The theme of this year's festival is "Social Justice" and an announcement was made to that effect at the beginning of the evening. And that was 100% of the social justice-related content of the evening.

So presumably the social justice parts of the festival were in the panel discussions, not the concerts. There's nothing wrong with this, I'm just rejecting what might have been a suggestion that I have made a positive contribution to social justice by attending the ECM marathon last weekend. There doesn't seem to be any connection between those two things.

And if you're going to kick off a music marathon by declaring your interest in working for social justice, you might wish to be as inclusive as possible in your booking. There were no women playing music on stage that night, for example.

Regardless of who is creating the music, however, the music itself is what most of us are there for.

Most of us.

There were too many photographers and they practically ran wild. Much of the music was quiet and the riotous clicking of shutters and the squeaks of wet boots were beyond distracting, approaching ruinous levels of interference.

Somebody sitting behind me during the Coltrane/Virelles set was taking so many pictures (with a loud shutter sound camera) that I wondered if they might be making a stop-motion animation film.

And the Coltrane/Virelles set brings me to my other complaint: excessive amplification.

Michael Formanek's bass amp—or something—was feeding back during his set. And his bass did seem to be over-amplified.

Did it have to be amplified at all? Did anything have to be miked? They were an acoustic quartet.

The start of the Ravi Coltrane/David Virelles was delayed because there was a problem with getting the microphones to work. But why did they have microphones? A piano and saxophone duet shouldn't need them. And when Virelles played percussion at one point, the excellence of what he was doing was marred by his occasionally hitting a microphone that, I think, didn't have to be there.

Bill Frisell had a problem with a cable during his set. But he's an electric guitarist, this wasn't a case of amplifying something that didn't need to be amplified. Problems of an electrical nature seemed to be the real theme of the festival, though. (The projector also went on accidentally during Frisell's set. There were gremlins in the wires that night.)

All of this made it a relief when Nik Bärtsch's group took the stage for the final peformance. Not only were they coming from a much different musical place than the other performers, but they also played completely acoustically, no microphones, no amplifiers, nothing.

So if you were just thinking that the acoustics and dimensions of the concert hall required all of the amplification I've been describing, Mobile proved otherwise. They were beyond refreshing.

Next year: try it without microphones and amps unless it really, really isn't going to work without them.