Saturday Night 12 Points : Marcin Masecki, Alarmist & The More Socially Relevant Jazz Music Ensemble

12 Points 2014 will close on Saturday night, with three very diverse acts from Poland, Ireland and Netherlands.

Pianist, composer, conductor, independent label fixer; Warsaw native Marcin Masecki has a lot of musical balls in the air. He’s also curious, an excellent quality in any musician, and it comes to the fore in projects that include writing for the Polonezy brass ensemble, directing the Warsaw Orchestra of Recreation and playing in punk cabaret band Paris Tetris. When alone, he plays piano and very well too. A very thoughtful pianist who is evangelical about classical music, determined to make it relevant to his audience on his own terms.

Dublin’s a musically vibrant place, and this is reflected in the DNA of Alarmist, whose backgrounds range from jazz, math rock, electronica and formal composition. They’re crafting very personal and detailed music, and it offers further proof that the next generation of musicians are untethering themselves from the old stylistic dogma. Genres are harvested and manipulated, and multi instrumentalists Neil Crowley, Elis Czerniak, Osgar Dukes and Barry O'Halpin take a quasi orchestral approach that allows their music to hover in its own instrumental space, gravitationally pulled toward a rock aesthetic but constantly implying other philosophies in a way that excites.

The More Socially Relevant Jazz Music Ensemble may have anambitious name, but the gifted young Dutch guitarist Reinier Baas has recruited a line up of luminous musicians from his generation that could well live up to it. Their 2011 debut release brought the superlatives gushing from the Dutch music press, Volkskrant describing them as “the hippest and most exciting jazzband of the Netherlands". If free improvisation is the yin of Dutch jazz, then here is a band unmistakably from the yang, with self-assured grooves from bassist Sean Fasciani and drummer Mark Schilders stretched taut over Baas’ prolific writing, and two saxophonists straining at the leash in Ben Van Gelder and Maarten Hogenhuis.