James Brandon Lewis and Fire! blow up a storm at Portugal’s Jazz em Agosto

One of the key features of the Jazz em Agosto festival (Jazz In August) is its amphitheatre setting in the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon. With that site undergoing renovation this year, the 9pm concerts were moved indoors to the Grand Auditorium, itself a very impressive location. As each band began playing, the stage-rear floor-to-ceiling drapes would swing open, revealing the gardens outside, through a completely glass wall, rushes and trees bathed in a separate lightshow. Sometimes the lights would dominate outside, the stage dimly lit, at others this lighting emphasis was reversed, adding an extra frisson of atmosphere to the sonics.

A couple of Scandinavian acts had cancelled, replaced at short notice by two US bands, previously forbidden fruits of international travel restrictions. Broken Shadows will be covered in the print version of this review. The other Stateside combo was the James Brandon Lewis Quartet, concentrating on last year’s Molecular album. The stage-drapes were completely closed at first, for ‘A Lotus Speaks’, but then all members darted in tandem, Lewis letting out a wild yelp after completing his charged tenor saxophone solo. Aruán Ortiz’s piano solos were highly abstract ruminations on the melody constructions of each tune, entering a mystical boudoir of circumspect expression. Brad Jones and Chad Taylor became exceedingly sparse on bass and drums, eventually leaving Ortiz alone, with hints of ragtime in his freeness. Fender Rhodes and a snapback beat provided a sudden contrast, Lewis blowing with an Albert Ayler-esque vibrato. ‘Neosho’ had a bowed bass, avant Cuban aura, before the closing ballad ‘Loverly’, the running order again mirroring that of the album. Lewis encored with what sounded like ‘Code B’ but was probably the title track from the soon-coming Code Of Being album, a firm-handed number that bodes very well for this next songbook.

Fire! was one Scandinavian band that did make it, giving the live premiere of their Defeat album. This is where Mats Gustafsson gets heavily into his flute, but not at the expense of other, lower grumblings. The core trio is expanded by Goran Kajfeš (trumpet) and Mats Äleklint (trombone), and Gustafsson still spends considerable time with electronics and baritone saxophone. With Fire!, only a thin obelisk-shaped slit of garden was visible through the drapes, but it did widen for ‘Each Millimeter Of The Toad, Part 2’, a slow, inevitable groove that is destined to become a crowd favourite in the canon of relentless motion. Bassline and brushes stoked the tension, and Gustafsson yowled through a baritone solo, his electronic input sounding very close to turntablism. This cyclic Fire! tendency is sounding closer to Can than ever.

Two of the best Portuguese bands embraced relationships between jazz and rock, abraded textures of distress, at moderately high volume. Ikizukuri had trumpeter Susana Santos Silva guesting, playing at the most violent extremity of her range, as bassist Gonçalo Almeida fuzzed outrageously, the twinned horns often operating at a needling height, soprano nestling uncomfortably, trumpet muted into a restless buzz. Silva and Julius Gabriel were a team against the ‘rhythm section’ wall of thunder!

Anthropic Neglect had Jorge Nuno’s psychedelic guitar standing right next to José Lencastre’s wildly crying tenor saxophone, not as extremely rockin’, but still well over the border from old jazz.

Roots Magic arrived from Italy, firstly with a more traditionally avant garde jazz, rooted in the 1960s and 70s, secondly with a wily sense of humour, absurdist yet dark. Their multiple horn-swapping also lent an air of experimental folk anarchy, even though the numbers were sharply organised. The clarinets, saxophones, flutes, vibraphone, bass and drums combined to craft a filmic, episodic nature, brash and bright. At a couple of points they were firing on bass clarinet and baritone saxophone. At others their music sounded like skipping Celtic folk. They made direct musical dedications to Milford Graves and Muhal Richard Abrams, making a rousing funeral pyre to bid farewell, loud and magnificent, they closed out the festival with a kind of nostalgic extremism.

There were also 6pm sets in the smaller Auditorium 2, with Austrian electro-percussionist Katharina Ernst and the drums/turntable pairing of Ignaz Schick and Oliver Steidle being amongst the notables.