I was in the Büro des Bürgermeisters, the Mayor’s Office upstairs at the Rathaus of the town of Moers, for a solo performance by saxophonist and all-round musical maniac Hayden Chisholm, when a man randomly offered me single malt whisky at 2pm. At length I realised that the man, wearing an orange shirt, orange belt and orange socks with black shoes, black jacket and black leather trousers…at the point when he started addressing the other thirty or so people in the room…was in fact the Mayor of Moers. Ten years ago Hayden Chisholm enjoyed an official residency here. The warm buzz of conviviality left me unprepared for the strong and sweet emotional impact of the performances to come.
Relocating us all to the airy lobby for a more expansive acoustic, Hayden Chisholm set up with the alto saxophone, shruti box (a drone bellows harmonium from India), Pūtōrino (bugle flute), kōauau (traditional Maori mouth flute): two small and precious instruments that were gifted to him to connect with home in New Zealand. This Kiwi escapee came to Germany in the 1990s on a scholarship to study saxophone at the Music Hochschule in Cologne. He made his beans having developed a system of micro-tonal fingerings for saxophone, so called “split-scales” using quarter tones. His repertoire includes songs from his travels in the Balkans. On the CD Love in Numbers he explores the Fibonacci series as it manifests in the overtone series, and his performances include throat singing, or overtone singing, that multiphonic ethnomusicological approach where you generate high notes whistling up and down above the fundamental. He’s contributed to a collaborative project setting James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to music. This is my guy and the kind of musical maniac I’m talking about.
Over the course of the Moers Festival 2025 he performed six different sets reflecting different aspects of his eclectic practice, in each case demonstrating his virtuosity as a technician who is also a master of restraint, technically intimidating but a musically devoted and accomplished stylist who absolves himself of style through fluid deployment of aspects of folk, jazz, and microtonality, with a storytelling yen as a traveller, émigré and nostalgist, who plays from the heart. On the outdoors free stage Unter Bäume, a quartet with Jessica Pavone on viola and Darius Heid on piano found the impromptu trio compelling in harnessing the sterner language of musical modernism; a duo with Jun-Y Ciao showcased his command of avant garde sound-based playing with an unsettling edge; and a solo set in the Evangelisch Stadtkirche, that was actually a duo featuring one of many impromptu appearances over the weekend of pianist Maya Dunietz, also showcased Hayden Chisholm’s spontaneity and musical versatility.
Two other solo sets were powerfully emotional expressions of two different aspects of saudade. Saudade is a Portuguese word expressing nostalgic longing for a place or a person, and to me saudade is the word that best captures these strongly emotional performances. The beautiful and joyous appearance in the Büro explored his Kiwi homesickness in a fluid musical history evoking Maori culture and history as a touchstone, including “Pōkarekare Ana”, a traditional New Zealand love song in written in Maori around the time of WW1. The music is scrupulously reduced folk jazz, reminiscent of Northumbrian music with the Shruti drone and the pentatonic in the flutes and sax, and that unforgettable throat singing. The most directy affecting moment was a pure blues with a harmonica and vocal call-and-response in a bittersweet tribute to his residency and residence at Moers: “I played my heart out here and I’ll play my heart out more, I’ll even make my last breath here, if there’s one thing I’m sure.”
Photo credit Kurt Rade
The solo set in the attic of the Peschkenhaus art gallery was an expression of the saudade not of place but of personal loss, dedicated to Croatian pianist Matija Dedić, who had passed away the day before. “Then sings my soul, my soul, how great the love” he sang, and in another coruscating blues, “My brother’s gone, my brother’s gone. You left too soon. Far behind the moon, we’re all alone, cold to the bone.” The concert the day before had also included a dedication to another of Hayden Chisholm’s mentors, pianist John Taylor, who died ten years ago. In the festival Halle Hayden Chishom performed with Kinetic Chain, a jazz supergroup of pianist Achim Kaufman, bassist Petter Eldh, and drummer Jonas Burgwinkel in a set styled as “an inventory of losses before a sunrise in Gemini” adjacent to Chisholm’s fiftieth birthday, with the set list a “mosaic of thirty years”. Contrasting the intimacy of the solo sets, this full scale concert in the Halle was packed out, with the group closely arranged in the centre of the space with folk convivially all around. Somehow it retained a sense of special intimacy. It was a mosaic, a personal musical recollection or recapitulation of three decades of a career in a life, but it felt just like pure music, from the heart.
