I over 100 år har Blå Kors med hjerte, kunnskap og kraft vært en trygg havn for mennesker som av ulike årsaker sliter i hverdagen. Det skal vi fortsatt være. Blå Kors Kristiansand ble etablert i 1909, og har en lang historie bak seg. Blå Kors er en diakonal organisasjon som fremmer rusfrihet i samfunnet. Vi hjelper mennesker som sliter med alkohol-, rus- og spilleavhengighet, psykiske utfordringer og mobbing. Organisasjonen satser også på forebyggende tiltak i tillegg til behandling, rehabilitering og ettervern av mennesker og deres familier.
John Kelman should have been here, like in the days of old. A strange place for the opening event of this year‘s Punktfestival, with a French-looking Jesus on the wall, but this venue of Blå Kors offered kindness, fine acoustics, and a really good concert. My first live experience in a very long time. Bugge Wesseltoft was asked to put the group together for this 25th anniversary of Jazzland Records. In these years around 250 albums have been published from well known artists and those deserving wider recognition. I normally don‘t trust anniversary concerts, they easily end up consisting of tapping shoulders instead of taking risks. This one was different. Did they really play for the first time in this set-up? No intense preparations? Nearly unbelievable for what I‘ve heard.
Håkon Kornstad: sax
Harpreet Bansal: violin
Lilja (Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir): guitar
Sanskriti Shrestha: tablas
Audun Erlien: bass
Veslemøy Narvesen: drums
Everyone of them was able to think outside of well-trodden paths. They all managed what Robert Pirsig once described as „lateral drifting“ – finding new ideas on the margins of things and sounds they can handle while sleeping. The interaction was a lesson in mutual empathy – wakefulness and restraint in equal measure. They easily followed one another to places most quiet, and they all seemed to be as curious to each other‘s dicoveries as the audience was. The music was travelling far distant places, in a natural sounding amalgam of styles, in which Classical Indian moments, fusion jazz stylings, nordic folk memories (as well as valuable seconds that would put a smile on the faces of Barney Kessel, Jon Christensen, and Sonny Rollins), were just stages of a long journey. They should do a record.
Live Remix: John Derek Bishop
And then John Derek Bishop offered a kind of „ghost story“ in the aftermath of the concert using his own apparatus and sounds he had sampled from what had happened before – transporting them (and us) into a parallel world of distant echoes, strange reminders, floating water and (crushing?) waves. Closing your eyes, this was a fine opportunity to „turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream“, to put it simple, and with John Lennon.