Moers Festival puts the jazz-pedal to the metal for rocking 50th Anniversary

Improvisation and chance. Upending mental habituality. These are frequently the aims of free music and jazz in general, but we don’t often experience such states as an innate part of a festival scene. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, with its 51st edition, the Moers Festival (not far from Cologne) rejects the ingrained routines often associated with seniority. Was this a deliberate strategy? The city’s music school customarily houses the renowned Moers Sessions, where surprise improvising groups are assembled, but in 2022 it became the festival’s new organisational hub, scattered with installations, and hosting a new stage named Annex.

Meanwhile, the park-located Rodelberg stage has now become an established setting, born out of last year’s virus restrictions. The festival marketplace hops across from the grounds of the indoor Festivalhalle, but a smaller set of stalls and wagons still inhabit that old location. This creates an oval walk where all three areas are connected and walkable. There were also multiple venues in the actual city centre of Moers, as well as a continuing online existence. This led to a wild abundance of choices, as the festival returned to full bustling life in ‘22. Even as your scribe adhered to the core trio of zones, there were still sharp choices to make in this refreshed atmosphere of change.

Annex was a small courtyard stage with a makeshift rain canopy, revelling in its secret line-up of sudden groupings. As the weekend developed, a musician hang-out scene developed, with journalists sniffing around to paw out the dynamic set-combinations. It also seemed as though the old-guard Moers attendees were gathering at this new shrine of free jazz. Your scribe noticed a Faust van parked nearby, musing that a fan of this great German band was a Moersfest regular. But nay!, it turned out that the Annex emcee was the man himself, Jean-Hervé Péron, a founding member of Faust, travelling in his authentic Faustmobile. One of his prime groupings brought together John Dikeman (tenor saxophone), Chris Williams (trumpet), Luke Stewart (bass), and Mike Reed (drums), going for a 1959 flotation, swift tenor intercut with brittle trumpet interjections. They entered an abstract zone, with bowed bass and bell-trinkles, making a suspended space of extended tones. A slow groove arrived, with conversational horns converging, ending up by honkin’ together, as bass and drums grew silent.

New York altoman Chris Pitsiokos played with the new quartet CLCJ, turning out a somewhat soupy improvisation of effects-coated instrumentation, but one of his peak weekend achievements was a duo with the Argentinian cellist Violeta García. They both played acoustically, but their combined textures had an electronic quality, due to the cello passing through an amplifier, and the alto seeking out piercing tonalities. The pair’s empathy was strong, as they wove flexible structures together, savouring the high pitches in a trebly tussle, tones often uncannily matching. García was down at the extreme low end of her strings, while Pitsiokos was gurgling his mouthpiece in a water cup, before serenading Violeta on one knee, as she drone-dragged her bow. García plays like a bassist, with clicks and runs, body blows paired with Pitsiokos’s curved squeals. Their second piece began with a hog-callin’ rumpus, blood on the barn walls. It all ended with a duck-boar hybrid hoarse-call bowel-grind!

The Sunday morning Moers Sessions featured a set with Jasper Stadhouders (guitar), Max Johnson (bass) and Joe Hertenstein (drums). The latter shouted “louder” to Spinifex axeman Stadhouders, and the industrial-scale spasming began, with bent squall-spurts and a chundering snare-massing. Stadhouders was just one member of the Spinifex ensemble populating the sessions and the Annex scene, after the band debuted its new project with two singers, where they got into Indian vocals and rhythms, alongside their accustomed riff-rock complexity.

There are other forms swirling around Moers, including global-folkloric, hardcore electronic, moderne composition and extreme rockin’. This last category was exhilaratingly represented by two of America’s finest sonic trashers, Liturgy and Lightning Bolt, who provided a pair of extremely ripping outdoor sets at Rodelberg. Both acts, with their complex time signatures and/or barely controlled chaos, possess strong appeal for jazz mentalities. Still rocking, but in prog jazz fashion, the Japanese New Yorker violinist Sana Nagano led her Smashing Humans outfit, featuring saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum and bassist Ken Filiano. Nagano’s dynamic compositions surround her with spiky noise stutters, but her own violin often remains untouched in the vortex, aside from when she flips on her effects. This was more in extreme evidence during her Moers Sessions appearance the next morning.

The festival’s all-year-round Improviser In Residence is the Chicagoan cellist Tomeka Reid, who premiered new material with her quartet (pictured above) on the closing day. A new direction of abstraction heading towards a mournful processional was navigated by a deliberate compound of styles, involving jazz, blues, folk, gospel, but in small essences, governed overall by Reid’s personality. Solos were kneaded into the tunes, collectively, with Mary Halvorson’s guitar effects reduced to a minimum, creating a natural plane. The foursome even had a coordinated garb-scheme of calming orange hues.

Flock is something of a UK supergroup, bringing together Bex Burch (Vula Viel), Tamar Osborn (Collocutor) and solo artist Sarathy Korwar, landing free-blowing on top of rippling rhythms. How Noisy Are The Rooms? had turntablist Joke Lanz resourcefully mimicking the unusual vocal acrobatics of Almut Kühne. The three keymeisters of Simon Nabatov, Jozef Dumoulin and Philip Zoubek had the most wires tangled, with their tolling doom-drone stormclouds meeting of piano, augmented Rhodes and Moog-stack. Gothic depths, high drama, cosmic worming and bass rumbling galore...!

These performances represented just a personal sliver of all the available action, as the long Moers Whitsun weekend took on its most vital possible existence, whichever trajectory an attendee chanced upon…