Date: June 27, 2012
Venue: Le Poisson Rouge (NY)
Review by Jeremy Siskind
From the moment that Terje Rypdal and his quartet stepped onto the stage of Le Poisson Rouge, all my sensory impressions grabbed me by the hand and hurried me to towards a faded word in the dusk light of a pitchy forest: dated. The hairstyles of the Norwegian band were combed with ‘80s cliché, the sound was jazz-rock that harkened to the age when musicians were enamored with “plugging in,” and the overall aesthetic was a tribute to the sort of virtuosity that has – in my vision – gone out of style with the rise of conservatory jazz programs.
Oddly, the band functioned in almost two completely separate units with solos by rock-based Rypdal and heavily-Miles-influenced Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg pivoting around a very able rhythm section of organist Ståle Storløkken and Italian drummer Paolo Vinaccia.
The two front men played at the same time for literally well under 5 total minutes of the hour and a half performance. Although the effect was a bit jarring to my expectations as an audience member, it was musically effective, as the two alternated between extremes of the maximalism-minimalism duality. Rypdal’s tunes typically were long vamps on a single chord over which he displayed his guitar-hero prowess; they were impactful, and he was incredible; the experience was unvarying – a spine-shattering collision with Rypdal’s raucous cascade of plucks and strums.
Mikkelborg, on the other hand, had many tunes that were long, drawn-out rubato melodies flowing over subtly shifting harmonic seas. If Mikkelborg didn’t have a gorgeous tone, these could’ve gotten boring very quickly, but his beautiful phrasing and dulcet, Miles-like Harmon muted sound (as well as a staggering amount of reverb added to his sound via microphone and speakers) kept the pieces rich and alluring. Although there were moments of intersection, these alternations often felt like two different concerts or a programmatic light-darkness/devil-angel concept of which the audience was never informed.
Having rarely taken the time to listen to this sort of music at length before, I came to admire and take interest in the complex sound shapes – the carefully executed swells and screams of the band, who used the electronics extremely effectively as part of their expression. There were moments of ecstatic sound bursts and enormous rhythmic cliffs and valleys of great suspense and resolution. The rhythm section played with admirable restraint considering the demonic energy with which Rypdal relentlessly came at them. Drummer Vinaccia took a very interesting solo in duet with a collage of movie soundbites played electronically, although it was a surprising addition to a nearly-completed set with nothing else of the sort.
The audience certainly didn’t find the performance dated. A packed house – largely of Europeans – went wild for the performance. Personally, I found moments to enjoy and even to savor, but the evening didn’t change my essential position on the cumulative status of this kind of jazz – that it’s an outsider to the musical landscape of 2012.
