First and foremost I must be grateful to Sanne van Hek for something that's got nothing to do with her own concert at the Moers festival. I was telling you the day before yesterday what a revelation Tobias Klein was to me and that I liked every sound that came out from his instruments. Well, Klein was suggested to the morning sessions curator by Sanne van Hek. Without her suggestion the festival would have been poorer. But now to Mrs. van Hek herself.She has already been staying in Moers since February as she was appointed to be this year's improviser in residence. A nice idea, modelled after other artist- or writer-in-residence prizes and probably quite enriching for the year-round cultural activities of this little town (I can't follow these activities though, as I'm living too far away). So, she started her activities a few weeks before the festival already - check the little interview on the official festival-blog. I thought I once saw a nice little video about her work as improviser in residence on a blog, but now I cannot find it anymore. It was really fun to see how she invited a group of kindergarten kids to her living room and started rocking loudly with her Black Napkins trio in this intimate setting. Some kids had to cover their ears and threw amused or bewildered glances at each other. The good thing about this residency is to give us people a chance to experience not just a concert as the ready "product" but also the artistic process and development of ideas - either in person or in writing.
The concert itself has been best described by Mr. Eitel already (see link to Plushmusic below), I don't think I could add anything substantial to it. Just a few remarks, though: Her trumpet playing is of a simple and mostly very melodic beauty, though not entirely original - it seems she's drawing a lot from Scandinavian sources. Her true strength in my eyes is not this trumpet playing but the conceptual outlines and designs of settings for improvisation.
And especially in the beginning it was great visual joy to see Koenrad Ecker grooving away - never saw any musician headbanging while sitting behind a laptop, but Ecker was getting close to that.
And I wish I had heard a bit more from Benoît Delbecq - the piano got a bit lost in the mix.
The usual links lead to Sanne's Myspace site and her blog and certainly to Plushmusic.This concert actually is well-covered on Youtube, in short little snippets at least:
I don't know this musician before I attended her concert. I am not theoretically armed enough for talking about technical aspects of her works. But from the feeling on me, which were aroused by her music, I think that there was nothing special.
ReplyDelete