Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

Bang On A Can Marathon 2008

Without the manic intensity of me trying to liveblog every set of a 27-hour concert as it was happening, this year's Bang On A Can Marathon felt a lot more chill. Of course, it was also considerably shorter, clocking in at a mere 12 hours and change. Perhaps inevitably, it was also less diverse, with just four artists representing from outside of "new classical" circles (Karsh Kale, Owen Pallett, Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon). So yeah, evidently nobody from the jazz team made the cut this year. (The 2007 Marathon had sets by Vijay Iyer, Don Byron, and the World Sax Quartet.) However, the out-of-towners included Ireland's Crash Ensemble, Israel's Ensemble Nikel, and my peeps from the Soviet Socialst Republic of Canuckistan, Contact.

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Alarm Will Sound played John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd mvt.), Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, and (much later in the night) Matt Marks's arrangement of The Beatles' (by which we really mean John Lennon's) Revolution #9.

The Adams is actually a reincarnation of a piece originally written for Kronos Quartet, later retrofitted for the Alarmists. It's a brisk amusement-park ride and they pretty much slayed it. It has some 4-on-the-floor bass drum that works infinitely better than that infamous orchestral "techno" section in Thomas Adès's Asyla -- although to be fair, I would probably like piece that a lot more if it was ever played with Alarm-level rhythmic authority.

AWS brought the same precision and intensity to the Birtwistle, a piece that is a very good example of the kind of fractured, disjunct, big-M Modernist aesthetic  I basically cannot hang with. The individual moments here are often really striking -- we occasionally get a little taste of a cool little angular bass line -- but that's all Birtwistle will ever allow us, just a taste. Then he interrupts it with a few seconds of dissonant long tones, and even that quickly splinters off, motivic shards flying off in every direction. The performance was tight and they made a great case for it, but this cocktail of two parts solemnity to one part ADD is not really my drink of choice.

Carmen Arcadiae… actually makes musique concrète's all-time biggest hit, Revolution #9, sound positively linear by comparison. Matt gave a very entertaining introduction to his arrangement, wherein he likened Alarm Will Sound's penchant for creating acoustic reinterpretations of electronic music to Harry Potter fanfic: "Basically, we're giant geeks." So yeah, it's pretty much straight-up fanservice for the small but obsessive subset of Beatles fans who were actually intrigued by the White Album's penultimate, ah, "tune." (A Venn diagram would probably show considerable overlap between that set and the set of people who show up at the Bang On A Can Marathon.) Anyway, this painstaking recreation is wholly absurd and I loved it -- Matt's chart is wildly entertaining and theatrical, with members of the band honking car horns, screaming into mutes,  imitating backwards tape loops, and screaming in each other's faces. ("Hold that line! Block that kick!") Does my fanboyish enjoyment of this arrangement make me a giant hypocrite? Yeah, probably. So what else is new?

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Pamela Z played and sang Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave. I love Pamela Z. This time, she did not use her customary BodySynth, but a motion-sensitive theremin-like controller she called a "Swearingen" (named after the gadget's inventor, not Al.) Pamela went second (in between the first two AWS pieces) and, in an uncomfortable echo of last year's Juana Molina fiasco, her performance was delayed by tech gremlins. I dunno if the tsuris caused her to have to abbreviate her set, but whatever the reason, it was too damn short.

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Lisa Moore played Annie Goslfield's Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, for piano and keyboard-triggered sampler.

Gosfield explained that "Lightning Slingers" is old-school slang for "telegraph operators," and "dead ringers" refers to how the acoustic piano sounds are sampled and transformed into sounds that recall analog synths, slide guitar, and such like. I liked the moody, resonant middle section, and Lisa Moore is always impressive.

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The Crash Ensemble played Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás, Terry Riley's Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle (3rd mvt.), and later on, Arnold Dreyblatt's Resonant Relations.

Dennehy is an Irish composer, in case you couldn't tell. He is also the artistic director of the Crash Ensemble. If you are Irish, it must really suck to know that there is basically no aspect of your traditional culture that has not been commodified and kitschified for global export, to the point where now all it takes is a single pennywhistle appoggiatura or a mournful celtic fiddle slide to make people want to stab a shilelagh into their ear canal. This is to say that Dennehy has a tough row to hoe, trying to bring old-style Irish sean nós singing into a new music context, without stumbling into cliché -- and you know what, for the most part, he succeeded. While I did find the piece a wee bit meandering, the closing gesture, with Iarla Ó Lionáird's sweet voice riding atop the ensemble's furiously cascading arpeggios made for an ecstatic release.

Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson was pulling double duty last night, conducting Crash as well as his own band, but he left the Celts to their own devices for Terry Riley's Loops for Giant Nude Hairy Warriors etc. I enjoyed this drumset-driven, odd-meter aggro romp immensely.

I wanted to enjoy Arnold Dreyblatt's Resonant Relations -- it used an intriguing tuning system and contained some fun, oddball synth-harpsicord ostinatos -- but the music felt very stiff and episodic, without much apparent momentum or direction. I just wasn't feeling it.

