This is the first of AJ’s reports from this years 54th festival in the town of Moers in Northern Germany
“The way to live is defiantly, and the way to defy is to live,” said Vijay Iyer at the close of a headline set with Wadada Leo Smith performing compositions from their new album Defiant Life: the title of the album neatly encapsulates the twin watchwords of radicalism and exuberance which characterised the 54th edition of the Moers festival; in a concert of discrete light and shade, Iyer and Wadada gave us a masterclass in how to combine them.
The town of Moers lies on the western bank of the Rhine with Duisburg on the opposite bank, but the caprices of the German transport system can often make access to it unpredictable. The festival has its roots in free jazz, but is now squarely uncategorizable, in part due the efforts of its ebullient director since 2014, Tim Isfort. Over four days the intimate site in Moers city park and various venues in town was home to 2000 ticket holders and 250 artists from 20 countries.
The overarching theme of Moers 2025 was “Stille” evoking “Silence as a Space, a Stance, a Sign of Hope”: a theme which it might be paradoxical to pursue in such a melee of noisy activity. With so much going on we won’t have time to touch on the two Focus Countries China and Rwanda, or the “hfcm// moers” series in collaboration with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (more on that in a separate piece), or the “Über’m Platz” performances sixty feet up in a cherry picker, or about getting bikes and following the Pianomobil around town while Mark Holub and Chris Williams from Led Bib jammed; or Cath Roberts and Iris Colomb performing in a box made out of Japanese paper; or the eight-hour concert “Multiple Voices” in which two classical singers Terry Wey & Ulfried Staber performed all forty a cappella vocal parts of Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in alium” one line at a time; or my own international festival performance debut blowing a trumpet, badly, alongside Improviser In Residence Bart Maris and a small boy, who was actually pretty good.
“Moers ist politisch!” proclaims one of the slogans dangling from the roof in the main hall, and the way festival and politics intertwine in this town and region is a necessary part of the story. In the UK we tend to think of politicians as philistines who wouldn’t know one end of a saxophone unless they could claim it on expenses, and so encounters between creative types and public servants seem moot, but laudable. Here it runs deep. At a jazz-not-jazz festival, anti-fascist messages naturally abound, but there’s also an interesting undercurrent concerning local representation. The Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party between them hold two thirds of the town council seats. It is not so much politics being downstream from culture as an intertwining of the two which is as deep as it is ultimately healthy. Ina Brandes (CDU Ministerin für Kultur und Wissenschaft) opened the festival with a speech reassuring the festival’s future and funding (despite its having been cut 10-15% since last year). Just before I saw Hayden Chisholm perform in the mayor’s office (more on that in a separate piece), Sun Yizhou & Tim Soloveitzik were in the Wahlkreisbüro of Jan Dieren of the SDP.
Moers stalwarts still talk in hushed tones about Sun Ra in 1979, which was the same year the returning Wadada Leo Smith played as well, and the year that Moers instigated “projects”, now renamed the “moers session!” on the outside stage “Unter Bäume” on the Solimare meadow, where improvisers are thrown together to be spontaneous in free sessions. The drama was heightened by the changeable weather alternating ten minutes of hot sun and ten minutes of ferocious downpour accompanied by wind.
The nuclear heat of creativity in the groupings sometimes resulted in fusion: the sextet including Liran and Pete from Led Bib was a space rock wormhole; a quartet with Led Bib’s Chris and Charlotte Keefe was a fever dream of felicitous abstraction and sticky funk; an incendiary pairing of Charlotte and saxophonist Hans Peter Hiby in a raucous quartet performance channeling the riotous spirit of freedom music.
Sometimes there was fission: Led Bib drummer Mark Holub and turntablist Mariam Rezaei dominated a quintet effecting uneasy glimpses of the digi-apocalypse; and John Dikeman is for me the most exciting saxophonist around, with such ferocious technical power to make the extended range of the horn sound like the standard range, at which range he has some of the ragged throatiness of Peter Brotzmann. It’s definitionally ear-splitting so you have to want to enjoy extreme exertion on the side of both performer and audience, this might be the quintessential expression of one kind of defiant life – especially in the pouring rain.
Defiantly, the sun shone on the meadow stage for Led Bib premiering their new four-piece format and a new album, Hotel Pupik. They sound fresh and rejuvenated. In their journey over ten albums they have evolved away from pithy head-improvisation based structures with an ever more sophisticated integration of elements born of their strong bond. With Liran’s expanding bass fx rack and their classic double alto format newly supplemented with Pete taking on a tenor and good use of Chris’s fierce baritone sax, they really blew the roof off that open air stage.
Photo credit: Elmar-Petzold
Defiant life couldn’t be brought home harder than The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. Their debut album is an intense and uncompromising bricolage and babelogue of musical languages vividly realised by the quartet of Mariam Rezaei (turntables), Mette Rasmussen (alto sax), Gabriele Mitelli (picc tp, electr), and Lukas Koenig (dr). At Moers they plain rocked out. They’re like an electronically enhanced Irreversible Entanglements, with that same vital and exciting, even epochal, sense of urgency, the feeling that it matters. It felt like an event, like the opposite of the festival’s theme of silence: pure politisch. And sheer class to a stop dead on a sample of a voice demanding “you wanna know what’s good?” The rest is “Stille”.
