четвер, 18 червня 2009 р.

May Concerts

Well, to say honestly, three concerts I visited this May weren't great.
First, on 10th, was my first visit to Kremenchuk, which is town of about 200 with something thousand people. I was surprised a little when I acknowledged that there are some jazz musicians, especially free-jazz musicians. I meet pianist Sergey Goruynovich month before on concert in Cherkasy. He plays something quite like Cecil Taylor. This time I came to see him in his home setting. But performance was weird a bit. Mostly, what struck me is that it was in a restaurant. Half of program was vocal standard jazz and other half an improvising music. Sergey is nice academically drilled pianist and he quotes classical music a lot from "Flight of a bumble bee" to Schostakovich 7th Symphony, but I guess he's more suited for solo playing.
Small footage here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZG3-3-K9SA
Succeeding concert on May 23nd was Petras Vysniauskas duo with pianst Egidijus Buozis. Petras is excellent free-jazz player but that standard program he turned into some kind of mockery. It was fun to watch, not very interesting to listen.
And the final concert of month was Lviv performance of quartet of saxophonist Roby Glod, pianist Roberta Piket, bassist Mark Tokar and drummer Klaus Kugel. Due to scarce of time I didn't write about concert in English. But the gist of what I wrote in my Ukrainian review was that quartet wasn't playing very coherently. To me, despite nice soloing that evening, compositions at whole seem not very well-rounded. Nevertheless, that was the best concert I visit in May and also I had a chance to spend some time with Yury Yaremchuk. He showed me very interesting recording he made that day.
Now it is summer and the closest event I'm planning to visit is a concert of bunch of people consisting of Perry Robinson, Waclaw Zimpel, Bobby Few, Mark Tokar, Klaus Kugel. For me, a big fan of Mr. Few, it's a huge event but it is planned as far as October.