Jazz em Agosto

Jazz em Agosto (simply “Jazz in August”) has now reached its 39th edition, presented in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s gardens, in a recently refurbished amphitheatre. The concerts take place over eleven days, at 9:30 each evening, when the sun has toned down its blaze. Artistic director Rui Neves favors the alternative avenues of jazz, inviting free improvisation, folkloric infiltrations, electronic attachments, and loud guitars.

Your scribe was in Lisbon for six days, which began with a trios focus. The Attic explore a classic free jazz vocabulary, featuring Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone), Gonçalo Almeida (acoustic bass), and Onno Govaert (drums). Sinews were flexed straight away, as an invocatory horn loomed over groaning bowed strings and rotary skin patterns. Govaert dropped bombs as Amado led a locking together of power, a driving force of ascendance. Almeida was left completely alone to solo, starkly exposed for granular intimacy, flamboyant and forceful. A sequence grew that was governed by controlled-flail drum strikes, scaling another of the trio’s regular peaks. A more concise piece followed, this trio courting no internal pressure for the players to produce extended constructions. When they sensed an ending, they took immediate action. The set concluded at around fifty-seven minutes, and there were fierce calls for an encore. The threesome returned, but only to take another bow.

Ghosted are another trio, comprising Andreas Werliin (drums), Johan Berthling (double bass), and Oren Ambarchi (guitar and electronics). Rhythm and repetition abound, mostly courtesy of the two Swedes, with Ambarchi feeding his strings through a tabletop of electronics, while a Leslie speaker whirls around behind this Australian nomad. His guitar rarely sounds like a guitar, and Ambarchi surely has a desire to be a cellist and/or a Hammond organist. There was one brief surge of familiar axe feedback, and a reflection of Robert Fripp’s spiral-pickings towards set’s end, but Ambarchi mostly adhered to tonal drones, clouded curls, and hearty pulses. Werliin used congas to begin, Berthling snaking with subtlety, Ambarchi being the glissando glider. The grooves continued, as Ambarchi set free spangles lightly, encouraging an incandescent swirl, partially moving backwards like a reversed tape spool. Around twenty minutes in, Berthling switched to electric bass, and two-thirds in, Werliin’s drums took a frontal sonic position. Ambarchi’s Fripp & Eno section at once had him sounding like a kora and a conventional harp. The crowd was much fuller this evening, possibly due to the rock, drone, electronic, and minimalist aspects of the Ghosted three.

Lisbon’s airport is very close to the city center, and the Gulbenkian is right under one of its descent paths, setting up an environmental accompaniment to these sets, each plane observing exactly the same computer-guided gradient for landing. Your scribe noticed that once the shows had concluded, the planes switched direction, taking off over the romantically illuminated Gulbenkian gardens.

There were also occasional early evening concerts, in the Gulbenkian’s smaller theatre at 6:30. Marta Warelis is a Polish pianist who has been living in the Netherlands for well over a decade. She’s lately been working with the New York label Relative Pitch, issuing the solo album A Grain Of Earth in 2022. Warelis works at the piano keys, but also spends a significant part of her forty-five-minute set preparing its strings, or actively playing them with her fingers. In both of these areas she creates manners of playing rarely heard, interleaving several phrase-patterns at high speed, as if combining multiple imagined compositions rapidly co-existing. Hammer and pause, silence then rumble, Warelis savors a note’s gradual decay. She’s also extremely sensitive when manually stimulating the strings, coming up with what sounds like an accelerated mandolin sound, or scraped tones, sustained in a singing hover. She also dragged a ragged rope, or perhaps dismantled bow, snagged around a single string. Resonant and grating, singing and moaning, Warelis exudes smiling surprise when prompting her instrument, discovering this particular concert’s possibilities. She also immerses herself in an intense state of speed-reaction, judging wildly.

Gard Nilssen’s Supersonic Orchestra closed out the festival on Sunday night, largely playing compositions to be found on the forthcoming Family LP, out in mid-September on the ever-inspiring Finnish label We Jazz. Like Supersonic’s debut, it’s a live recording, probably the wisest way to capture this massive outfit’s colossal spread of driving sound. This was the only act that could compete with the jet-streaming above.

The Norwegian drummer and composer Nilssen chooses to play with two other sticks-men, along with three acoustic basses and a massive horn assemblage. The seventeen-piece line-up is largely from Norway and Sweden, with Denmark and Poland also represented. Many of the members also lead their own bands, including Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, Petter Eldh, Ole Morten Vågan (double bass), Kjetil Møster, Signe Emmeluth Krunderup, Otis Sandsjö, Mette Rasmussen, and Maciej Obara (reeds).

Nilssen co-composed this new material with saxophonist André Roligheten, who couldn’t be at this gig—Sandsjö took his place. The Supersonic approach often revolves around quite accessible themes, enlarging with excitement, eventually introducing solos that tend to be ecstatic in their runaway freeness. Climaxes stack up, sometimes followed by hushed subtlety, acting as a bridge between numbers. There is a rich pool of soloing talent, particularly in the reeds section. One slight snag was that they should have been louder, although your scribe admits that he was perched on the back row, in the extreme right-hand block of amphitheater curvings. This was the only way to view Supersonic’s membership in this sold-out setting, given that the players face each other rather than the audience. The album sequence was observed, with “The Space Dance Experiment” leading to “Spending Time With Ludde.” “Letter To Alfred” had a charging wall of horns, which the soloists soon clambered, Sandsjö making a slow honk, Møster raging on tenor. The encore was Mongezi Feza’s “You Ain’t Gonna Know Me, ‘Cause You Think You Know Me,” making this one of the festival’s longest sets.

These Jazz em Agosto evenings are performance delicacies confined to hour-long sets, thus imparting a sense of studied savoring, a nightly occasion that includes turning up early for the pre-show bar socializing, and then potentially hanging out afterwards, for further red wine, stout beer or white port, and yet more socialising. The bar remained open until 1am, so the hang was near-interminable, if so desired. Highly unusual for a moderately formal concert venue.