NovaraJazz brings together great music, good wine and fantastic venues

Walking through ancient Novara, the second largest city in Piedmont, located just 50 kilometres west of Milan, is like walking through history. The Ligurians founded this beautiful pre-Roman city with its current population of over 100,000. And much of Novara's history is still well preserved. In this respect, NovaraJazz is still a very young festival, at just 21 years old. But it is just as exciting as the city itself.

One reason for this is the venues. The main venue, the Broletto in the heart of the old town, is a medieval architectural complex of four historic buildings with a central courtyard. Perfect for open-air concerts. Or the old, pretty church of San Nazzarro Alla Costa, a leisurely stroll from the city centre. Having the Bahraini-British trumpeter and flugelhorn player Yazz Ahmed perform there in a duo with the British vibraphonist and marimba player Ralph Wyld was a good decision on the part of the festival. The audience sat in the church and listened to the transparent, warm and relaxed sound colours of the vibraphone and marimba, over which Ahmed laid floating, soft lines. Repetitive patterns, sampled sounds and subtle electronics interspersed throughout create enraptured worlds of sound that captivate the listener more and more every minute.

Just two hours earlier, the duo of guitarist and oud player Gordon Grdina and drummer Christian Lillinger (pictured below) had performed in the city - what a contrast. The Canadian and the German make music between structure and spontaneity, with the drummer's nimble, polyrhythmic adventures and the guitarist's sometimes loud, rocking sound ideas as a counterpart. This duo shares a musical language with complex sound patterns that simply wipes away conventional expectations with energy. A real live experience!      

Closely linked to NovaraJazz is the Novara-based production centre ‘WeStart’, which initiates and/or supports innovative projects with musicians from the Italian jazz and jazz-related scene. Such as the Dialect Quintet led by Alexander Hawkins, which celebrated its premiere at this year's NovaraJazz, albeit not an entirely happy one. The British pianist met four young Italian musicians for the first time and played an exciting programme between improvised and composed music. However, due to technical issues, not everything went as planned on stage. After the festival performance, however, they went straight to the recording studio in Turin to record together, hopefully with a more satisfying result. Programmes such as ‘Um/Welt’ by bassist Marco Centasso or ‘Invisible Partners’ by Ferdinando Romano, who also plays bass, are also supported and promoted by the ‘WeStart’ team around Enrico Bettinello and show in Novara that young Italian jazz has interesting musicians and artists to offer.

The three from the trio The Elephant are already one step ahead. Gabriele Mitelli (trumpet, voice and electronics), Pasquale Mirra (vibraphone, voice and electronics) and Cristiano Calcagnile (percussion and voice) deliver a dense, gripping, multi-layered, wonderfully grooving, hour-long concert full of interlocking sound ideas on the large stage at the Broletto. Catchy structures combined with sound experiments always work coherently and convincingly with this band.

Some of the solo concerts at the festival were also exciting. In the courtyard of an old palace, US pianist Myra Melford combined power and fire with technical brilliance, free improvisation with beautiful melody lines. The Portuguese Rodrigo Amado (pictured below) delights in the beautiful Arengo Hall of the Broletto solo on the tenor saxophone with classic jazz themes by jazz masters such as Sonny Rollins, which he breaks up, deconstructs, varies in tempo, intonation or dynamics and contrasts with his understanding and DNA as an ingenious improviser. Captivating, intense, magical.

This can also be said of François Houle's performance with his project inspired by the British author Kassia St. Clair's book ‘The Secret Lives Of Colour’ about the cultural and social history of colour. The Canadian clarinettist and his fantastic quintet, featuring top international improvisers Myra Melford, Gordon Grdina, Joëlle Léandre and Gerry Hemingway, translate the spectrum of colours and their historical connections to music into abstract sound images in yet another beautiful location, the garden of the vicarage of the city's cathedral. Sometimes only reduced in small duo formations, then again in joint, vibrating outbursts. A demanding, at times rousing final chord of a pleasant festival that also knew how to appeal to the audience's senses in other ways with wine tastings after some of the concerts, which were accompanied by tasty risottos typical of the region.