Rok Zalokar Trio - Port Songs (2019)

Port Songs is a collection of compositions the title of which comes from living and composing in port cities during the years 2016 – 2017.
These are the cities where the composer lived – Rotterdam & Copenhagen – and the special city, where jazz and its piano language appeared for the first time – New Orleans. The multicultural nature of those cities is the main inspiration not by direct cultural fusion, but more through using an abstraction of the process by which those elements come together. The selection of small bits of different traditions and their use as a basis for composition and the improvisational process.
This trio also came together in Rotterdam, Alessandro Fongaro and Ruud Voesten being some of the most active young musicians on the scene. The band performed mostly in venues in and around the Netherlands, most notably at North Sea Jazz festival 2016, which was the same year the band was awarded with the prestigious Erasmus Jazz Prize. The Port Songs project premiered at Ljubljana Jazz Festival 2018 and was afterwards documented in Cankarjev dom.