PANOPTICON — Live @ De Kriekelaar (review)

PANOPTICON — Live @ De Kriekelaar album cover

Live album · 2008 · Eclectic Fusion

4/5 · 2011-05-20
Sean Trane

One Brussel’s more amazing feat, culturally-speaking, is that the French majority culture is left penniless (letting imagination and innovation reign), while the Flemish minority crumbles under tons of subsidies. Generally the public doesn’t give a damn about which community organizes the events, but in this case it happened to be a local Schaerbeek (Brussels) cultural centre, named after the sour cherries (gracing the back cover artwork) that grew there and used to make the famous Kriek beer. While PaNoPTiCoN played in the old building, most of the concerts I’ve seen there (Aranis, etc…) are in the new theatre at the back f the premises.

Soooooooo that night I was taking out a local standard-jazz singer lady friend (Liza Dee) for her to discover more energetic forms of jazz (and I needed her to hear to illustrate my type of music to make my point) and her first exposition to PaNoPTiCoN overjoyed her to the point that she managed to convince the guys in the band to make an encore with her on vocals. I think she surprised the band members with her adaptation to them with her aerial vocalizing (it seemed to click almost instantly), but unfortunately due to technical reasons, the recording went awry and was unsalvageable; therefore that part is not on this disc. What we’re left is a more “normal” PaNoPTiCoN set - as if that existed, since it is always improvised. That night, Domenico chose the usual (or often-returning) Guennet on keys and Catala on bass, recalled Lossignol on trumpet, but Delgado’s presence (on guitar) was the first time I got to hear him.

Playing in front of a small bunch of Uni students that night, PaNoPTiCoN must’ve wowed a few of them, because most stayed until the end, which is a feat, since that type of red-hot jazz-rock usually clears a room fairly quickly. The band sounded more like Miles Davis’ formation circa Big Fun as On The Loose indicates, due in part to Lossignol’s trumpet inspirations, while the aptly-titled Slaughterhouse 5 (fifth track on the disc) is definitely a free-jazz improv that then moves into gentler moments.

Among the stranger (or unusual for the group) tracks improvised that evening is the extremely quiet Narmada’s Drift, which never lifted above ground zero, just playing ambient over Solazzo’s percussion and IMHO overstaying its welcome by a few minutes, even if it eventually morphs into a more incisive Breathe Deep, with Lossignol trying to cover up Domenico’s overloud and unsubtle (just in the finale) drumming. Closing up the show, Dom’s percussion leads again his crew into one final crescendo that is aptly titled Codex Chaos Control, which describes fairly well the music.

It’s kind of funny that as I wrote this review (listening to the “album” in my living room) well over two years after seeing the given concert, the music on the disc doesn’t stick much with the memories I have retained from that evening.