Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Gent, België

Attending a concert by the Jef Neve Trio can be a moving experience. There is an intensity about his piano playing that transfixes an audience. At the recent album launch at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels of his major label debut Nobody Is Illegal on Universal’s EmArcy label, there was a moment during “Abschied” when he seemed to make time stand still. His improvisation possessed such compelling melodic clarity the whole audience seemed to hold their collective breath. When it was over their roar of approval said it all.

Yet while it was clear that while he delighted in the physical properties of music – textures, rhythms and dynamics – Neve never lost sight of music’s story-telling privilege, spinning beguiling melodies and taking them to unexpected destinations. On the evidence of this concert he emerges as a young musician of enormous promise who has the potential to become a major voice on the European jazz scene.

Together with bassist Piet Verbist and drummer Teun Verbruggen they created music that was sharply focussed yet broad in its appeal. The key was Neve’s lyricism. Often beginning with a deceptively simple melody, he inverted it, extended it and developed it thematically through increasing force fields energy provided by Verbist and Verbruggen until it reverberated with orchestral grandeur.

Original compositions such as “Nothing but a Casablanca Turtle Slideshow Dinner,” “Second Love” or “Together at Last,” not only revealed the group’s musical maturity through manipulation of the rising line and their masterful use of tension and release, but also a youthful sense of adventure with improvisations that seemed to grow organically from the thematic material at hand, rather than indulging in technical showboating that all too often passes for jazz these days.

Proud of his Flemish heritage and of European culture that forms the backdrop to his daily life, Neve is at the forefront of a new breed of young musicians who are unafraid to show in their music where they come from. In fact, the Jef Neve Trio could only come from Europe. While Neve’s mastery of jazz improvisation is clear, so too is his mastery of classical music that saw him graduate with Master of Music degrees in both disciplines from the Lemmensinstituut in Louvain in 2000.

With so many young European jazz musicians educated in both jazz and classical music today (something that rarely happens in the United States education system), it is perhaps inevitable that today, many young musicians from across the continent see it as perfectly natural to draw on both disciplines as a means of broadening jazz expressionism. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t use classical music in jazz,” says Neve. “I mean, European musicians don’t mind that maybe some of our music doesn’t swing. It’s not a rule, we don’t have that pressure you can have in America, so I think we are more free to experiment with different ideas.”

It has meant the emergence of a distinctive European voice in jazz in recent years and is the most exciting development in jazz in over a quarter of a century. Suddenly European jazz is hip while American jazz is seen as passé and with the release of Nobody Is Illegal, the Jef Neve Trio is set to emerge as a very hip European group indeed. “Europe is the new jazz area,” says Neve. “Because of our cultural diversity I think we have an open mind on how you can create music. We don’t really fight the rules – we don’t have rules that it should sound like this or that [like they do in America].

The result was a jazz concert that included many elements that are more commonly (but by no means exclusively) encountered in classical music – pedal points, a greater use of dynamics, rubato, rhythmic diversity, thematic development, ad hoc songforms and accelerando – that contributed to the overall richness of a startlingly original performance. Add to this the group empathy developed by the trio since their formation in 2003 and the questing imagination of their charismatic leader’s soloing and you have all the ingredients for a memorable gig. In an age where the quick musical fix has become the norm, Neve’s music, it seems, is set to be around for the long haul.

http://www.theobserver.com/