GARANA Jazz Festival, Garana, Romania, Saturday, July 10, 2021
After three really nourishing festival nights, repeated thunderstorms complicated the start of the fourth festival concert, which had to be even more delayed than usual.
My colleague Michal Kratochvíl was couriering after the storm in his stomach, so his comments from the fourth evening at Wolf Meadow are missing.
The first performance belonged to the Romanian Sorin Zlat Quartet. Playing alongside lead pianist Sorin Zlat were Cătălin Milea – saxophone, Mike Alex – bass and Iulian Nicolau – drums. Their concert was a surprising, rather dense fusion of jazz, Latin American music, pop and classical music, understandable only for perceptive and focused listeners.
An interesting start to the evening after almost 4 hours of intense storms.
The solo recital of Israeli pianist Omer Klein brought a pleasant calm. His music is boundless as it organically absorbs various sources of inspiration and constantly pushes mainstream jazz concepts into the future. Omer’s concert performance at the Garana was highly successful due to his highly imaginative interpretation of his own compositions.
A clear highlight of the fourth festival evening.
The expected highlight of the evening was to be brought by the trio of top musicians Helbock / Jansen / Studnitzky. Austrian pianist David Helbock with German trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky and guitarist Arne Jansen played their latest project called The New Cool at Garana. With his new trio, David Helbock has turned to cool jazz, inspired by the innovations of his idol Lennie Tristano.
Frankly, I found their very sensitively played music a little too cool for me, but that’s what The New Cool jazz is supposed to be.
The starry midnight at the Wolf Meadow turned into an incredible combination of colours during the concert of trumpeter Petre Ionuțescu and electronic magician Daniel Dorobanțu. A wild light show accompanied their duet, which combined the sounds of trumpet and piano with electronic music, an inspiring detour from jazz towards ambient, as you can see in the video preview below.
Sorry, I couldn’t stand their rather monotonous music for long.
