Category: Concerts
August 9, 2019, Lisbon
At yesterday’s concert with percussionists Joey Baron and Robyn Schulkowsky, Schulkowsky made probably the simplest and most direct statement on the theme of resistance so far. Dedicating a song to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who quietly stood for her dignity and human rights when she refused to move to the back of a …
Jazz em Agosto ad at a tram stop
August 8, 2019, Lisbon.
Explosive. Before the french power trio ABACAXI (Portugese for Pineapple) even began, therewas a threateningly loud hum. Then with a strum of the guitar, thud of the bass, and powerful pound of the drums, Julien Desprez, Jean François Riffaud, andMax Andrzejewski began their assault…
August 4, 2019, Lisbon
Day four ofJazz em Agosto began earlier than the others nights with a free to the public concert by Lisbon based guitarist Abdul Moimême. Actually, to say Moimême plays a guitar is a stretch of the definition of ‘plays’ … there is a a guitar, actually two, but they are laid out on two tables and covered with large …
ByPaul Acquaro
Aug 3, 2019, Lisbon
I am convinced that the best way to see a city is to orient yourself towards one of its remaining record stores and walk. Take your time, don’t worry, they open late and hardly at the hour Google Maps indicates, so get sidetracked. I started at my hotel and headed out, and along the way discovered a par…
August 2, 2019, Lisbon
Brilliant blue, in the mid-20s (80 F), with a light breeze, the weather could not have been more inviting for a long walk through the jumbled city, and so I begin the day with an exploration of the Gulbenkian grounds. Back when I began my undergraduate work in the early 90s, I thought I would become a landscape arc…
August 1, 2019, Lisbon.
There could not have been a more apropos artist opening this years “Resistance”-themed Jazz em Agosto festival than Marc Ribot. His latest album, Songs of Resistance, is a self proclaimed soundtrack for the troubles of our times. For the album, the guitarist arranged songs from the American Civil Rights movement…
By
Martin Schray
Last year I covered NYC’s Vision Festival with Paul Acquaro, but since he has moved to Berlin, I’m on my own this year. New York welcomed me in its typical manic way: heavy clouds were hanging over the city, it was raining. On the bus from Newark Airport to the city it was on the news that a …
Thursday, November 1st
The Haus der Berliner Festspiele is a mid-century modern split-level architectural gem and it is more than a stones throw away from the typical environs for Berlin experimental jazz, like the scrappy Soweiso or Donau115, or even the slick Radial System V, host to the annual A’Larme Festival. But for a long weekend this mon…
The People Band (l-r): Paul Jolly, George Kahn, Terry Day, Mike Figgis, Charly Hart, Davey Payne.
Photo courtesy Fotoarchiv exploratorium berlin
Tucked away on an upper floor of a re-purposed chocolate factory in Berlin’s Kreutzberg neighborhood sits the Exploratorium. Hosting workshops and concerts with a focus on improvised music, the cente…
August 15 – 18, 2018. Oslo, Norway
Entering the courtyward, on the way to Cafe Mir
It was Saturday, the last of the Blow Out festival, when an opportunity arose to sit down with drummers and festival organizers Paal Nilssen-Love and Stale Liavik Solberg at a small trattoria in the hipGrünerløkkaneighborhood of Oslo. I had my list of questio…
You really cannot ask for a more serene setting than the Kunststation Kleinsassan, a small art museum nestled in the Rhön mountains of central Germany. Against the setting sun outside the panoramic windows of the cafe, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and saxophonist Frank Paul Schubert performed two intimate sets of music to a captivat…
I had been looking forward to Friday’s program, and buoyed by last night’s concerts, I was ready. Maybe what had piqued my interests most was that the line-up featured a solid core of free jazz, topped off with a bit of video enhanced electronic post-rock. Again the heat was an issue, but unlike earlier in the week, when the night tempera…
