Repeat after me: Michael Wollny. There were no CDs for sale
at a table on the way out, but there are more than a dozen albums since his
first cut in 2005. There’s a smattering of European awards, but there were
empty seats for his 10 p.m. at Max at Eastman Place Tuesday night.
Wollny inhabits a body that is
little more than a container for an insanely great pianist. The intensity of
Wollny’s expression leaves him barely able to sit still on the bench as he leans
so far over that his hair brushes the keys, his elbows splay out, his left leg
pumps rhythm at the hip joint, and the right leg curls up until his foot is
nearly what is on the bench.
So here’s the thing. Even with all this gyration and even
inside-the-case-string-plucking, Wollny’s physical technique is all classical and his line is all jazz. The
lilt of his hand as if around a soft ball. The compositions he and his
ensemble musicians have written in fits of inspiration to the Austrian
composers Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). The way he
expresses a full dynamic range, sometimes with a melody, sometimes with
abstractions, and every time with direction. This, my friends of jazz and of
classical, is where we meet and experience something original.
Completely different, but also on the piano tonight was the John Nyerges Quartet at the Rochester
Club. You’ll recognize the name because Nyerges is a pianist with the Rochester
Philharmonic Orchestra…but do you recognize him without the tuxedo? Nyerges strolled through original compositions like “Monk’s
Blues,” “A New Day,” and “Solid as Stone” by loosely fingering his way around
the keyboard, eyes closed, uttering what could be a tone poem.
I wasn’t as sold on the other two shows that I went to this
evening. My theme for this year’s festival is to seek out performers with a
claim of fusing our American jazz with another ethnicity. At the Reformation
Lutheran Church, I caught about 30 minutes of The Eero Koivistoinen Quartet. He made
his first American jazz concert appearance in 1969 in Newport, but the
persistent forte of amplified instruments in such hard acoustics became a wall
of sound. I think of jazz as layers between which you can slide a wandering
melody. Koivistoinen calls his work “collective
cacophony improvisation.”
I had a similar experience listening to Djabe in the Big Tent. Big on the pulsing four drums and four
cymbals (the drummer was wearing earplugs), but where was the jazz foundation,
and where was the balance between the instruments? The third song, “Dark Soup,”
had the feeling of a Hungarian gypsy, but there was an unfinished feeling to
the line. And the group simply wasn’t connected to the audience, whether
through eye contact or truly stepping forward to deliver a performance.
Wednesday night is a big night combination of pianist
Gretchen Parlato (Kilbourn Hall) and then Roger Hodgson, advertised as “the
legendary voice of Supertramp” (Kodak Hall). See you there!
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2013.
