Alessandro Fongaro premieres works at North Sea Round Town fringe show

North Sea Round Town (NSRT) is the official fringe festival of North Sea Jazz with 350 shows around Rotterdam. With only a fleeting visit, I focussed on a couple of shows, in particular, Alessandro Forgano’s Dream Project, the largest of several performances he has composed as the Artist in Focus for 2024.

Beginning in Amsterdam at the architecturally striking Bimhuis, its reputation as a centre of artistic experimentation kept intact with the four acts chosen for the InJazz Festival showcase. An NSRT partner, InJazz offered Netherlands based artists who were jazz in spirit but with broader influences. Ponga playfully blended global jazz grooves with less successful free moments, the following lineup of Giuseppe Doronzo, Andy Moor and Frank Rosaly highlighting Ponga’s improvisational inexperience with a powerful combination of Moor’s dissonant electric guitar, Rosaly’s restless drums and Doronzo’s edgy baritone sax: his latter use of Iranian bagpipes and Hulusi Chinese flute highly evocative. In contrast, flautist Mark Lotz’s and his band’s Freshta performance was a celebratory swinging jazz tribute to the Afghan women’s rights activist Freshta Kohistani. NSRT’s Artist in Focus from 2023, Sanem Kalfa, closed the show with TELEVIZYON. Kalfa’s vocal acrobatics and her versatile band swirling enjoyably between electronic pop, jazz-inflected prog and unhinged library music. Imagine Laurie Anderson with improvisational swing.

With multiple gigs criss-crossing on the second evening in Rotterdam, I was only able to catch Wasted Generation’s post-bop ensemble before heading to the wonderful Cinerama venue for Alessandro Fongaro’s ‘Dream Project’. The ‘dream project’ is essentially a brand new production to be presented in an unlikely venue, the award-winning Italian bassist and composer choosing to respond to the themes of ‘Hunters in the Snow’, a famous Renaissance painting by Bruegel, the Dutch-Italian links, relevant to his artist’s life in Rotterdam and his Italian childhood. Fongaro also focussed on several influential photographers and filmmakers, the audiovisual aspects an obvious reference for a performance in a beautiful cinema.

Musically, Fongaro’s inspirations for the ten themes he has composed encompass the Italian singer-songwriter tradition, baroque, romantic and 20th Century classical music and improvised jazz but I could also hear suggestions of leftfield indie rock ideas amongst his ever-shifting palette.

The show starts with Fongaro on a wide stage, a huge cinema screen hosting a monochromatic photograph behind him, towering over the stage. From a lectern, vocalist Carmen van Muliers opens with a spoken word piece, “Tension creates movement” a growing refrain as Fongaro warms up his strings in anticipation. As the vocalist departs, the remaining seven of the octet, including members of the acclaimed North Sea String Quartet, enter. Sat down throughout the ninety minute plus performance, they weave a story that is more poetry than narrative, image changes on the screen not really a marker of direction, more an abstracted mood.

A powerful dynamic bassist in a trio, Fongaro unselfishly decentres himself on this slow burning epic as the musical movements come and go. From discordant strings interludes to woozy indie-jazz grooves, the score is tightly crafted, each theme swiftly moving to another. If there are moments of improvisational freedom, they appear from keyboardist Marta Warelis, psychedelic spaceship squeals panned through the cinema’s PA adding an Arkestra wildness that only happens occasionally before returning to the sedate pace that the entire piece wanders on. Expansive, melodically rich and harmonically complex, this is an ambitious project, which is musically successful if a tad lacking in performative dynamics. It feels like there is another level of development before the score reaches its maximum impact but for a first time performance, they should be very satisfied with what they have achieved.