The Tour de France started from Basque lands, coinciding over the weekend with the celebration of the 46th Getxo Jazz Festival. Coexistence between bikes and saxophones has not been easy, complicating the arrivals and departures of the scheduled musicians, who have seen how the Biscayan capital was literally besieged by the multicolored snake. Highways blocked, accesses blocked, hotels overflowing… The Tour de France muzzled jazz, equally complicating the attendance of the respectable five days of programmed luminous and energetic music. But the music ended up prevailing over the pedaling law, registering one of the most satisfactory editions in recent years, from an artistic point of view.
In its European competition for young groups, the French quartet of the Italian altosaxophonist won Giulio Ottanelli, a young talent with a sharp songwriting instinct and with a lot of personality, supported by a contemporary review of bebop. Then, on the festival’s main stage, the Muxikebarri, two men collected all the applause, guitarist Marc Ribot and double bassist Dave Holland. The first displaying a torrential proposal of improvised music spurred on by free jazz and punk, together with the members of that revolutionary trio Ceramic Dog, who form a drummer with all the rhythms, the drummer and percussionist Ches Smith and a multi-instrumentalist of great sound poetry, bassist Shahzad Ismaily. They presented part of the new material recorded on their album Connection, which when translated live is an unlimited jazz adrenaline rush.
and then it came Dave Holland, the double bass player that Miles Davis loved one day and who is on tour with a new quartet, in whose lead there is a saxophonist with an imaginative and torrential breath, Jaleel Shaw, and in his rear a guaranteed drummer, the forceful, but fine Nasheet Waits, and a pianist with a unique and impossible phrasing, Kris Davis, who has a different way of playing her instrument, and not because of her femininity, but because of sheer talent. After a start where the warnings were given (A new day), contemporary jazz connected to a singular creative energy, midway through the concert, Davis prefaced an extensive composition with a suffocating and obsessive, disturbing phrasing, which showed all the technical and expressive excellence of the quartet, with an incombustible Shaw, an accurate Waitts, a magical Davis. Holland meanwhile to his own, holding it all with an erudite rhythmic pulsation, and some solos of polyhedral emotion.
The festival also featured the friendly guitar of Al di Meola and the throats of Jazzmeia Horn y Kurt Elling; The first is a privileged singer, but she is in entertainment and her talent remains in something fake; the latter is still the classiest male singer…and vocal truth.