On the second day of Rewire, we hone in on performing artists who embrace improvisation and experimentation to push their classical and modern jazz training to the limits. From Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements’ politically-charged, free-jazz freak-outs to The Thing’s fusion of gritty, improvised jazz with avant-rock, noise and punk, the Rewire Saturday showcases a vast spectrum of forward-thinking experiments in contemporary jazz and improvised sound.
Festival (€75) and Day (€33.50) passes are available now at Tickets.
With Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother at the helm, Philadelphia outfit Irreversible Entanglements channel their deep study of free-jazz improvisation into a powerful brand of protest music you are unlikely to hear anywhere else. Accompanied by Ayewa’s searing narrations of Black trauma, survival and power, their live performances are a vigorous and politically-charged fusion of freak-out jazz and cosmic beat poetry that honours as much as it defies tradition.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/eNakSIsksZc
The legendary trio of Scandinavian free jazz heavyweights Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love, The Thing started out as a jazz cover band, reinterpreting the likes of PJ Harvey and Iggy Pop, jazz avant-gardists Don Cherry and Albert Ayler, and even Lightning Bolt. In the two decades since, they’ve established themselves as one of the most progressive acts working in free jazz today, fusing elements of avant-rock, noise and punk into vigorous maelstrom of gritty and powerful improvised jazz.
Released to widespread acclaim in November, James Holden’s latest album, The Animal Spirits, saw the British-born artist and self-described ‘techno-shaman’ reborn as a live musician and jazz band leader. Presenting the album live at Rewire 2018, with RocketNumberNine’s Tom Page on drums and Etienne Jaumet on saxophone, The Animal Spirits is an expansive and psychedelic journey through the free-flowing jazz of greats like Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders, traditional Gnawa rhythms and James Holden’s own modular synthesizer.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/uQsHZ0eyPl8
New York avant-gardists Zs find their roots in free jazz experimentation. Dispensing endless streams of hypnotic saxophone, rhythmic percussion and minimalist drone, the trio follow up last year’s spell-binding Rewire performance by bringing along a special guest in fellow New Yorker Arto Lindsay. Renowned for his unique fusion of abstract noise and the grooves of Brazilian genres like tropicalia and Bossa nova, Arto Lindsay’s sees his sultry grooves and glitchy jazz-pop pushed into dizzying new realms.
Laurence Pike has been operating at the cutting edge of the electronic and jazz music worlds for the better part of two decades. A prolific drummer, percussionist and composer as part of forward-thinking bands like PVT, Triosk and Szun Waves, his recent solo debut, Distant Early Warning, was recorded with little more than a drum kit and sampler and sees the Australian musician embark on a deeply personal sonic journey through his own jazz history and the electronic experimentation of his bands.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/7DZ61nrVUWc
You’ll also find ample doses of jazz experimentation on our other festival days. On Friday, Chicago outfit Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society present their latest album ‘Simultonality’, an expressive work in which traditional musics, American minimalism and improvised jazz converge around a three-stringed Moroccan lute called the guimbri, while German percussionist and electroacoustic composer Sven Kacirek channels his jazz drummer training into a mesmerizing patchwork of marimba, xylophone and piano.
On Sunday, local jazz hero Jasper Stadhouders joins his PolyBand for a transcendental journey through hypnotic polyrhythmic cycles, while South Korean composer and piri master Park Jiha dispenses mesmerizing fusion of traditional Korean music with saxophone, bass clarinet, vibraphone and percussion, and London duo Rupert Clervaux & Ben Vince lead you through their improvised world of energising looped saxophone grooves and intricate textures of rhythmic percussion.
Rewire 2018 spreads out across key cultural venues in The Hague’s city centre from 6-8 April. See the full programme atArtists.