Almost Too Much: The 43rd Konfrontationen Festival for Free and Improvised Music

By Andrew Choate

I’ve written about the Nickelsdorf Konfrontationen for the last ten years in a row (including 2005 and 2007) and the temporal format I’ve come to prefer requires me to write about the previous year’s festival a just before the next incarnation. The primary reason for this choice is not procrastination, but because I want to establish for myself and my readers what I consider to be lasting impressions. Living within a culture that hyper-regurgitates itself, a culture that attempts to acknowledge and be done with every cultural manifestation as quickly as possible, I’ve decided that it’s a necessity to take some things a little bit more seriously, and to give them time to live and be considered. The artists that perform at the Konfrontationen deserve that respect , and every set deserves to be described, rather than higgledy-piggledy highlights and lowlights. That would be too easy, and there is nothing easy about a life making or promoting this music. 

Dennis Warren’s FMRJE photo by Lauren Spiro

Dennis Warren’s FMRJE ––Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Ensemble featuring Annabelle Plum: extended voice; Jamal Moore: reeds; Vance Provey: trumpet; Michael Shea: keyboard; Tor Snyder: electric guitar; Mowgli Giannitti: electric bass; Dennis Warren :: drums, percussion––set the tone for friends and fans reuniting with a boisterous set. (A vividly entertaining video of the full performance is online, with personality-driven editing on full display.) This was modern free jazz from a student of Milford Graves, with added inflections of 8-bit samples triggered by drumsticks. I swear I heard the sound of coins being collected by Mario in Super Mario Bros. as a recurrent motif––slightly puzzling but it certainly added a different kind of texture. In fact Warren’s quizzical digital addition to his percussive arsenal continually kept my attention, especially when Moore added an array of cowbells to the swirl. Plum veered on storytelling with her vocals, repeating lines with little twists while the centrifugal thrust of cheesy, spacey electronics whirred throughout the open-air venue.

The bass drum was also sent through effects at times, resulting in a fascinatingly slowed down thud. They veered toward something almost funky by the end, with wild amplitudes of twang from Snyder’s guitar fizzling like an electric charge bouncing around a room, hitting a wall and taking new angles. Proper chaos maintained and emboldened, controlled and unleashed to start the festival. 

dieb13 Trio - photo by Lauren Spiro

 

The second set was a premiere by the trio of Li-Chin Li (sheng), Gerald Preinfalk (reeds) and dieb13 (triple turntable). Preinfalk started on soprano saxophone and they each explored various kinds of harmonic feedback and overtones while schnitzels were pounded in the festival kitchen. When Preinfalk switched to bass clarinet, he blew harder and dieb13 constructed fractals out of organ sounds. Li’s sheng emitted whistles like a harmonica meeting an accordion, a glimmering tremble of a sound. Sheng tones glimmer-bombed Preinfalk’s increasingly gruff mumblings through his reeds until Li burst out with three bonks of breath, causing dieb13 to pound the tables that his turntables rested on, radically increasing the tension. Rather than take the obvious path of heightening the volume and embracing an eruption, somehow the three musicians held onto the tension by backing away from amplitude and gripping the raw melodic subtleties that were within the original outburst. Beef jerky reconstituted by Campari.

A venerable quartet followed featuring three legendary stalwarts of the creative music community (Joëlle Léandre: double bass, vocals; Agustí Fernández: piano; Zlatko Kaučič: drums, percussion) plus Mette Rasmussen (alto saxophone), a younger musician who has been making all the beautiful decisions during this early phase of her career. Fernández and Kaučič pounced in together right away with a quick duo; they were followed shortly thereafter by a perfectly timed entrance from Rasmussen that changed the direction and syncopation with the gentlest of harmonies. Léandre was soon into the dish and this band simply played sympathetically and engagingly for their full hour. Rasmussen’s wooden flute particularly entranced me, especially in combination with Kaučič’s native Slovenian hand percussion. Chants and vocal exclamations from both Léandre and Rasmussen increased the sense of both play and ritual, thrilling my heart. After the concert my friend Eddie summed it up best when said that the concert felt like having a happy childhood.

The first day’s finale was another quartet (Liz Allbee: trumpet; John Butcher: reeds; Ignaz Schick: turntables, sampler, live sampling; Marta Zapparoli: electronics), though this one was much more subdued and textural rather than visceral and human. Albee played her trumpet through a variety of other mouthpieces throughout this set, most notably involving oboe reeds to generate a buzzy fly alongside Zapparoli’s celestial firestorm flares and cricket static from Schick. Butcher on tenor saxophone sounded like a pig taking a breath, in a good way, like a city slicker charmed by the country once again.

The music felt like it was a message from space, beamed into our orbit by an accidental howl of angles. Overall, the set went from minimal to bare. I liked what they were trying to do, I’m just not sure they did it – though I have a feeling the recording could be taut with actualized anticipation.  

