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ON TARGET Agog’s music was eminently accessible

Nearly a month ago, we did hear a violinist added to the guitar trio led by Amit Heri, but after that it was the guitar-led pure trio of Gerard Machado.

And now, last week, in a concert at the Grand Ashok, we heard the Dutch group Agog comprising Frank Wingold on guitar, Mark Haanstra on electric bass guitar and Joost Lijbart on drums. Not that I had anything against their music. Although one could have been a bit leery of them because they carry something of an avant-garde reputation, their music was eminently accessible to the lay jazz fan.

The reputation in fact was largely a creation of the PR handout that preceded them. That plus the fact that all the music they played was composed by one or other among them, usually a signal that the musicians are avoiding the beaten jazz path in their performing work.

The only thing remotely resembling experimental sounds from their repertoire was when Wingold used an electronic gizmo operated by his foot to create reverberation effects a la rock musicians.

In fact, some of their music, as they said themselves, was influenced by pop/rock and some by the Western classical tradition. But everything was grounded in the hoary jazz tradition of improvisation, and they made a point of saying that this was an “equal” trio, meaning a balanced one, in which every member got into the spotlight as often as the others.

It was particularly a treat to see the number of solo improvisations that Haanstra took, besides playing an anchor role behind Wingold’s solos too.

There were passages in which both of them improvised separate solos simultaneously. Haanstra occasionally started a piece off with a solo intro, as with the opening number (whose title I couldn’t catch but sounded French).

In “Far and Wide”, whose title, according to Wingold, is inspired by the flat landscape of the Netherlands, where the total absence of hills enables one to see the horizon in every direction, the sense of monotony of the landscape was established by a riff or repeated short phrase which ran much of the way through either on guitar or on bass.

Both this number and the fast-paced “The Song Within”, inspired by the work of 20th century east European composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok, were particularly strong in their development, with a series of solo improvisations.

All three musicians performed very well. One would have liked Lijbaart, who came to Bangalore with another Dutch group called Osmosis some years ago, to take a couple of solos, but their lack certainly didn’t prevent one from appreciating his quiet virtuosity in the percussion department.

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