So I should've said from the start of my Jazz Fest blogging that this is the first year I've gone to the thing with any sort of schedule in mind. Before, I would just kind of wander about and catch whatever free shows I could, mostly on weekends. Turns out, I didn't know what I was missing in the off-street venues.

Tonight, I stepped in to the Lutheran Reformation Church on North Chestnut, where Ygdrassil played for something like the fourth time in two days. There's an immediate sense of the sacred when a band plays on an altar (definitely more so than a street stage) and I can see why Tom Kohn, who introduced the band tonight, calls this his favorite 2008 venue. Kristian Blak started the set off with a bit of explanation about the name -- Ygrdassil is the world tree; it's a term you might remember from Nordic mythology -- and the idea behind it: the tree reaches up to heaven, and at the same time, down to hell, a comment on the cyclical nature of all things, how life turns to death and it all happens over and over again. Everything's broken down, then restored.

When the band began its first composition, a piece called "Ravnating," it was immediately obvious that breaking down and building back up again is how Ygdrassil's music works, too. Blak started hunched over inside the paino, plinking at strings, as the music built, ultimately providing a narrative for the images projected on a screen off to the side of the altar. Stark black and white landscapes and pictures of the bird that inspired the piece (the ominous raven) clipped by as the music swirled on.

I didn't look at the clock, but the first piece was probably 30 minutes long; I was enthralled the entire time. The array of horn and wind instruments were manipulated in such ways so that they ommitted sounds more akin to bird calls than traditional music. The bass player's fingers were like spiders chasing each other up and down the slim upright instrument. The guitarist started off a composition of his own with a simple, minimalist progression; when it was pierced by a lone siren from outside, the beauty of it all was only punctuated.

The last few songs were based on chants that, Blak explained, could last seven years at a time. This put the image in my head of being happily lost for the next seven years, stuck, Rip Van Winkle-like, in this church, listening to this beautiful music.