Lucas Niggli and Zoom, June 27, Performance Works

One of the joys of volunteering at this festival over the years – and particularly at our “home” venue, the Performance Works on Granville Island – has been the opportunity to encounter a variety of artists to which our generally straight ahead sensibilities would not normally lead us. Such was the case yesterday with Swiss percussionist, Lucas Niggli, and his band Zoom. Along with German trombonist(and melodica and nose player!), Nils Wogram and fellow countryman Philip Schaufelberger on guitar, he created an afternoon of compelling music, which, for the sake of simplicity, could be described as a mixture of the new and the traditional, the composed and the improvised.

The band played two sets of approximately 45 minutes of length. In general, pieces began with either slow, piannisimo interplay between the players, often more sonic than melodic, followed by a series of mood and tempo shifts finishing in a composed unison ending, or they began with the well paced composed melodic sections and continued with various portions with a series of crescendos and diminuendos. This is not to overly simplify the effect of the music, but to state that each piece had its own arc in terms of mood, meter, and dynamics. In the first set, on the second song, Super Blues(which may have had a bit of a bluesy feel to it at times but was far from being anything close to a standard blues- and that’s OK!), Niggli displayed some attributes which make him a creative force. He was observed surveying his nearby piano chair of various cymbals and other percussive “toys” with the eye of a painter to see just which one would fit for him at that moment. And, for that moment, the particular small cymbal that he put on his tom-tom worked just right. Later, he used his hands to play the traps set as if it were a set of congas. Beautifully done. The final piece of the first set was actually two pieces, “Brain Ballad” and “Celebrate Diversity”. Diversity indeed. Numerous tempo and mood shifts. From fast and free to slowly descending ½ notes to a drum solo with liberal use of the rims to a nose solo by Wogram using his pointer finger to alter the sounds, it had a bit of everything. The fast paced unison ending provided a rousing ending to the first set.

-Bill