Halvorson’s oblique guitar, a sort of impossible mix between Bill Frisell and Anthony Braxton, often plays the leading role … Video, Photos

Genoa, isolated by the yoke of the highways in constant maintenance, out of the loop of major musical events due to lack of space or organizational capacity, clinging, as far as jazz is concerned, to the praiseworthy but disproportionate programming of two city clubs and little more, for once has taken revenge.

Home of the first and only date in Italy, Thursday 14 November, of the Thumbscrew trio, namely Michael Formanek, Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara, one of the most famous, authoritative and original groups of contemporary jazz, hosted on the stage of La Claque to close the autumn season of the Gezmataz festival.

About a hundred people in the audience, who fully got the better of the evening climatically not encouraging the exit. Live, the peculiarities of the trio already known through the eight albums published together, stand out even more vividly.

The impression is of having three soloists in front of you who, by chance, have managed to find the right combinations to make their instruments coexist, a bass that sculpts the notes or caresses them with extreme sweetness, the very agile guitar that sometimes deviates from reality to follow imaginary paths (it always reminds me, with those slips of tones, of Dalì’s soft watches), the drums that fly free, often independent from the role of rhythmic support.

The setlist, after a couple of relearning tracks taken from the past repertoire, focused on the most recent “Wingbeats” published by Cuneiform records a few months ago, here proposed again for the trio format without the aid of the vibraphone.

Halvorson’s oblique guitar, a sort of impossible mix between Bill Frisell and Anthony Braxton, often plays the leading role in the exposition of the angular themes composed by the trio, alternating with Formanek’s powerful double bass, when the latter, abandoning the rhythmic support, exposes his intense and lyrical singing. Fujiwara stands out for his agility and coloristic imagination, giving Thumbscrew’s music a pervasive circular motion.

Written pages and improvisation alternated in equal measure, with the latter obviously having a prevalent space compared to the recordings, as happens in the reinterpretation of “Orange was the color of her dress, then silk blue” by Mingus, presented as a tribute to the music loved by the three and also an occasion for a remembrance of the great names recently disappeared from the list of living jazz musicians, such as Quincy Jones or Roy Haynes.

The hour and a half spent with Thumbscrew ended with great satisfaction from the audience who came to listen to music that was perhaps even more immediate than expected, with the cover of “The Peacock” by Jimmy Rowles, conducted impeccably and “dirtied” at the end by an electronic scribble by Halvorson.