A Night In Anzio: Igor Butman, Camille Thurman, Sylwester Ostrowski, Freddie Hendrix & Endea Owens fly high in Italy

As corporeal gigs quickly make their return, schedules filling up with a pouncing vigour that’s been building since March 2020, the streaming experience is seemingly here to stay, as a complement rather than a replacement. Venues all around the globe have decided that having learnt how to grapple with the technology, and having connected with fans from all geographical points, it makes sense to continue, for artistic, monetary and publicity reasons.

There are also the rogue individualists who create events in their head, subsequently ensuring that they’re made real. The Polish tenor saxophonist Sylwester Ostrowski is one of those artists (and festival organisers) who ambitiously brings players together, collaborating with like-minded folks in the Netherlands, Russia and the USA. Promoting A Night In Anzio involved an intersection of artists in that coastal resort, just south of Rome, filmed live and then streamed a week later via the Stateside website Jazz Corner.

Fellow tenormen Igor Butman and Alexander Beets also run their own clubs and festivals in Russia and the Netherlands. Singer and tenor saxophonist Camille Thurman (pictured top) was fresh from her John Coltrane project at Lincoln Center, with Wynton Marsalis and company, offering a new arrangement of A Love Supreme. Trumpeter Freddie Hendrix is a flashing bolt on the NYC club scene and bassist Endea Owens is a rising star from Detroit. The band also featured the young Polish guitarist Jakub Miseracki, who is set to travel far in coming years. As if enough countries weren’t already involved, pianist Albert Bover represented Spain, and Jacksonville drummer Owen Hart Jr. perched between US and Dutch allegiances. There was even a local guitarist from Anzio itself, Francesco Bruno, guesting on a couple of numbers.

The gig was shot at L’Abbraccio Music Theatre & Bio Food, which boasts a mini-amphitheatre, stone-stepping down to the beach. Like an ambient field recording, the performance was backgrounded by the stirring sound of waves crashing and spume hissing. The pinkish cloud sunset had just begun, over the endless sea backdrop. In a Fitzcarraldo feat of non-compromise, the PA, lights and film crew had made the road trip from Poland, which was very worthwhile given the high audio quality of the show. This was actually much easier than starting from technical scratch in Rome. Talking about high surveillance, one of the cameras was a tiny, zipping drone...

One of the advantages of being at a gig in the flesh involves witnessing unpredictable chaos. The heat had been high, with seemingly no rain for weeks, and then a micro-storm hit the beach, with perhaps no more than three minutes of a deluge that succeeded in soaking the entire amphitheatre. The band were three numbers into their set. Following a pause for sunbeams and mopping, both they and the audience returned in a strangely renewed state, as if the downpour had provided a special frisson of energy, as if everyone hasn’t been accustomed to dealing with a greater adversity during the last year or more.

The repertoire involved fairly mainline jazz, extending out from Dexter Gordon and Stanley Turrentine, to John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, with original numbers also included. This was no excuse for coasting through familiarity, as the line-up were universally intent on filling each tune with individualist embellishments, almost hinting at free jazz, but within a melodic context. Drum patterns skittered with complexity, horn solos ducked and careened around the melodies, guitar rubbed with hints of a fried rock friction, piano was flecked with a hint of Cecil Taylor, and Thurman scatted lines we hadn’t heard before, making fresh discoveries during ‘My Shining Hour’. It was a band of equal levels, not competing with each other, but building up a detailed working relationship of dynamism and unpredictability. Well, the spirit of competition did burn during Dexter’s ‘Cheese Cake’, where every tenor jostled against its neighbour in a row (or a row?) of simmering ‘discussion’. Ostrowski almost explored the bass clarinet realms with his solo. Butman took to the heights of the tenor range, often like an old r’n’b honker or squealer, targeting with soulful precision. Owens stoked with forcefulness and intricacy, favouring a tough, grainy fullness rather than any kind of amorphous low presence. There have been many gigs and festivals happening in the flesh, even during the pandemic, but this one gave a primordial flashback rush similar to that felt by acolytes of electronic dance music, but transposed to a jazz club version, prompting the gut-level sense-memory of an evening in a cramped basement, although radically transported to a Roman beach..!

A Night In Anzio streams on 14 July here online, remaining freely available online after the event...