Hi everyone!
I just came back from Willisau where the New New York Art Quartet,
featuring John Zorn, was playing.
There were two short concerts in the afternoon (around 1 1/2 hour each).
The first concert was a Swiss band called Lucas Niggli's Big Zoom with
Lucas Niggli (drums, percussion), Nils Wogram (trombone), Philipp
Schaufelberger (guitar), and Claudio Puntin (clarinet, bass clarinet)
and Peter Herbert (double-bass) as special guests. It was trully
amazing!!! This band is really really impressing. All musicians were
great, especially Nils Wogram (who also played yesterday with Fred Frith
and Aki Takase): this young guy is really promissing. Although the two
guests were also amazing (at some point, Puntin reminded me of how Zorn
is playing), I would have liked to see just the trio: they really know
each other very well and the addition of two players to the band was
limiting their play. They wrote the whole music down and thus improvised
less. They didn't go as far as they would have if they were just three.
Too bad... But their performance was still great!
The NNYAQ (Milford Graves: drums and percussion - Roswell Rudd: trombone
- Reggie Workman: double-bass - John Zorn: alto sax) started very
slowly. They entered on stage one by one. First Workman playing a little
bass solo (this guy has extremely long fingers!), then Rudd and
Graves... Quite nice but nothing great... Then came Zorn and the whole
show started. For old guys, they really kicked ass! And you could really
see the chemistry and respect between the musicians: at some point, Zorn
was not playing and he was sitting and looking at the others with a
giant smile on his face. Later, Graves started to sing something like
"Mama John Zorn" (!) and went dancing and crawling at Zorn's feet. Then
he jumped out of the scene and started to dance among the audience. At
this point, Zorn stopped playing and took pictures of Graves from a
camera he took out of his pocket! Really funny to watch! Of course,
musically speaking, it was also great, lots of improvisation,
technically flawless, with some nice strange ideas (Workman blowing in a
big plastic tube stucked behind the strings of his bass, Rudd playing
with a towel on his trombone, etc.).
Both concerts were trully great and I'm really glad I was there (and I
managed to buy tons of CDs there :') ).
- TR
PS: sorry, this message might arrive twice. I sent it previously with
another e-mail address. Ups :')
