Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch excite at Enjoy Jazz’s Solo Piano season

Enjoy Jazz is one of the longer festivals in existence, globally. Usually, this German tri-city marathon begins its gig-every-night run in early October, continuing until mid-November. This year, all went well for the first month or so, with spaced-out, reduced capacity shows, no Americans allowed, and a concentration on European players. Then, the German lockdown interrupted Enjoy-ment in early November.

One exception to the no-Americans tendency was Brad Mehldau, who was in Amsterdam rather than NYC. He opened the festival’s Solo Piano season, which was originally intended to feature eight artists, although of the last three bookings, one date has now been cancelled and the other two have been moved to a post-lockdown December position. Enjoy Jazz may well be in a situation where their festival season might run interminably into the new year, as gigs are gradually rescheduled. Replacement dates are now firmed up into mid-December.

Your Jazzwise scribe was around Mannheim and Ludwigshafen in mid-October, catching the core period of the Solo Piano run. Ambitiously, during the virus season, there were representatives from Switzerland and Greece. ECM artist Nik Bärtsch will usually bring his Ronin or Mobile groups, but this was a rare opportunity to hear him play solo, in the eminently suitable surroundings of the Friedenskirche, Ludwigshafen. This is an unusual 1932 church (rebuilt in 1955), circular in construction, with an abundance of modern stained-glass strips. Bärtsch has the appearance of a monk, anyway, so he was completely in his element, concentrated and pooled by sympathetic acoustics.

Bärtsch (above) navigated a rippling rhythmic flow, often with a patterning systems style, influenced by the early times of minimalism. Filaments were turned into fragments, as Bärtsch struck mallets under the lid, theatrically making zithery flourishes, or creating low bass drones via prepared piano tactics. Once this magical meditation carpet was unrolled, Bärtsch embellished with small percussive hits and trilled clusters. Following an abstract adventure, he would usually return to a briskly repetitive cycle, sounding like he was improvising in both the abstract and rhythmic realms.

Tania Giannouli might not be signed to ECM yet, but she would surely be welcomed inside their sonic universe. She played at the Kunsthalle art gallery in Mannheim, once again in a physical space that was ideal for both music and virus-avoidance spacing. The huge foyer area, with its extremely high ceiling, sounded surprisingly intimate, in the way it enfolded the piano sound. Slimline speakers added subtle amplification, as Giannouli also investigated the possibilities of her subtly prepared piano. This approach involved more extended gestures, coaxing out slow scrapes or vibrant moans, interior whalesong dotted with small mallet taps. The results were unavoidably filmic, with a locational approach that evoked landscapes and their opened emotions. Giannouli made melancholy melodic progressions, sometimes with a frisson of folkish traditionalism, spirits in view, clearly limned. Down at the left-side low end, she rode through the winds, then suddenly had both hands inside, swiping harp-like, struck emphatics creating a full-bloom climax. The ‘movie’ was reaching its ultimate scenes, with fully flowering shapes and enlarging, dark growths. (Watch the video of this concert below)

The third solo piano gig of the week was also in Mannheim, at the Alte Feuerwache (Old Fire Station), another of the city’s great venues. Hermann Kretzschmar is a member of the esteemed Ensemble Modern, who are doubtless most known to jazzers for their recordings of ‘Greggery Peccary’ and ‘The Yellow Shark’, by Frank Zappa. In a conceptual move too labyrinthine to detail here, Kretzschmar elected to cover Ludwig Van Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, scythed down from their usual 10 hours into an almost manageable single gig-length. His strategy was to only play the first sound (or sometimes silence) of each bar. This had the effect of making Beethoven sound like Stockhausen, with Kretzschmar showing off a remarkable range of touches and rhythmic jolts, alarmingly sensitive in execution. Suddenly, he got up and exited, which would have made the gig of sufficient length, but after a short pause, Kretzschmar returned, for what seemed like another hour, but probably less, eventually becoming quite a tedious experience, despite its practical invention over a 2CD duration. Was that even The Beatles in there, towards the end, or was your scribe merely dreaming?