(The third of three subscriber posts on Subtack on this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.)
Angelika Niescier—Marta Sánchez—Tim Berne—David Murray—Elder Ones—London Jazz Composers Orchestra—Amalie Dahl—Fire! Orchestra—Mary Halvorson—Marc Ribot—Mopcut and MC Dälek—Sakinda Abdou—The Handover—Moabit Imaginarium—James Brandon Lewis—Cadences—Where we’re going.
Something like a festival, shapeed as it is by the organisational demands of a one-off occasion, by acts that it’s felt will draw an audience, by the circuit of prizes and names, and names, offers a cross-section of whatever is felt to be happening at a particular moment on time. It’s partly through festivals, which tend to be recorded and documented far more and far more officially than regular gigs, that we construct our history. (The archive of Jazzfest Berlin / the Berlin Jazztage is a particularly rich resource, as the documentation made available at last year’s festival revealed.) But what really happens is what happens on the ground, day to day: that which continues, in New York or Chicago or London or Berlin and beyond. What’s beyond the headline, what continues after the applause has ended. What we heard in Leo Smith or Pat Thomas, in the massed voices of larger and smaller groups around them, also sounds out round the margins of the big events, events that, in the current environment, are themselves no doubt in the margins, under threat of some kind. The sound must come from every angle.
The full post can be read here.
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