elements into certain sets. It is engaged with its surroundings shown throughout the week in a project called Jazzfest Community Lab Moabit, where festival performers offered concerts and workshops in the Moabit neighborhood, which has become home to many immigrants. And it is willing to deal with its history. The Jazzfest opened its archives to scholars including Lewis, musician/academic Kristin McGee and DownBeat contributor John Corbett, who presented talks and published articles in the festival program dealing with the Jazzfest’s successes and lapses in matters of race and gender.

The programming brought living history to the stage in the person of esteemed elders who are still contributing to the music. Octogenarians Joe McPhee and Joachim Kühn were inspiring in ensemble appearances with much younger musicians, and Christer Bothen made trenchant contributions as a member of Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra. Pianist Marilyn Crispell, who is 77 years old, played a solo set that was both rigorous and poetic. Her presence on the Berliner Festspiele’s stage on opening night also attested to the festival’s commitment to proactively make history. Jazzfest Berlin is a signatory to KeyChange, an initiative to transform the gender balance in music. The presentation of new and boundary-pushing work by Kris Davis, Sylvia Courvoisier, and Sun-Mi Hong demonstrated that inclusion represents not compromise but access to great music.

The festival began on Halloween night; what better time to hear an organ combo? But Decoy, which includes Britons double bassist John Edwards, drummer Steve Noble and Alexander Hawkins on Hammond B-3, is not your standard organ trio. The improvisation gives equal measure to the genre’s sonic signposts and their collective backgrounds in free music, ranging from bluesy gestures to erupting clouds of sound. They were joined by American free-jazz, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, who was just three days short of his 85th birthday. Although his days of lugging an armful of horns onstage are behind him, his instruments of choice — a tenor saxophone and a book of poems — did not feel limiting. Spry and styling in an AC/DC sweatshirt and red sneakers, he exuded mischievous joy and deep appreciation for his fellow musicians, past and present. His brief, pungent tenor cries dipped in and out of the trio’s roiling action, imparting emphasis and redirection; and alternating between lusty recitation and emotionally invested singing, he telescoped five-and-a-half decades of loss, survival and artistic growth into the text, “How Long Has Trane Been Gone?” This time on piano, Hawkins also performed in the intimate A-Trane club on the final night with singer Sofia Jernberg as the duo Musho. Jernberg is gifted, with astounding range and control, and Hawkins expertly balances support and contrast. Their disparate set included William Shakespeare’s “The Willow Song,” Bacharach & David’s “What The World Needs Now,” and the Armenian exile’s lament, “Groung” (which translates to “Crane”). They distilled songs to essentials — a line or two of lyrics, or just a melody — and then grew these kernels into sui generis performances that acknowledged the material’s pain, and then transcended it with the boldness of their improvisations.

Some of the festival’s richest music came from big bands and trios. Swedish bassist Vilhelm Bromander’s Unfolding Orchestra extended the examples of Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, who used African, Asian, and orchestral instrumentation to add color to charts that framed fiery solos. His compositions used Dhrupad (classical Hindustani) singing and Nordic string sounds as focal points and weight-bearing essentials. Another Swede, alto saxophonist Anna Högberg, unveiled a new, 12-piece large band, the Extended Attack, whose doubled horns, bass and drums were augmented by prepared piano, turntables and musical saws. She applied these resources to a set-long piece called “The Lonely Sailor,” whose episodic structure shifted between hammer and anvil rock rhythms, pensive blue passages and bristling free exchanges between smaller, breakout subsets. And on the final night, the Otomo Yoshihide Special Big Band combined visual commotion and tight execution to delightful effect. The mostly original set contained acknowledgments of Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Charlie Haden, whose examples gave precedent for the band’s refusal of purism and humanist engagement. Different ensemble members, sometimes several at once, conducted sections of the band, using visual gestures to draw attention to musical ones. The leader’s distorted electric guitar and electronic musician Sachiko M’s sine waves added a prickly counterpoint to the band’s nuanced horn charts and muscular rhythms. When the audience demanded an encore, they were rewarded with a playful song-and-dance arrangement of a folk song from Fukushima.

Joe Lovano’s Mystery Trio showed just how free music can go without letting go of song-derived structure and lyricism. Pianist Marilyn Crispell created an unshakable foundation of rumbling sound and implicit rhythm which permitted the leader to unpack stark, patiently evolving lines in his incomparably sumptuous tone while drummer Carmen Castaldi played on a parallel track that rarely locked into what the other two played, but always complemented it. But sometimes it seemed that the real reason for the trio’s existence was so that Lovano could listen to Crispell solo; when she came to the fore, he stood near her piano, eyes closed while his fingers played open air, visibly transported by her playing. Spurred on by a much younger French rhythm section, the 80-year-old German pianist Joachim Kühn played lucid, torrential music that felt more like a new beginning than a victory lap. He shared an emotional moment with the audience, remembering how he had begun his career on the festival’s main stage 58 years before; they rewarded him by demanding more from him as well. And at the nightclub Quasimodo, the Berlin-based group Ouàt closed out the festival with a delirious bacchanal. Originally a piano trio that explored the repertoire of Elmo Hope, Hasaan Ibn Ali, and Per Henriksen Wallin, they have transformed into an open-to-anything free-for-all. One moment, multi-instrumentalist Simon Sieger chanted over drummer Michael Griener and bass/gimbri player Joel Grip’s raucous, Afro-Caribbean rhythms; the next, they were a back to their roots, with Griener unfolding bold, Tyner-esque passages over a fiercely swinging groove. To cap it off, they invited Swedish saxophonist Martin Küchen out of the audience to lead the willing crowd in calisthenic dance moves. Returning to George Lewis’ point for a moment; who is jazz? Jazzfest Berlin 2024 showed that there’s a multitude of individuals reimagining the music in creative and life-affirming ways. DB