Sven-Åke Johansson, Alex von Schlippenbach and Rodrigo Amado among Jazzfest Berlin’s 2022 highlights

There were no streaming hook-ups at this year’s Jazzfest Berlin, and a return to difficult audience choices due to an abundance of programming in separate locations. Let’s not forget, though, that 2021’s festival featured a large stack of fleshly performers, and a substantial audience, with its streaming elements already in the minority. Silent Green was an impressive transitional venue in ‘21, but now the refurbishment of the core Haus der Berliner Festspiele is completed, there’s a return to most sets happening around its various stage-sites. In ‘22, we also had a return to the satellite shows around the church (Kaiser-Wilhelm) and clubs (A-Trane, Quasimodo), making personal strategies even harder to form. All of these factors helped imbue Jazzfest with a strongly released energy, but most of these powers emanated from the artists themselves.

Your scribe’s first night at the Haus soon turned into a tour of the clubs, just a few streets north in the Charlottenberg part of town. The Hemphill Stringtet opened in the Haus, led by cellist Tomeka Reid, addressing the composed music of reedsman Julius Hemphill. This was a pleasing revelation, as his string quartet works combined ascetic sweeps with elements of old-time country and ragtime, manifested in avant-roots fashion.

Then, the alto saxophonist Mette Rasmussen played at a packed A-Trane (not such a great feat, as this is one of the world’s tiniest of famed jazz clubs), with an exciting trio line-up of bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Chris Corsano. This was not quite as thrilling as expected, principally due to Rasmussen’s inclusion of sonic voice snippets, designed to impart greater meaning, but actually derailing the momentum of her music.

Just a few streets away lies Quasimodo, which is also a rock/dance club, and quite a bit bigger. Here was one of the weekend’s absolute best gigs, with the Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado leading a group of great unusualness, not only in nationalities and generations, but also in the scenes they customarily inhabit. The combination of Alex von Schlippenbach (piano), Gerry Hemingway (drums) and bassist Håker Flaten (hot from the A-Trane) (pictured below) formulated a spellbinding rapport, with each player coaxing their compadres into the most motivated and intense form possible. The 84-year-old von Schlippenbach hung his head so low onto his keys that he looked like he was sleeping, but the motion of his hands belied this, as he led and responded with instant alacrity, rationing thoughts perfectly. Hemingway revealed an unfamiliar aspect, delivering his most Buddy Rich-ed performance ever, maintaining tonal sensitivity, but using the full kit to crash out insistent building climaxes, over and over again. Stunning, particularly when coupled with Håker Flaten’s manic drive. Amado had the luxury of flying free above all this intense surging, a roughened edge to his coiling blasts.

The festival’s second night peaked with Playing The Haus, a multi-performer sequence utilising three stage-spaces around the venue, with nine sets criss-crossing over three hours. Kassenhalle turned out to be the most inspiring location, as your scribe uncovered the Stockholm trio of Lisa Ullén (piano), Elsa Bergman (bass) and Anna Lund (drums). Nearly avoided as ‘yet another piano trio’, this group turned out to be the most crucial discovery of the weekend, few folks in the audience having witnessed them previously. The trio maintained a taut improvisatory circularity throughout, continually winding up to fresh peaks, then subsuming into temporary introversion. This winding progress was magnificently sustained.

The next set in Kassenhalle came from Vienna, with the Synesthetic 4, a band that amalgamates nervy rock guitars and beats with Balkan-styled clarinet contortions. They also had real-time paintings and drawings from Henning Bolte, who was prodded into ultra-productive speed-creation by the high speed of the Synesthetic repertoire. Bolte’s papyrus production line covered the floor, as his fleeting images were revealed on the stage’s video screen.

The Umpire Jumble stage introduced the Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson’s trio with saxophonist Bertrand Denzler and bassist Joel Grip, playing to a standing crowd in what’s effectively the rear of the main stage. In this group, Johansson revealed a grounding in traditional jazz, but at the start of the evening he’d conducted his ‘Overture For 15 Fire Extinguishers’, making quite a frothy mess. Fortunately, the Haus stage is a revolving model.

Johansson was wisely given spotlight status across the weekend. We haven’t had so many chances to catch him play. Although Swedish, the sticksman has been living in Berlin for most of his life, and is now almost 80 years old, adopting an old school Dadaist poise, with a subtle sense of experimentalist irony. There was a screening of Antoine Prum’s brilliant and witty documentary Blue For A Moment, which seems to accurately capture Johansson’s existence as a performance art being.

The drummer and conceptualist delivered his best performance on the closing afternoon, with Stumps, a quintet dedicated to the dismantling then repositioning of melodic and rhythmic fragments, acting as a real-time acoustic sampling brain. Could bassist Joel Grip be helping to initiate a new movement? He’s also a member of the similarly zoom-in-and-repeat micro-analysts [Ahmed], led by Pat Thomas. Stumps was completed by Axel Dörner (slide trumpet), Pierre Borel (alto saxophone) and Simon Sieger (piano), the latter making a strong mark with his minnowing orientalist pools. Repeats made a snail development, quite melodic in content, but with the audience subject to ongoing pauses, a gradual populating of the canvas. Dörner soloed in flowing fashion, continuing across the islands provided by his partners, piano chiming, bass hovering, Johansson rolling constantly. The band relaxed while the trumpet stung, with buzz-skitter brushwork on the skins, and an almost trad piano solo. Borel tooted his horn like a tin whistle, at his highest range, with isolated repeats growing into a complex seal pup distress. The roots of this approach might burrow back as far as Ornette’s Golden Circle trio in 1965. When solos arrived, and got active, the band tended to become busier too, circling with three-note phrases, followed by a piano solo with an almost Japanese tonality, smudged with suggestions of the Arabic world.

Jazzfest Berlin had almost too much sensory input on offer, which is far preferable to insufficient reserves of creativity. Many themes criss-crossed the weekend, including Eastern European folk tradition explorations, the riches of Chicago, the actual physical presence of South Africans, a healthy shot of Scandinavia, and that complete Johansson immersion. Artistic director Nadin Deventer has had her contract extended, so who knows where she’ll whisk us next year..!