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EMW at Jazzkaar Festival – Part Three: the Understated Fusion of ELLIP


Jazzkaar Festival is over now, and as you'd want from any good music festival, it has left attendees with an engaged musical brain on multiple levels. There was a session of morning yoga soundtracked by double bass player Mingo Rajandi. Performers and composers discussed the fate of big band jazz. Singer Stig Rästa, of Eurovision fame, sang his hits alongside a song to get kids excited about brushing their teeth. And, as shown in the last two parts of this series, bands from across Europe and the US got to the core of jazz.
ELLIP live. Photo: Martin Ahven (2021)

The curation of a jazz festival's lineup is an interesting thing, isn't it? Jazz at Lincoln Center—a key cultural institution in New York City—describes jazz as “a metaphor for Democracy. Because jazz is improvisational, it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression.”

While not every artist was swinging on the ride cymbal, had saxophone or trumpet solos, or walked to the scale of an upright bass player, the artists who played spoke to the freedom and individual expression of the genre. Perhaps jazz has broadened itself through its own fundamental, democratic components.

I certainly find those ideas—along with unconventional rhythmic patterns and front and centre bass parts—in the music of ELLIP, a six-piece band that played at Fotografiska in Tallinn on Friday August 27th, as well as a solo terrace concert the following afternoon with lead singer and songwriter Pille-Riin Karro.

Take a listen to “Shivers” and “Fool”, from ELLIP's 2020 EP Four Words, and you'll come across stylish moments of glitches and skips in the drum beat. And then there's that earworm of a chorus in the latest single “Square One,” that moves like a swift left and right stomping dance routine.

(Read more: Estonian Life No. 36 2021 paber- and PDF/digi)

Written by Vincent Teetsov, Toronto


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