Paul Zetter – Achieving Intimacy

Our jazz reviewer finds a new kind of audience at a concert featured in the current EU Music Festival. From the very fist note to the very last in the Hanoi Youth Theatre last Sunday, the Harmen Fraanje trio achieved something very rare and difficult to find on a stage in a 200 plus seat theatre – true musical intimacy. As Harmen and the other two people in the conversation;  Clemens van der Feen on bass and Flin van Hemmen on drums, wove cinematic stories filled with space, longing and hues of blue and green we, the audience, became willing and mostly silent participants, indeed almost intruders on intimate moments of musical thought and exposition.

Maybe the Netherlands’ best kept musical secret, Fraanje has been making CDs for a while but his most recent, Avalonia (2010), made its mark and got attention all around the world for it masterful rendition of beautifully spacious original compositions that seem to drift past you like clouds but with the clarity and flow of a mountain stream. If you hadn’t noticed, there is a global jazz trio renaissance going on and Fraanje is very near the crest of this new wave.

I didn’t think the exquisite sound mixing at the recent Max.Bab concert at the Goethe would be bettered any time soon, but on this night the mix was decibel perfect, making the Youth Theatre feel like it was a living room with a grand piano in.  As Fraanje’s opening notes trickled into our consciousness, accompanied by the pianist’s almost inaudible high pitched humming as van Hemmen’s drum started to join in, it was immediately clear that here were three young men who knew the meaning of musical communication. But how do you convey intimacy in a large space with 200 people listening and stage lights shining?   I suppose it has something to do with concentration, control and emotional openness. Let go and intimacy can easily become sentimentality, keep control and you don’t connect. Make yourself vulnerable and people enter your world, paint from the head and people stay on the surface.  The trio could play with the lightest of touches that would make a feather seem a clumsy instrument or bring on thunder in perpetual arpeggios that rose to a crescendo then violently stopped.  The musicality and sheer brilliance of van der Feen and van Hemmen keeping the music rooted but flowing. At times, the simple sound of Hemmen’s bare hand skimming the drum skin could evoke a universe of possibilities.

As the songs passed by with titles unannounced – many are on their CD Avalonia available at link below – the audience kept up their side of the bargain and remained focused too. It made me appreciate the silent contract an audience has to make with the performers for a successful two-way communication – it was so finessed this evening that every cough or muted chatter (of which there was incredibly little) sounded like a monstrous intrusion. Joined on stage by two traditional Vietnamese musicians introduced as Tuan and Ha on Dan Bau and Bamboo xylophone, the trio became a quintet and continued in much the same vein. Even with the novelty of such traditional instruments taking on new roles like creating textures and percussive accents we remained rapt.

This was a very strong offering in the current  eclectic EU Music Festival line-up – it started as a jazz festival after all.  Heartfelt thanks to the Dutch for raising the jazz in Hanoi  bar one more time and creating a shared experience that went so deep and personal.  Now the jazz trio baton will pass to Anne Paceo at L’Espace on 25 Nov – happy times. Visit Harmen’s website Words and photographs by Paul Zetter