Day two began in the afternoon in the Protestant church next door to the Jazzgalerie, with the audience sitting in the church’s infamously uncomfortable 90º wooden pews waiting for Phantom Power, the duo of Kai Fagaschinski on clarinet and Michael Vorfeld on what I’ll call a stringed percussion assemblage. They played exact sounds: sounds that can only be created when the head is held at a certain angle against the clarinet, or the body is contorted and tremoring with a loose frond of steel wool over a cymbal. When audience members arrive late and trudge up the stairs in the back, the building shakes like a bulldozer is active outside and the old wood creaks profoundly and deeply.

vorfeld post show by Ang Wilson

A slightly Polynesian melody began drifting from Fagaschinki’s clarinet, but someone’s cell phone beeped so they halted that number. Trembling kebab skewers wielded by Vorfeld against a cymbal were imbued with such a specific rhythmic shake that even when he wasn’t touching the cymbal, he kept the skewers trembling, firmly installing the rhythm in his body and refusing to let it disappear. Fagaschinski has been one of my favorite musicians for a decade, and it’s because every time he plays a note he does it with both intention and, to my ears, true affection for the existence of sound. In a space like this, with absolutely no reverb, that tone was on exquisite display, and in tandem with Vorfeld’s precision created music of almost unbearably ethereal delicacy balanced by completely mortal passions. The church bell struck six and the concert ended: paradoxically pragmatically.

In Situ Ensemble (Liz Allbee: trumpet; Rhodri Davies: harp, electronic harp; Christian Kobi: reeds; Enrico Malatesta: percussion; Magda Mayas: piano; Christian Müller: electronics) welcomed us back into the Jazzgalerie for the evening’s transitional set between light and night. Thoroughly pleasant tinynesses followed, like someone trying to whisper in your ear but they can’t stop laughing, so you only hear little bursts of loveliness. Wind blew through the outdoor space, adding natural gushing whooshes to the refined elegance elongated for our listening pleasure. The smoothness of the stratum contributed by each member of the ensemble added up to a perfectly layered prism. The junk rumble of Malatesta’s percussion fit into the backward electronic spins of Müller fit into the softness of Mayas’ inside-piano harmonics fit onto the pretty pad-dancing of Kobi’s soprano saxophone fit into the faux-folk dawdle of Davies electronic harp fit into the breath worship of Allbee’s modified trumpet.

Biliana Voutchkova’s flight was cancelled so a trio became a duo of Isidora Edwards (cello) and Vinicius Cajado (acoustic bass). This casual improvisational meeting of two of Voutchkova’s cohorts established that each musician embodies a complete philosophical presence in regards to their instrument. Edwards teased psychedelic colorations and electronic-sounding awes out of her borrowed cello when Cajado turned his bass to the side and used mallets to wriggle the length of the wood. A wonderful preview of what could come during the next day’s rescheduled trio set.

The evening closed with a real highlight from four musicians central to the scene in Vienna, especially the Monday night series at Celeste – Susanna Gartmayer: bass clarinet; Thomas Berghammer: trumpet; Martin Siewert: electronics, electric guitar; Didi Kern: drums, percussion. Instant good times. Kern served up a rambunctiously funky beat and Berghammer and Gartmeyer floated chilled, soul-stirring motifs on top. I think I even heard the notes from Spandau Ballet’s “True” dance out of Berghammer’s trumpet. This was fun: improv, 80s pop, funk, ambient electro-acousticisms, free jazz – somehow it was everything just right; like when a bunch of junk goes into a trash compactor and emerges as a perfect multi-colored cube, but in this case what went in was good and came out even better!

Siewert got into some gorgeous lapsteel tonalities during their second piece, matching Gartmeyer’s quavering bass clarinet nuances with aplomb. It felt like they were having a great time onstage because they went in so many directions, often simultaneously, and it worked. Improvisations that didn’t stick to one style of improvisation, but opened the whole musical bag. I left tangled by charm.

Sunday began with the delayed meeting of Biliana Voutchkova (violin), Isidora Edwards (cello) and Vinicius Cajado (acoustic bass). A nice breeze flowed around the stage and seemed to inform the music with breezeyness, paradoxically belying the intense concentration of the performers. Tiny sounds, long sounds, tappy sounds – the full gamut was utilized. This was one of those sets where you could feel in your bones how much effort the musicians were exerting to make the music work and grow – not out of difficult desperation, but through tender consideration. An improvised string trio can easily be a thin wash of agreement and counterpoint, but each personality shined brightly as the music grew richer and richer on a remarkably consistent trajectory. I had a full body experience of total listening. The progressive carving out of space for each player and each string to not only make beautiful contributions but to sync in such a way as to transcend all sense of individuality was sublime. A truly rousing accomplishment of embodied immateriality. 

