Thessaloniki
and Athens are sort of like Chicago and New York. Even though the former is
usually overshadowed by the latter, they can at least lay claim to having a
distinctive avant-garde jazz scene all their own. Indeed, a free improvisational
music scene exploded in the Aegean city after the fall of the military regime
and it has held on ever since. Although they use the term “jazz”
intermittently, the Free Jazzers discuss in depth the art and practice of
improvisation, as well as some of their shared history in Chryssa Tzelepi &
Akis Kersanidis’s In Situ, which
streams for free until Sunday on Festivalscope’s public facing platform.
Their
ethos is free and experimental, but you can still hear a good deal of structure
in the music documented in situ, in In
Situ. Thanks to a few practically-underground clubs, like pianist Sakis Papadimitriou’s
hole in the wall, the music had an infrastructure to provide gigging and
learning opportunities. We hear him in a variety of contexts, including
plucking the piano strings in a very outside performance, but going inside during
the film’s surprisingly swinging closer.
Tzelepi
and Kersanidis introduce us to many colorful figures, including Gianni Lenoci,
who also experiments with treated pianos, as well as practicing Butch Morris’s
conduction techniques of big band conducting. Drummer Floros Floridas is
Papadimitrou’s frequent duo partner, photographer, Aris Georgiou is sort of the
Francis Wolff of their scene and graphic designer Dimitris Arvanitis is the Reid
Miles.
There
are also a couple ringers of note. German drummer Gunther “Baby” Summer is a
former East German, who originally discovered jazz through Willis Conover’s
Voice of America broadcasts and now regularly collaborates with Greek jazz
musicians. He is also quite stylistically flexible—his nickname is a reference to
an early hero, New Orleans drummer Baby Dodds. We also see parts of a command
performance by Art Ensemble of Chicago veteran Roscoe Mitchell, backed up by
many now familiar Greek jazz musicians.
