Garbled Wrek?

... and so it was on Saturn's Day the 17th in the novem month of the year 2007 the mighty Jan Garbarek came to Manchester. An expectant public filed into the Bruntwood Theatre at the RNCM to honour the impressive line up consisting of Manu Katché on drums and Rainer Brüninghaus on piano/keyboards. Eberhard Weber was due to be in attendance on bass but this wasn't to be and the spot was filled by Yuri Daniel. Am I the only one who finds it annoying that jazz groups feel they can switch the line up unannounced. It's somewhat ironic that this happens routinely with jazz in particular, as the individual musicians are frequently considered to be as important as the group. I'm sure some people were there to see Eberhard Weber and would doubtless have been disappointed. I was keen to check out Manu Katché and would have been furious if he had been replaced. The irony is that this would utterly unacceptable in the pop and rock world. Imagine the uproar if Led Zeppelin were to show up without Jimmy Page and Robert Plant on the forthcoming tour.


Anyway, to the gig. Jan strode on looking every bit the handsome Nordic God that you might say he is, the rest of the band looking striking in black also. The gig began really well with the first track veritably blowing me away. It started with a moody synth wash and some speculative reverbed sax line fragments. The track then developed through a number of sections with some fantastic playing from drummer Manu Katché. He has a delicious lazy feel that's truly engaging and delightful to bask in. His playing is also precision perfect and never loses drive and force the way many laid back players do. The track was quite a long orchestrated piece all the while slowly building momentum and after a few shifts of gear finished on a knockout high. The mood and feel of the concert carried on more or less the same which worked for another couple of tracks but after this it did start to flag. Garbarek clearly has a different and individual approach but it can start to sound a bit samey after a while and the high register playing was getting quite wearing in the latter part of the set. Much of the piano playing was quite gorgeous with Brüninghaus having a distinct classical twist giving some of his improvised melodies a quaint innocent period charm. As with Garbarek, the sonorities of his playing are noticeably European with far less blues and bop than is usually heard in music going by the name 'jazz'. This is refreshing to hear but can wear thin if it's overdone as I think it was here.

On the whole this was a good gig and it appeared to connect with the audience judging by the atmosphere and applause. Perhaps just a little more variety in the harmony and compositional approach would have made it a much better one.