As intrepid festival director Antanas Gustys explains in the programme, this is the 37th Vilnius Jazz Festival – and incredibly, he has been in charge since the first. The Alister Spence/Tony Buck duo on the first night is one of the highlights, building on their 2023 debut album Mythographer. Both players have a remarkable stylistic range – this duo is at the free-improv end of their output. Towards the end of the set, jazzy and groove-based touches appear, but in a rather detached, etiolated form. After the continuous set, which rises to a climax with tremolo chords, there’s a brief encore.
Most contemporary French jazz/improv rejects the legacy of Debussy and Ravel in favour of muscular rock with asymmetric grooves. A puzzle
Spence/Buck are preceded by the excellent Vincent Courtois-François Corneloup duo, whose jazz often has grooves. Courtois studied classical cello at Paris Conservatoire, and in the late 1980s discovered jazz and improv. During their set, the vivid and varied lighting is attuned with the music. The following night features a less successful French outfit – NOUT, a trio of flute (Delphine Joussein), harp (Rafaëlle Rinaudo) and drums (Blanche Lafuente). Folkish episodes alternate with progressively frenetic rock outbursts. Courtois/Corneloup excepted, most contemporary French jazz/improv rejects the legacy of Debussy and Ravel in favour of muscular rock with asymmetric grooves. A puzzle.
NOUT is followed by Amirtha Kidambi’s group Elder Ones. The Indian-born, New York-based vocalist is backed by Alfredo Colon (tenor sax), Matt Nelson (soprano sax), Lester St Louis (acoustic bass) and Jason Nazary (drums). Her music is, she says, influenced by Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Miriam Makeba; like them, her art is very political. The New York band is excellent, but the vocals are over the top. Kidambi is an overamplified belter and screamer, not an interpreter of the lyric – if Shirley Bassey outbelts Celine Dion, Amirtha outbelts them all. The core of the music has substance, however, and I empathise with Farmers’ Song, the second piece, which protests against Modi – “a fascist”, as Kidambi rightly says.
Friday is the outstanding evening. The first set is by a Lithuanian/Japanese trio whose music is pervaded with incredible stillness and low volume; they were Gintė Preisaitė (Lithuania, piano), Sachiko M (Japan, sine waves) and Aikawa Hitomi (vibes, marimba, congas, bongos). The second set is by the remarkable, recently formed trio of Kondo Tatsuo (piano), Kimura Jinya (tuba) and Kobayashi Takefumi (drums). The brass bassist has a porkpie hat while the drummer wears a (English/Japanese) shapeless or daggy hat. Their third piece is Charlie Haden’s Silence, which the pianist says “means silence of the people because of oppression or violence”. I recall Charles Fox in the 80s playing Göran Strandberg’s version of this haunting composition on Radio 3, in a characteristic Foxism adding that it was called, somewhat paradoxically, Silence”. This trio specialise in the haunting, slow and lugubrious, but the closing piece is a strong, mid or uptempo groove with melodic tuba solo.
The Tatsuo piano trio are members of Otomo Yoshihide’s explosive post-rock big band, with the ultra-dynamic leader on volatile electric guitar. As well as being a force of nature, Yoshihide is a polymath – he works in jazz, improv, noise and pop, and has collaborated with Messrs Zorn, Marclay, The Boredoms, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Jim O’Rourke. He first formed a big band in 2005, and current members include Sachiko M and Aikawa Hitomi. There’s an array of reeds and brass and an addition to the hat repertoire, as one musician wears a bowler. Improvisation is directed by band members using hand signals, with material including Charlie Haden’s Song For Che, Eric Dolphy’s Something Sweet, Something Tender (transformed, with no genuine chord-based improvisation) and a Mingus composition whose title eludes me. The concert is a sellout – the band have a big following in Vilnius, and indeed everywhere. Do catch their three-day residency at Café Oto, 27-29 October.
Aruán Ortiz opened the final night with a superb solo set comparable in approach to the one he presented at Newcastle’s Festival of Jazz and Improv earlier in October. It’s from his project Cub(an)ism, the title of a recent solo album. The Cuban-born pianist divides his time between Barcelona, where his family lives, and New York, where he moved more than 15 years ago. His set began quietly in the bass, gradually rising in register and volume. Again, Ortiz based his improvisations on classic material, though this time I caught only deconstructed Thelonious Monk – at Newcastle, Ellington and Ornette Coleman were audible.
The musical portrait of Louis Andriessen that followed was conceived and performed by Vykintas Baltakas and his LENsemble, with Belgian soprano Naomi Beeldens – “LENsemble” is Lithuanian Ensemble Network. Andriessen (1939-2021) drew on jazz and American minimalism as well as European modernism, and the concert features three of his works. In Workers Union for freely chosen instrumental line-up, each performer chooses the pitch, but in a political metaphor, cooperates with the group rhythmically. Il Duce for tape is based on a 1935 speech by Mussolini. For some audience members, this was a tough listen – their repeated bursts of applause signalled that the piece had continued long enough. M Is For Man, Music, Mozart is a multimedia project with visual material by British director Peter Greenaway. The music quotes from Mozart, while Il Duce quotes from Strauss.
That brings me to the vexed question of jazz audiences. This isn’t an issue about Vilnius, though there are distinctive features – a possible legacy of Soviet party discipline is that audiences arrive for the first set and tend to stay throughout. A traditional snorer in the upper circle interrupted Aruán Ortiz, but this happens even at bastions of elitism such as London’s Wigmore Hall. The problem for me is that jazz audiences can no longer simply listen – they have to photograph, film, text and talk. A pity, because they’re surely missing many of the riches to be heard at magnificent events such as Vilnius Jazz.