Reviews

Irish Timeswriters review EST/Microclimate and Niwel Tsumbu Duo

EST/Microclimate at Vicar Street

Eagerly anticipated by a packed attendance, EST's only Dublin concert of their Irish tour didn't disappoint. Although EST - Esbjörn Svensson (piano), Dan Berglund (bass) and Magnus Ostrom (drums) - have been together for more than a decade, their work remains astonishingly fresh. They tackle each piece as if by stealth, easing from an exploratory idea, riff or rhythm, which gradually morphs into a full-blown performance.

There's also an abiding impression that not all of these stealthy beginnings are pre-ordained cues into an agreed repertoire. It gives what they do a constant element of surprise, even when they deftly pick up on cues to go into an arranged section. Most of all, the group has an abundance of ideas couched in an acute, collective sense of nuanced dynamics, colour - including an undeniably musical use of electronics - and texture. Much of the material was from their current CD, Tuesday Wonderland, including the opening Eighthundred Streets by Feet, which began with a piano riff against arco bass and developed through a superb piano solo into a trio performance full of drama and tension. That, in turn, segued into a grooving Behind The Yashmak, via a long pizzicato bass solo.

They shifted back to the current CD for a lovely The Goldhearted Miner, with a deceptively simple, gorgeous piano solo in which traces of Svensson's classical background in Schumann and Ravel were discernable. A powerful Mingle in the Mincing Machine (where do they get the titles?) followed for contrast, until a bass pedal allowed them to go straight into a gentler rocker, Definition of a Dog, by which time the groove was positively euphoric.

The final three pieces, Sipping On The Solid Ground (the only performance which developed some longueurs), Goldwrap and the encore, Dolores in a Shoestand, came from the new CD, and it's worth noting that the encore was far from being a perfunctory gesture.

Earlier, the trio was preceded by an impressively together set by Microclimate - Ronan Guilfoyle (bass), Joe O'Callaghan (guitar) and Seán Carpio (drums) - whose flexibility was, at times, reminiscent of Tim Berne's Big Satan, heard at the same venue recently. Ray Comiskey

Niwel Tsumbu Duo at The Sugar Club

Niwel Tsumbu trades in good vibrations. His wayward incantations and surgically precise guitar lines were a breath of fresh air on the eve of our annual paddywhackery love-in. Congolese-born, but resident here, Tsumbu radiates energy.

Accompanied by Éamonn Cagney on spinetingling percussion, he launched headlong into an original repertoire (supplemented by the occasional playful segue towards Mac The Knife, that conjured comparisons with Charles Mingus during his glorious Ah-Um period).

Tsumbu's music is two parts jazz-inflection and three parts African rhythm. His real strength is his abandonment of all notions of western convention in the architecture of his music, favouring instead a freewheeling, unruly and circuitous route that eventually brings him from start to finish. Uh! Eza nzela molayi was a curtain raiser of immense confidence and panache, which gave Tsumbu free rein to straddle guitar, percussion and vocals with celebratory ease.

Admittedly, the song afforded Tsumbu the chance to showcase an embarrassment of musical riches within the first 10 minutes of the evening's performance - with the foreboding concern that we might have heard all he had to offer before we (if not he) had even warmed up.

Truth was though, that Niwel Tsumbu and Éamonn Cagney had a cataclysm of moods and moves to share as the evening wore on. RIP was hypnotically meditative and surprisingly life-affirming, and gave Tsumbu the chance to taper his energy levels to a pedestrian pace, and his childlike delight in his discovery of what he christened The Lost Scale had us eating out of the palm of his hand: an unapologetically light-fingered salutation to the bottomless well that is music.

The Irish Landscape meandered, and the marriage of sean nós and Congolese incantation may take some time to convince, but this was largely due to the discrepancy in vocal prowess of Tsumbu and Cagney, rather than an inherent stylistic incompatibility. At its core though, it offered a neat counterpoint to the Aboriginal concept of songlines, of singing the landscape into existence, blade of grass by blade of grass, tree by tree.

Cagney's percussive contributions were calculus-like, melding elastically with Tsumbu's classically-influenced guitar lines.

Winding down with Unknown Story, a meditation on how nobody has a monopoly on the truth, the Niwel Tsumbu duo unveiled a cavernous stash of redemptive music, and promise much more to come. Siobhán Long