David Murray, the Necks and Nordic delights at Helsinki’s We Jazz Festival

David Murray would top the bill at many boutique festivals, but Helsinki’s We Jazz event aims for egalitarianism. All artists at this weeklong event, held at smallish venues around the capital, are listed alphabetically in the same font, without nationality or other categorisation. Still, it was clear when tenor saxophonist Murray took the stage that this was a giant among a line-up of mainly emerging European talents.

The vigorous 69-year-old played the main stage at an old tram depot on the festival’s final Saturday-night marathon, which featured more than a dozen acts. After a gig with his own quartet at another Finnish festival a month earlier, he returned with a Norwegian rhythm section: drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, who’ve backed the likes of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

Murray immediately showed there’s no moss on this stone with his full-blast opening tune, ‘Splash’, harkening back to his frenetic free playing in the 1970s. Like a man noisily rummaging through a whole house from cellar to attic, he furiously exploited every register of his horn, sometimes kicking a leg out as emphasis.

With over half a century of gig experience, Murray at first kept a wary eye on several loud, drunk guys in front of the stage who pumped their fists and bellowed during Nilssen-Love’s drum solos.

They, like everyone else, fell silent and spellbound though, when Murray switched into tender ballad gear for Carole King’s ‘Natural Woman’, backed simply by Håker Flaten’s double bass. Time stood still as Murray reached back to blues, gospel and bop for a soul-searching solo.

Murray switched to bass clarinet for ‘Nazaré Donato’ and ‘Seriana Promethea’, title track of his 2022 album with Hamid Drake and Brad Jones. While this rhythm section was not quite up that level, they offered suitably shuffling funk and rhythms from Brazil, a Nilssen-Love touchstone.

Earlier in the evening, a more meditative tenor saxophonist, Heli Hartikainen, transformed a small cinema into a quad-sound and vision installation. After a surprise ‘secret gig’ with an acoustic trio earlier in the week, this was the latest site-specific iteration of Chronovariations, an extended work that makes up their recent debut album. Backed by live looping and other electronics from Spanish sound artist Esther Calderón Morales, the saxophonist coaxed an extraordinary range of sounds from their amplified instrument (both pictured above).

At times, this included breathing into it, scraping metal against it, popping the keys and tapping it, which triggered rumbles from wired sheet metal hung around the immersive listening space. Sometimes that meant exquisite, improvised playing of the horn in the ‘traditional’ way – albeit with a ghostly halo around it.

There was more powerful saxophone work that night, this time strongly in the AACM tradition, from Polish-German alto firebrand Angelika Niescier. She was accompanied by Brazilian drummer and vocalist Mariá Portugal in a gleeful set full of twists, turns and surprises, from breakneck roller-derby dashes to moments of nearly bossa tenderness.

Another Korjaamo tram hall stage featured two Swedish sextets with unusual instrumentation and cross-cultural roots.

Trumpeter Goran Kajfeš led his Tropiques project, featuring a string trio whose elegantly woozy swaying brought to mind Egypt’s Fathy Salama Orchestra. Kajfeš played muted trumpet, painting an impressionistic aquarelle sound not far from that of Matthew Halsall, and also played – less memorably – keyboards along with pianist Alexander Zethson.

Another Stockholm band with influences from far afield was the long-awaited Sven Wunder live band led by keyboardist-producer Joel Danell, whose retro-sounding exotica has been mined for adverts and hip-hop tracks. The six-man lineup recreated that lush sound with spellbinding strings from Syrian qanun master Feras Charestan. After a while, though, the swirling improv was dragged down by the heavy-handed rock guitar and drums of Reine Fiske and Christopher Cantillo.

Earlier in the week at the G Livelab club, there was more varied, elastic electric guitar and drum work from Kalle Kalima and Tatu Rönkkö of the duo Lampen, who recently released their second album on the We Jazz label.

Berlin-based guitarist Kalima specialises in smouldering bluesy solos that build to incandescence, as on ‘Grün & Grau’, with Rönkkö contributing an energetic tempo rubato. At first, their parts seemed to be mutually oblivious but then interlocked like trapeze artists in midair. ‘Soleil de Sud’ offered a sunny head-nodding groove on a dark cold night. In its sunset bars, the tune delved into reggae, steering between the rocks of prettiness and angry noise.

On the eerie ‘Würgeengel (Strangling Angel)’ Rönkkö sounded like a second guitar as he scraped the edge of his cymbals. The duo traded off rhythm and support roles with each other – and simultaneously with themselves, sounding like a much bigger band.

That is eminently true of Australia’s the Necks, a returning We Jazz favourite known for their minimalist, hour-long improvisations, far from standard piano jazz trio fare. Each of the three is an equal spoke in this juggernaut wheel.

The term ‘spiritual’ gets tossed about but seems particularly apt for a Necks performance. Their sets are ritualistic, beginning almost imperceptibly after a moment of silence for the room to quieten. Pianist Chris Abrahams started with an inobtrusive rhythm pattern while Tony Buck tentatively rattled small percussion and bassist Lloyd Swanton added gentle creaking of a ship at sea, then sea mammal sounds with a bow.

The group improv started as faintly sketched plans for the future, relentlessly building to vivid reality. Abrahams telepathically proposed ideas, to which the others responded cautiously before taking them and running. Soon the band’s trademark mind-meld took over, becoming one instrument with an incremental Koyaanisqatsi-like accretion to a slithery motorik beat. Along the way, they conjured up vivid imagery. A shimmeringly beautiful piano over drum-and-bass helicopters took me to a tropical island after a hurricane, then gamelan drums in a Balinese temple garden and a feeling of rushing off a cliff but being saved at last moment. A dome of sound enveloped this acoustically perfect room; we were swept into a placid backwater pool…then suddenly it was over. Swanton thanked us for taking part in the last night of their month-long tour, adding: “we’re just getting warmed up”. So were we all.