BLOG: North Sea Round Town door Richard Foster #5 – ENGLISH

Experiments in Interzones

Alessandro Fongaro negotiates trains, mountains, boxing and silent improv 

‘I’m sorry for the poor spelling. I’m fried by the tons of hours spent on the train…’ So let’s continue by text? Alessandro Fongaro is “somewhere in Europe,” returning to Rotterdam after spending some downtime back in the northern Italian hills he’d grown up in, decompressing after his bruising schedule as the Artist in Focus at NSRT. That was to be the subject of our phone call, but it had broken up too many times to continue.

I wonder what it was like for Alessandro, at those mountains again, checking in on their form and presence after a month trying to put them into words and music for those who may never see them in real life. Had they changed? Alessandro didn’t let on. Those musings are for another time. We text about two remarkable shows in Alessandro’s NSRT programme. One was part of a culturele fietstocht, where lucky visitors could cycle around the city and catch various festival events. As part of this, Fongaro found himself slated to play at Boksschool Maaskracht; fitting given the essential physicality of his playing…

It was Fongaro’s first time playing with the formation of Bo van der Werf and Sun-Mi Hong. Of course, Sun-Mi Hong is part of Fongaro’s quartet, Pietre, and there to give a familiar sonic framework to fall back on, but Fongaro ‘hadn’t seen Bo in a long time.’ The bigger  gamble was matching these players to the space they were allotted. Boxing schools have a special atmosphere. They are meant by their very nature to be dynamic and energetic spaces but Alessandro picked up on the ‘light and delicate’ aspects of Boksschool Maaskracht. Would the music the trio made there float like a butterfly? It seems so. Fongaro; ‘The acoustics made us use a wide range of dynamics, never too loud.’ Two concerts were played, for two groups of cyclists enjoying a mix of mild Sunday exercise and some jazz-oriented brainfood. Neither set was the same; the changes mainly came with the sets’ running orders. The repertoire was a mix of numbers from Dolphy, Ellington, and Strayhorn and originals from each of the trio. And a refreshing time was had, by all. Fongaro again; ‘It felt great to be there, at the new boxing school opened by the group of people I had started to box with five or six years ago. Now I could bring my other world, music, into it.’

A more august setting was provided by the Batavierhuis on the 10th of July. And fitting, in that this lovely, slightly sedate old building was the place where the Artist In Focus ‘trajectory’ came to a close. The music, presented under the moniker “Laboratorio del Suono”, was anything but traditional. Alessandro proposed to meet on the day itself with cellist Lucija Gregov and drummer / composer Mark Schilders, and the three put together a distinctive set made of short sketches and pieces (Fongaro’s own and a couple by Paul Motian and one by Milton Nascimento) and ‘a lot of improvisation’.

The three agreed on a central  idea; that of taking ‘a lot of time’ to let each idea and gesture take root and eventually germinate new possibilities. Fongaro; ‘We took a moment of silence at the beginning, as if *that* was the first thing we played, and built very carefully from it. The atmosphere in the room was very beautiful, my photos were exposed so that the audience had to walk by them and have a look before reaching their seats.’

A true haven for artists and performers alike, away from the hullabaloo of the European Championships semifinals… ‘I was surprised a decent amount showed up despite the football. [In any case] I was smiling during the whole set, happy and surprised by the intuition of my fellow musicians: the whole set felt so effortless and at the same time so honest and full of craft and depth.’ The three decided to use no amplification whatsoever; sometimes the hum from the lights was louder than the music played. Fongaro was energised by the commitment to, and acceptance of, the limitations of a purely acoustic performance. ‘Mark chose to perform with a quite unusual set, no hi hat. He also had some stones which he hit and let resonate on the skin of the floor Tom. This concert felt like the perfect closing, healing and liberating.’

Now, back to those stones…

Journalist Richard Foster writes a blog for selected performances at North Sea Round Town 2024. Richard writes regularly for The Quietus and Louder than War and has written for Vice (Noisey) and The Wire among others. 

This was the last blogpost by Foster about NSRT 2024.

Photos: Hielke Grootendorst
Click here to view all the photos made by Hielke Grootendorst.