More Low Than Low Quintet with its debut album

After the album Young Researchers IV. – Brina Kren – Crucial Encounters, released in December last year, Jazz Cerkno Records published another album recorded at the 26th festival. It is the debut of the Slovenian-Italian band More Low Than Low Quintet entitled Under the Ocean is the Place, which was released as a CD and digital album on Friday, February 18. The quintet, which played its premiere concert at our festival, boasts a very imaginative and in the world of jazz not very common set of instruments: three double basses and two bass clarinets. The band was brought together by Matjaž Bajc, the author of all compositions on the album. He is known from the band Koromač, which also has an album recorded at the Jazz Cerkno festival (Kontrapunk, 2019). The roots of this bass-wind quintet can be found in the trio of double bass players Matjaž Bajc, Giovanni Maier and Žiga Golob. Maier as well as both Italian woodwind musicians, Marco Colonna and Mimo Cogliandro, are known for their collaborations with Slovenian musicians.

For its premiere performance at our festival the quintet members announced that they will “explore the mutual communication of low voices and also hit some higher registers, too.” The five musicians achieved the coexistence of very low tones and vibrations with a distinctly focused and harmonious performance. The compositions start as sketches with a barely recognizable motif of one of the musicians, which others then skillfully take over, and from the initial hint compose suggestive buzzing songs with a lot of lyricism, dreaminess and romance. “We haven’t seen anything like this before, especially when Colonna and Cogliandro played; their instruments were tense accompaniment in some places, and elsewhere they deepened the hustle and bustle of big double basses,” Andrej Pervanje wrote in a concert review for Radio Študent. Darinko Kores Jacks summed up the performance in Večer newspaper: “The band’s of increasingly complex and intertwined interactions between sound lines gradually leads to ecstatic climaxes that sound almost ritualistic.” The album, which is part of our discographic series Live at Jazz Cerkno, is available online at our bandcamp.