Winner of the Parliamentary Jazz Award for Best Media, 2019

Review

Jon Hassel Arve Henriksen Erik Honor

Punkt Festival: London King’s Place 28 Nov 2008

image

by Tim Owen

December 20, 2008

/ LIVE

It's seldom a compliment to the band to nod off during a performance, but on this occasion I would gladly have stayed in that state of reverie for the rest of the night

The well-established Norwegian Punkt festival has an intriguing concept: each performance on the main stage is immediately followed by a live ?remix’ in an adjacent space. The remixers are festival curators Jan Bang and/or Erik Honoré, occasionally abetted by another featured artist. This year a satellite festival took up residency in London for three nights, and I went along to the second, principaly for the main performance by Jon Hassel’s Maarifa Street and its subsequent remix by Honoré and Arve Henriksen (trumpet). 

Of the musicians at the cutting edge of world-Jazz fusion, Jon Hassel is one of the most significant, and yet also one of the most unsung. This is probably because he plays and records seldom enough, and when he does either he mines rich, increasingly narrow and austere veins of his own patented ‘fourth world’ sound. Tonight he brings his Maarifa Street band to a half-full Kings Place to perform music from his 2005 album of the same name. Whereas that recording featured Dhafer Youssef’s voice and oud, tonight’s septet retains only linchpin bassist Peter Freeman, and otherwise emphasises the Nordic roots of the Punkt festival by adding Jan Bang (live sampling), Eivind Aarset (guitar) and Helge Nordbakken (percussion).

The performance, which is scheduled to be followed by a remix in the smaller hall next door, begins austerely, with Freeman tapping solidly onto the strings of his bass to create a skeletal yet insistent ‘beat’, accompanied only by Hassel’s sparse, deliberate trumpet over rather gloomy electronic keyboard effects. The piece barely gathers momentum, but the music does expand incrementally, with Aarset’s so, so subtle use of the wah-wah pedal adding a distinct funk inflection. We soon find ourselves in the outer regions of sonic territories occupied since the early 90’s by some of Hassel’s more high-profile followers, such as Nils-Peter Molvaer. 

From the second of the sets lengthy pieces onwards, only Freeman’s bass could ever be described as ‘emphatic’, a supple but irregular underpinning that enables the others’ contributions to ebb in and out of the flow. At times there was barely any forward momentum at all, as Nordbakken created eddies of brush on metal percussion, into and around which Jan Bang wove his processed sounds. Appropriately water-themed visuals later gave way to fire, as Freedman and Nordbakken stoked the rhythm somewhat more insistently, and I drifted in and out of wakefulness. It’s seldom a compliment to the band to nod off during a performance, but on this occasion I would gladly have stayed in that state of reverie for the rest of the night.

After Maarifa Street’s richly-deserved mini-ovation, I roused myself for the short walk to Hall 2 for the ‘remix’ by Arve Henriksen (trumpet) and Erik Honoré (laptop), with most of the audience slowly trickling in behind me. Henriksen’s set was cut to a mere twenty minutes by the late-running of the earlier sets. As with DJ Strangefruit and BJ Cole’s remix of the earlier set by Sweet Billy Pilgrim (a thoroughly urbane rock band in the Blue Nile mould whose singer is sometimes, as is Hassel, associated with David Sylvian), Honoré elected to process only a small segment of Hassel’s music, very little of which was identifiable. In particular, I was hoping to hear some mediated interaction between Hassel and Henriksen, but this was not to be. No matter; given any sympathetic backing - and Honoré‘s work was impeccably subtle - Henriksen is reliably compelling, his tone gorgeous and richly, warmly poignant. Enhanced with colour-saturated lighting effects by Russell Mills this was a perfect coda to the evening.

blog comments powered by Disqus