LBT & Immortal Onion, Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival review: 'ear-opening barrages of sound'
Mixing jazz with electronica and techno, this European double bill was quite an ear-opener, writes Jim Gilchrist
Immortal Onion & LBT, Famous Spiegeltent, Edinburgh ★★★★
This double bill gave a vivid insight into at least one direction jazz is taking in Europe, while perhaps raising the question – when jazz meets techno and electronica, can we still call it jazz? Let’s not go there though, because in the event both trios generated ear-opening barrages of sound, electronic or otherwise.
From Gdansk, Immortal Onion opened their Edinburgh debut with a sizzle of electronic keyboards and explosive drumming. Playing largely from their current album, Technaturalism, Tomir Śpiolek on keyboards, Ziemowit Klimek on Moog synthesiser and drummer Wojtek Warmijak created jagged, ever-shifting soundscapes, cinematic keyboard cascades vying with hoots and juddering bass from the Moog, all riding on Warmijak’s drum attack.
With frequent tempo changes, you never quite knew what was coming next – a spooky, sci-fi-sounding Moog melody or a foghorn-like bass outburst.
If Immortal Onion’s switched-on approach might fuel a rave, the multi-award-winning LBT from Munich embrace techno utterly, but with conventional jazz piano trio instrumentation. “It’s techno. You dance to it, so feel free,” announced pianist Leo Betzl to the largely standing audience (some of whom obliged, animatedly), before striking up a repetitive, staccato figure on damped piano keys (concert grand this time) with double-bassist Maximilian Hirning and drummer Sebastian Wolf working up the kind of fiercely unremitting beat that characterised their set.
There was little in the way of melody: the trick seemed to be just how long Betzl could sustain a minimalist phrase, even a single, ringing note, over Wolf’s drum groove, Hirning’s bass bolstering the pulse, occasionally breaking into bowed squalls. Sometimes Betzl might open things up – a cascade of arpeggios that might become a new riff, or a sudden swirl into lower register, but the locomotive drive was incessant, hypnotically so.
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