June 6, 2010

A Sunday morning session at Moers Festival 2010

After we had been so highly enthused about Saturday's morning session, we didn't get an early enough start on Sunday and only arrived on the festival site when the sessions had already started. We did a bit of session-hopping at first, peeking into this or that concert room. My wife wasn't satisfied with a trio improvisation of Eve Risser, Justin Veloso and Esra Dalfidian (we're a funny little family: whenever there's trouble, it's mostly caused by the drummers) and waited outside, where she met Borey Shin, the piano player and accordeonist of Super Sea Weed Sex Scandal, who smiled at her. (Later that day she exchanged a smile with Takumi Fukushima, too. It's interesting: While East Asians - my wife is Chinese - don't smile much at each other in their home countries, they would stick together and exchange smiles when they're in the western countries. On the other hand, when I'm travelling in China I think I don't smile at other western faces that I meet there - while I might smile at some people in my home country sometime. Sorry for that long aside...)
We ended up in the morning session where our beloved Tobias Klein was playing for the second half of the set. Yuko Oshima proved in this session that she can be more versatile at the drum set than what she had shown the other day on the main stage. She played a very funny and fierce duo argument with Super Seaweed Sex Scandal's tenorist John Stanesco. Viljam Nybacka was treating the electric bass again - he was always coming together with Tobias Klein, or vice versa. He had some especially good moments in a rock setting (with guitar player Paul Wheeler). The trumpet player of the session was Eiríkur Orri. I think he wasn't bad, but I don't really remember him too well. To see the Super Seaweed Sex Scandalists (Stanesco and Wheeler in this case, Veloso in the one that we had left) in these freely improvised settings with other musicians was also arousing some thoughts on the booking politics of the festival. In these improvising settings there were moments where they lacked a bit of self-confidence. Yet where else should they develop this if not by being confronted with situations that allow them to experiment in front of an audience? And the mentioned Stanesco/Oshima duo was really a killer.
Summarizing this morning's session experience, Tobias Klein reinforced our first impression of him: He was again our star of the set, we loved every move he made.

3 comments:

ayu1234 said...

yes, very true regarding Tobias Klein. (sorry, I simply copied the name over here, because I can hardly remember any name, hahhah~~~~~). But I remember that the concert which we caught in the middle and I left it in the middle as well, was unbearable to me, not because of its drum, but the vocal. not because the singing style was not original enough or so, but I couldn't bear the ideology which went with it.

ayu1234 said...

nevertheless, what you said about our family's preference on music, is also true. I think that drum is always playing the key role in the band, (which does contain a drum,)which sets up the tone of the big-scale scenery of the music.

ayu1234 said...

Yuko Oshima performed really better in this session than she did on the big stage. I guess her problem is not that there are something technically that she couldn't handled, but the theme with sophisticated or delicate threads. She demonstrated impressive skill with quarrelling and violence. Even she herself knows that well enough.