Tigran Hamasyan
Organiser: Voll-Damm Barcelona Jazz Festival
Venue: Paral·lel 62
Photography: Jordi Amela (@amela_photo_concert)
Writer: Carles Pinós
Report in collaboration with Genesimphonic (Ràdio Gelida)
On 3 November, at Sala Paral·lel 62 as part of the 55th Voll-Damm Barcelona Jazz Festival, we had the chance to witness a truly unique event: the Tigran Hamasyan (b. 1987) trio. The musician, born in Gyumri, Armenia, came accompanied by Marc Karapetian (electric bass) and Arthur Hnatek (drums). The concert opened with Tigran alone at the piano, a calm, intimate, unhurried start in which the piano phrasing was joined by his own voice. Without a break, the concert moved straight into ‘Levitation 21’ from his album ‘The Call Within’ (2020), a track with the complex development and intricate rhythms that are the band’s trademark, leaving the audience stunned by what they were witnessing. The trio then carried on with ‘New Maps’, also taken from ‘The Call Within’, on which, once again, the trio showed itself perfectly in sync, executing the track’s harmonic and rhythmic complexities with Swiss-watch precision, constantly playing with contrasts in volume. Before launching into the next piece, Arthur Hnatek took a moment to address the crowd and introduce the trio and their music.
After a beautiful solo-piano opening, ‘Entertain Me’ came in and drove the crowd wild with the musicians’ skill and precision — a track built on a stubborn drum groove within a fusion of jazz and ethnic music laced with progressive elements. The start of the next track caught us off guard with an electronic bass sound used as a pedal note, over which Tigran Hamasyan spun his sonic toys on the piano, perfectly blending tradition and modernity; the track was ‘The Dream Voyager’. The concert continued with this overwhelming, intricate sound on tracks like ‘The Space of Your Existence’, among others, before the set opened out into a precise, imaginative drum solo, with the piano chipping in with subtle percussive chords. Finally, the track offered up a series of rhythmic breakdowns leading into the concert’s close. The encore, a well-developed track squarely in ‘nu-jazz’ territory, served to show off the side of the band most devoted to this kind of music.
The concert ended and the crowd rose to its feet demanding more, and after a long, tense wait, with Sala Paral·lel 62 nearly full to capacity, the trio reappeared to play their well-known ‘Vardavar’, to the delight of everyone there. In short, we had in front of us one of today’s great pianists on the jazz scene, who, with his trio, served up an explosive harmonic cocktail seasoned with impossible rhythmic patterns, performed with millimetre precision and a level of musical rapport rarely seen. Now all we can do is count the days until this incredible trio comes back to play Barcelona again and treats us to another intense, overwhelming, abrasive concert.
