Jazz breaking news: TrioVD Rock Jazz Em Agosto

For the first time it tested out part of its programme in a venue downtown. The ‘off-Broadway’ Teatro de Bairro is located in a part of the city that has a real edge to it (something partly down to economics), so it was an ideal backdrop for the quirkily jagged delights of Leeds’ TrioVD and the Hanns Eisler-dedicated, raw avant-punk jazz cabaret of mixed-European trio Das Kapital. TrioVD (pictured, above left) has become more of an improvising unit over time but there’s always been an intense physicality to their performances. They composed on stage in real time, spitting out their influences along the way (turntablism, Stockhausen, Beefheart, Zorn, David Lynch and more) without ever taking themselves too seriously. The trio Das Kapital similarly grabbed the moment and had a lot of fun doing it. They’re a tribute group to the German composer and Bertolt Brecht-associate Hanns Eisler. Among the songs the fiery Danish guitarist Hasse Poulsen introduced was, “the national anthem of a country that no longer exists” (remember GDR?) and the explosive drumming of Edward Pérraud especially fired up a very vocal younger audience.

The Open Air Amphitheatre, the festival’s main stage located in the floodlit gardens of the HQ of the festival’s key funders, The Gulbenkian Foundation, looks something like a theatre set for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It played host to the pianist Matthew Shipp’s acoustic trio that twisted jazz, electronica and other idiomatic familiarities into new shapes with a raw, rhythmic propulsion. A duo set by pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Gerry Hemingway, both ex-members of Anthony Braxton’s ‘classic’ 1980s Quartet, seesawed between a thumping intensity and enigmatic meditation, the tremolo-propelled beauty of their version of a lesser-known Coltrane ballad, ‘After the Rain’, and the dazzling impressionism when Hemingway’s vibes interlocked with Crispell’s piano were personal highlights. The Norwegian, now US-based, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s Chicago Sextet bound together hypnotic post-rock loops, collective ensemble freakouts and grungy Zeppelin-ish riffs to put the seal on a few days of jazz that was as intensely visceral as it was entertaining.

– Selwyn Harris