How To Disappear Completely

Kaeshammer

My Sarah twin and I hopped over to Hamilton's Studio Theatre last night in order to catch the spectacular performance of Michael Kaeshammer. The German-Canadian jazz pianist not only has some incredible chops, but he captivated the audience with his rather understated banter.

The first set of the act, guitar player Harry Manx, casually appeared clad in a navy blue tuque, flannel shirt, and dungarees. He performed on his banjo, his 20-string Indian-inspired guitar, and a home-made contraption he'd fashioned out of a cigar box, broom sticks, beer bottle caps, and a tire clamp he'd purchased from Canadian tire.

Tall and angular, Michael Kaeshammer ambled on stage in a pin stripe suit, exuding the cool sophistication of a dark lounge. Not only did he demonstrate rather impressive technique on his crazy doubled octave scales and those trills he played so fast his hands faded into fluttering blurs. He was also up for experimental feats of performance gymnastics. At one point, Kaeshammer was straddling the piano bench with one hand on the piano keyboard and the other on the synthesizer keyboard behind him. Not one to miss a beat, he began playing in unison on both keyboards. Then he turned his piano into a momentary drum kit, tapping on every different part, holding the strings down so as to get a wooden sound out of the keys, and plucking the strings in time. I told Sarah that when John Cage did that kind of stuff, people found him incomprehensible, but here was a jazz performer playing the strings of a piano to great applause: the audience was really digging it up.

With two such eclectic performers, putting the two together for the second half of the concert yielded, as Harry Manx told us, a folk blues boogie with a little Indian raga thrown in for good measure. The energy between the two performers was very tight. When Kaeshammer would launch into an extended improv section, Manx would make a great show of tapping his foot, looking at his watch, and then and only then finally picking out a new chord on the fret.

I, for one, was tapping my foot the whole time. I bought a CD, even though jazz is best experienced live.