Bennink by Tudor the Bestie

 

Back to the regularly scheduled program with the classic duo of Han Bennink (drums and percussion) and Terrie Ex (electric guitar). ‘Precipice’ was the keyword for this set, as the duo gleefully immersed themselves in play along the threshold of collapse. Having recently celebrated his 80th birthday, Bennink did multiple things that reminded me how much I love his music. foremost is his hyper-decisiveness: when an improvisation has run out of ideas, there’s no sugarcoating flimflam trying to tease out another possibility; he simply stops playing and announces “Terrie Ex!” to start a refresh. No idle mingling in hesitation here. I also appreciate his use of the ‘safe’ gesture over his drum set to indicate a clearing away of all that has just happened so he can begin something else. Terrie made use of multiple implements to attack his 5-string guitar, the most crowd-pleasing being the stage pillar. When he scratched the guitar with his finger, it sounded like coyote laughter. The highlight for me was Bennink singing a song by Misha Mengelberg while tapping a tom, intimating the simultaneous need to both remember and move.

The clear centerpiece of my memories from this incarnation of the festival was Tristan Honsinger’s final performance, as he passed less than two weeks after this show. He was joined by longtime collaborators Tobias Delius (reeds), Chino Shuichi (piano), Antonio Borghini (acoustic bass), Steve Heather (drums) and new-to-me performer

Marietheres Finkeldei. They began with a sultry jazz lurch as Finkeldei gracefully tossed slips of paper into the air. They flipped and fluttered in the air as paper will. As the music continued dancing and the paper drifted it started to feel increasingly simple and increasingly poignant: vintage Honsinger.

Alas, one glaring uninvited addition was sitting in the center of the stage, playing with the paper like a baby: Hans Falb. As an increasing variety of sizes of paper emerged––from cut strips to crumpled sheets––Falb inserted himself into the performance, now wiping the paper on the drums or flapping it around like a bird in search of flight. Finkeldei improvised around Falb admirably, even making him a meter-long paper bib to wear at one point. When she popped a balloon, Falb pretended to die. What had been mildly distracting though relatively innocuous theatrical behavior on his part changed when he belted out “Too much paper and not enough music. Come on, let’s play!”, making what was beautiful now awkward. Because the band had actually been making great musicfull of tonal shifts, rhythmic oddities and appealing melodies. Finkeldei whistled, the music stopped, and luckily a funky little ditty squeaked up from the ashes. “I’m madness,” Hans insightfully remarked. Then, at Honsinger’s feet, “You’re a philosopher,” to which the cellist responded “I’m just here.” The music jazzed up and improv-ed down until Honsinger followed up with “On the brink of madness,” instigating Kai Fagaschinski to call out an immediate, accurate response from the audience “Way beyond!”

A balloon blown up to the brink and released travels on a beautifully uncontrollable and quick path. Like life. Tristan Honsinger’s music embodied playfulness that cuts to the quick, and this set was no different. The history of creative music can’t be written without his spirit informing its path. 

Tony Buck Band by Tudor the Bestie

 

The final set of the festival featured Mazen Kerbaj (extended trumpet), Rabih Beaini (electronics, cdj), Andy Ex (guitar), Frank Gratkowski (reeds), Michael Vorfeld (light bulbs, electric switching devices) and Tony Buck (drums). Each musician entered the stage one by one, starting with Vorfeld to his table full of lightbulbs, engaging the click of fuses. A subtle start that forebode immensities, in the same way that a good horror movie opens with all-too-calm normalcy: the suspense was conspicuous. By the time the whole band was onstage, the music sounded like wolves howling during an avalanche: good times! No real interactions took place; this wasn’t that kind of set. It was more a question of how to make a dense musical wall that was still wriggling in multiple directions. It worked. I listened with the pleasure of devastation to the whole ensemble and I listened with inquisitive bliss to the individual contributions teased out by each musician. Near the end, Vorfeld stood up on the table covered with lightbulbs turning on and off in multiple colors electrical fizzlings and took off his pants, revealing the choice outfit of a black body-suit. Precariously dancing on a table full of fragile, exposed glass, he then began twirling one lightbulb on a cable, smiling with a wild glow in his eyes. The end of the cable fell back behind him, looking like a tail, while the bulbous light on the end implied a not-unfunny reference to male genitalia. The scene was quite devilish, and the music was certainly flaring.

For those of us that have fallen in love with this festival, the word ‘Nickelsdorf’ denotes less a place than a ritual: Nickelsdorf is a verb, a noun, an adjective, an event and most certainly an interjection. It’s a thrill to love and to be able to show love, and there’s always wildness in love. The 44th Konfrontationen at the Jazzgalerie in Nickelsdorf begins July 26, 2024. 

Andrew Choate curates The Unwrinkled Ear concert series in Los Angeles. He recorded a radio show in tribute to Tristan Honsinger in August of 2023.