Marni Jazz Festival gets Brussels swinging to diverse sounds

Located in the charmingly lively Flagey district of Brussels, the Marni theatre is a venue with a long and illustrious history. Both a cinema and concert hall it has had Orson Welles on screen and Duke Ellington on stage at various times in the past 70 years and the week long jazz festival this September was programmed with sufficient imagination to uphold the spirit of originality embodied by each icon without any making any tribute events to them. Several renowned international artists, from Eritrea’s Hermon Mehari to Japan’s Takumi Nakayama to Italy’s Giuseppe Millaci were on the bill alongside several generations of Belgians: Nicolas Thys, Elliot Knuets and Sam Gerstmans.

But arguably the most interesting gig was the transatlantic encounter of Belgian bassist Yannick Peeters‘s GingerBlackGinger and American drummer Tom Rainey. The youth of the former and the experience of the latter made for as engaging a blend as one may have expected, above all because of Rainey’s proven ability to enhance the music of a wide range of leaders, from Tim Berne to Ingrid Laubrock. As for Peeters she is a notable presence on the European scene whose work already shows character at this relatively early stage of her career.

Her songs have fraught, shadowy atmospheres that might well fit a new soundtrack of The Third Man, the post-war Vienna celluloid classic that remains one of Welles’s finest hours, but it would be wrong to call the compositions entirely downcast. Guitarist Frederik Leroux, with slight echoes of mavericks such as Michael Gregory Jackson, Kelvyn Bell and Marc Ducret, plays a crucial role in cracking out barbed, crunchy sounds as well as zinging harmonics that give the music a distorted, twisted blues-funk feel amid of the loose swing of the Rainey-Peters drums and bass axis.

As for alto saxophonist Frans Van Isacker he is a more discreet presence, though no less effective with his skewed, slanted motifs, especially when he plays bass clarinet. The result is energized and unsettling in equal measure, with the hard edge of the timbres calling to mind avant-garde heroes who retained a feel for dance in their work, notably Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill, though Peeters, whose time keeping and articulation are well on point, also has a gift for melancholic ballads in which melodic lines are pared down yet no less expressive, ‘Playtime Is Over’ is an apt way to close the set for its skulking, fall of night sensibility that strikes a contrast with the preceding material, making it clear that the band has sensitivity to match its intensity.       

In any case the credentials Brussels has as an historic jazz city that celebrates local, national and international talent was very much in evidence both before and after the Peeters-Rainey collaboration. The splendid Bozar Arts venue opened its new season the previous week with concerts by U.K stars Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd while the small but welcoming Sounds club in Ixelles, an area brimming with African restaurants and Bohemian bars, presented the French pianist Mark Priore and Japanese trumpeter-singer Toku to an audience that appreciated the duo’s mix of standards and originals that have a formal elegance as well as technical finesse.