Jaimie Branch gets Enjoy Jazz jumping

The marathon Enjoy Jazz festival in Germany certainly peaked during its closing week, with a stirring run of visiting alternative Americans from the New York-Chicago-East Coast nexus. On consecutive nights, we were excited by Irreversible Entanglements, Jaimie Branch and a new trio involving Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith. If Makaya McCraven hadn’t pulled out, the sequence would have been even more impressive.

Enjoy Jazz sprawls over two months, with at least one show each evening, split between Heidelberg, Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. This particular Stateside invasion took place in the latter Rhine-side city, at Das Haus, one of the festival’s key venues. There’s been a long time passing since catching the Irreversible Entanglements five-piece, and their set has now evolved into what sounds like two compositions, of Sun Ra durations. Orator Moor Mother is given ample time to brew up an intense language escalation, still repetitive, still powerful, although increasingly fine-sculpted, navigating the freeform ocean underneath. Trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and alto saxophonist Keir Neuringer are now spending equal amounts of time coaxing cosmic extrapolations out of their small synth-key set-ups, as if their horns have reached such a pitch of ecstasy that they’re only able to ascend ever-higher via burbling electronic pathways. Navarro infiltrated a rumbling field of synth-darkness, as Neuringer busied himself on roiling Korg. When the horns returned, they were instilled with a renewed potency. Bassman Luke Stewart spent much of the set working out variations on one of the most compulsively pummelling riffs of recent times, direct but gradually evolving. Moor Mother took the unusual step of introducing the band over what seemed like a 20-minute period, with extended musical continuations between each announcement. Then the hornmen took up cowbell and congas, adding further ritual abandonment, with this set poised at an ending-pitch for around half of its duration, continually climaxing, endlessly tense.

Trumpeter Jaimie Branch is still playing the same tunes as in pre-lockdown times, but she always makes them sound fresher, foraging for strange aspects and benefiting from the stability of her co-players. Her sets usually get better each time, as she pushes herself and her cohorts harder. Branch has become a formidable vocalist, with a lightning-limned presence. She fully embraces the stage-space, finding new modes of physical communication. She wore a red coat with what looked like an apiary gauze-helmet, or merely a supermarket vegetable bag, later revealed as a kind of transparent hoodie. Branch has different effects on her two microphones, one of them making her trumpet resonate with a deep bass aftertaste. She threw her coat at cellist Lester St. Lewis, and he cast it back, as Chad Taylor took a short but torrid drum solo, the steppin’ propulsion returning. Branch held her pinging watch alarm up to the microphones, kicked her floor tambourine, and the band collectively developed a dronescape. In between, she provided multiple cutting horn solos, aloft and spurting.

Craig Taborn (keys), Tomeka Reid (cello) and Ches Smith (percussion) began working as a trio in 2017, but the configuration still seems new, interrupted by the pandemic, and as-yet unrecorded. Taborn moved between full piano articulacy and tiny electronic keys, while Smith circulated around an impressive spread of drumkit, vibraphone and tubular bells. Reid, in the middle, acted as more of a grounding element, intently shaping figures of repeat or melancholy solo elaboration. Taborn started to sound like George Shearing at one point, Smith’s brushes getting busy, Reid walking out a bassline. The variations of instrumental palettes and improvisatory moods ensured that the trio maintained a constant mobility of surprise. A freedom tussle ensued, a volatile slowcoach groove emerging and staying the course, becoming a forceful pulse. It turned out that they were mostly improvising, even though much of the set sounded pre-composed. This is often the way, nowadays, or alternatively, compositions that sound like improvisations. It’s not as obvious as it used to be...!

For a few days, Das Haus became the leading festival venue, and the US scene dominated, but next, the move would be made to Mannheim’s old fire station, with sets coming from Vijay Iyer, Archie Shepp and Jason Moran, and then Heidelberg, with our own Portico Quartet, and a drone double bill with Ana Fosca and Nina De Heney. This is just a hint of the far-reaching contrasts made during the Enjoy Jazz festival…