Progressive Savage

Many years ago someone told me that there is a long process of maturation before you’ll start enjoying jazz music. For some time now, I thought about myself as a person whose musical taste had become mature enough to understand and appreciate some of the jazz performances. Couple of days ago I learned about a Jazz at the Old Town Square Festival and thought it might be interesting to see what is it all about, given that I’ve never been to any jazz gig before. Jazz at the Old Town Square Festival is an open air jazz festival taking place every summer here in Warsaw, Poland. It lasts for two months, presenting a different artist each Saturday evening. This year it started on July 4th and will continue till the August 29th.

The jazz festivities were initiated yesterday by a Hungarian fusion/world music band Djabe. The band was completely unknown to me–quite as every other name on the festival’s performers list–but after a visit to their website and hearing Doromb I became really excited about seeing them live and–oh boy–I was not leftdown. The band performance was absolutely amazing and Tamás Barabás quickly joined the ranks of my favorite bass players (and not only because of his excellent slapping). As for the other musicians, I think that many heavy metal drummers should be learning from Szilárd Banai’s fast and precise double bass drumming. Both Zoltán Kovács (keyboards) and Ferenc Kovács (violin, trumpet) gave a great performance as well and the only glitch was barely audible  sound of Attila Égerházi’s guitar which emerged only occasionally.

Nonetheless, I can say that Djabe made a great impression on me and left me expecting much of the festival itself. I can’t wait for the next Saturday’s performance by a “living legend” of Polish fusion/jazz rock scene, String Connection.

In my previous post I have mentioned a band named Naikaku, which stands for Internal Nuclear Tide. So far the band had released two albums, out of which I have heard and posses only the second one–Shell. Prog Archives have a really nice write-up about band’s history, so for background information I refer you to their article.

Now, back to the Shell. Shell is yet another instrumental album I’m reviewing here lately, but what an album this is! The recording is dominated by drum and bass tandem with flute and guitar coming and going as the music evolves. Even in it’s heaviest moments the rhythm sections stands out pretty well. What else an ex-bass player may need? The flute and occasional trumpet gives this album a very jazz-like feeling.

Magic Elf’s Heavy Meddle is one of the gems in my collection, although I do imagine that not everyone might find this album as interesting as I did, ah well…

Magic Elf is a New York based instrumental trio performing pretty nifty jazz rock, a fusion of progressive rock, metal and country. I’ve stumbled upon Magic Elf couple of years ago and–being mislead by the name–though “yet another power metal band”. I’m not sure whether the first song I’ve heard was Calamity Castle or Scrambledreggs but I changed my mind really quickly and think of myself as their big fan ever since.

If you’re at least a bit into metal in general then checking Steve DiGiorgio’s Wikipedia webpage you should find at least a handfull of bands you recognize, like Autopsy, Control Denied, Testament, Iced Earth, Vintersorg and obviously Death. Among all of this you’ll find a band named Dark Hall.