The Brooklyn Rail

The gigs of Cologne Jazzweek seem to be multiplying in the short history of this now-established multi-venue-festival. For eight days, Köln quivers under its own weight of a wondrous glut of joints, many of them specializing in jazz and improvised music. Cologne Jazzweek grasps this music securely, only inviting rock and electronics if they’re well-entangled with freeness. There are well-established hardcore venues like the Stadtgarten and LOFT, promoting acts almost every day all year round, and there are also churches, cinemas, and concert halls widening the festival’s environs. For the obsessive completists there is the ever-present stress of simultaneous gig-clashing, always reaching a peak around 8 p.m.

Paul Lovens is one of Germany’s (and the entire globe’s) finest improvising drummers/percussionists, specializing in a highly detailed, rhythmically bewildering, tonally adventurous, detail-pocked style; speedy, precise, and pointillist. Early on, Lovens was a member of the sprawling Globe Unity Orchestra, and on a smaller scale, played in a trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. Now seventy-five, Lovens has unfortunately been forced into retirement in the last few years, as his hands lose their active grip. Your scribe recalls being astounded by his playing back in the 1980s, belonging to a then-recent micro-scuttling skin-metal tradition explored by Paul Lytton, Tony Oxley, and Roger Turner. This same scribe last caught Lovens playing at the Citadelic festival in Gent, Belgium in 2019, where he was similarly impressive.

On Cologne Jazzweek’s second evening, the LOFT dedicated a gig to him, inviting a sextet of sympathetic players up the many flights of its stairs to play for our hero. Lovens had made an editorial request, preferring the band to divide itself for a pair of trio sets, all the more to capture an intimate sonic experience.

The LOFT has been a high shrine for improvised music during the last thirty-five years, founded by Hans Martin Mueller, whose son Benni took up the reins in 2017. Literally home-built, the interior maintains its informal aura, with a famed recording studio wired up to the stage area via a ceiling cable network. Visitors will be made breathless by the sounds, and also by the steep step-climb up to this eyrie of adventure. Mueller senior made a friendship with Lovens way back in the late 1960s, and the drummer has appeared at the LOFT on countless occasions. Although “retired,” Mueller can be found most nights at his old place.

The first set featured Frank Gratkowski (reeds), Philip Zoubek (piano), and Michael Vatcher (drums). Gratkowski is a serial horn-switcher, often within the space of a piece (these improvisations are much shorter than most), opening on alto saxophone, as Zoubek attaches clips to his piano strings and Vatcher looms over his tiny, basic kit. His snare drum sits high up, loose-strung for rattling resonance. Gratkowski chooses bass clarinet, partnered by bowed cymbal, the two sources luxuriating in a faint space, Vatcher bending his bowed saw, an instrument often favored by Lovens himself. Rationed events gently impose a sense of fine tasting, as Vatcher strokes his tiny hi-hat and weathered old bass drum. Sharp instances of aggression turn back to calm suspension. Skins are scrabbled and Gratkowski sticks a glass of water inside his alto. You’ll never get that out again, the audience collectively thinks, and indeed he ends up struggling valiantly to extract it, worth the trauma for the sound it makes.

The second set had the quieter roster of Wilbert de Joode (bass), Tobias Delius (alto saxophone), and Florian Stoffner (acoustic guitar), the latter representing a valuable discovery for the uninitiated. Delius prioritizes tenor saxophone, while the other pair prefer the percussive potential of their strings, taking a skeletal stroll as the horn flecks and striates in between their legs. Bent harmonics rise like a ghost of the 1920s, tenor a malleable floater navigating a high tightrope, Delius continuing on clarinet. Rubbing and bending passes between the strings, Stoffner’s chiming anti-harmonics suggesting Derek Bailey. A sharp tenor bite meets plod-shadows of bass, as Stoffner’s combover hangs with desperation over his guitar neck. Wilbert de Joode’s strings look very loosened, adding to the low vibrato of his lines, while Delius and Stoffner inhabit similar zones. A sudden wake-up of attack is charioted by Delius, and the only lack might be the sense that they are missing a unifying and climactic sextet improvisation. In the end these six remain uncompromising.

The following Monday night ended with a new trio called Extra, playing in Stadtgarten’s basement club JAKI (named following the departure of Can’s drummer Jaki Liebezeit). Trumpeter Peter Evans, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer Jim Black unveiled a configuration that produces music unlike most of their previous individual ventures, debuting with a just-released recording for the We Jazz label in Helsinki. Electricity crackles in a circle, around midnight, in a crammed dungeon with free admission. Virtuosity combined with visceral confrontation.

Evans opens with a fast fanfare, as is often his wont, pocket trumpet poised upwards. Tough drum-hits and rumble-bass act as an extraneous surround for the Evans spectacle. A high, purring vibration gets faster and faster, Don Cherry reconstructed as a precise virtuoso, becoming a dangerous bell-hooding shakuhachi drainpipe, close up to the microphone. Wind tunnel bassiness seeps up to dominance. Black is snickety-obsessive, and Eldh sets up repeating self-samples via his electronics rack. Black snaps metal as a surgeon would, and Eldh selects blood pudding electric bass. Is it the imagination, or is Evans working through jazz history, stepping from Cherry to Dizzy to Miles during different phases of this energized set? Eldh maintains the bass-scramble, and Black’s on the ski-slope dropping snow-bombs, as Extra illustrate their high powered compression of multiple energy events into a hyper-jazz mutation, not promised for the future, but here now, in the flesh.