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Karsh Kale (tabla) and Raj Maddela (drum kit) played Timeline, which is basically a collection of sick beats, with occasional electronic pads underneath. Their hookup was great and the Hinustani-meets-hiphop beats were, I believe I mentioned, sick, but man cannot live by sick beats alone. I wanted to hear a proper band over top of those grooves.

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Caleb Burhans sang no.

His sweet, ethereal countertenor sang out over a simple looped wash. The phrasing was irregular but flowing and organic, and Caleb's melodic instincts are unerringly sound. The performance had a spontaneous feel to it, so I asked Caleb later if it was improvised. He told me it was transcribed from an improvisation he'd recorded.

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The Hartt Bass Band played Julia Wolfe's Strong Hold.

A Masada-inspired (no, not, Zorn's band... the actual fortification) epic for eight basses. I was struck by the huge range spanned -- lots of harmonics and off- the-fingerboard playing along with the low-end -- and also the almost complete absence of pizzicato playing. One bit felt almost like a concerto grosso, with frantic, piercing solo tremolos interrupted by weighty tutti arrivals. Unfortunately, though, the microphones were also picking up the click track, which was bleeding over from the players' headphones -- being able to hear that faint click throughout robbed the piece of some of its magic. (Next time, use in-ear monitors.)

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Ensemble Nikel played Chaya Czernowin's Sahaf, and later, Sivan Cohen Elias's Riba and Ruben Seroussi's Nikel.

I'm afraid I wasn't really convinced by any of this music. Sahaf came closest -- it had some nice flittering gestures and I liked the spinning ratchets. But Riba, a sax guitar duet, sounded like it was composed by someone who had maybe read about improv in a couple of back issues The Wire without ever having listened to it, and thought it might be fun to try to elaborately notate what he imagined that sort of thing sounded like. Some drunk asshole actually cat-called the group during their performance of Nikel, shouting out a sarcastic "Wooo!" a few moments into the piece. I unequivocally denounce and reject this outrageous and unacceptable behavior -- just not the underlying sentiment. This piece managed to combine pointless meandering with timid bloodlessness, a combination that is guaranteed to be lethal in 100% of cases.

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The Young People's Chorus of New York City sang Michael Gordon's Every Stop On The F Train

The F train is my train, and the text sung by the chorus is literally what it says in the title, from Jamaica-179th Street to Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue. The setting is inventive and charming -- it needs to be, obviously -- if perhaps not quite as memorable as the kids' selection from last year, Meredith Monk's "Three Heavens and Hells." (I still get little snippets of that one creeping into my brain at odd moments.)

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The Bang on a Can All-Stars played selections from Evan Ziporyn's ShadowBang, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Convex-Concave-Concord, and a bit later, Lukas Ligeti's Glamour Girl.

Ziporyn's piece gradually developed outward from a spare and hypnotic core into a joyous, swaggering, vaguely Frisellian metametric groove. Some Googling reveals that the recording apparently also involves a Balinese singer/shadow puppeteer... I should really check that out.

Very near the end of Convex-Concave-Concord -- after a spending a good long while suspended in quiet reflection amidst softly fluttertongued clarinet notes, indistinct guitar harmonics, and a spare simple woodblock pattern -- there is a sweet arrival point on what sounds like the work's first proper, you know, chord. Things begin to pick up from there. Moments later brings the appearance of what sounds an awful lot like a IV chord, and you begin to suspect something might be up. Soon, there's no escaping it -- you've been gradually drawn into a hazy, slow-mo blues progression. Okay -- that, I did not see coming. But when it hit, it felt improbably right -- I would love to hear it again so I can pay attention to what kind of hints may or may not have been dropped along the way. Regardless, I think this work can comfortably join Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues in that very, very short list of blues-inspired classical works that do not suck.

Lukas Ligeti -- yes, György's kid -- built Glamour Girl around a slightly skewed Afro-Pop sensibility and his drummer's-eye-view of music. I really enjoyed the conversational guitar lines, the blissed-out 3/4 groove in the middle and the abrupt drumroll ending. These three pieces were probably the closest in spirit and concept to my own compositions.

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Violinist and singer/songwriter Owen Pallett played some of his songs, then the BOAC All-Stars joined him for Twelve Polearms.

There was a nice NYT feature on Owen ("The Return of the One-Man Band") not long ago, in which he expressed his abiding hatred of drummers. ("'Drummers ruin bands,' he said simply, as if the fact were common knowledge.") I think I understand where he is coming from -- his play-sample-loop-and-layer methodology is wholly unforgiving. It's true that lots of people are doing that now -- that was, after all, the hook for the article -- but Owen's approach to sampling is notably risky and complex, with no room for error. He's clearly spent a lot of work developing his own internal clock and does not want a drummer trying to tell him where he thinks the time is. But perhaps as a consequence, Owen's aesthetic does not exactly embrace the concept of "groove" with open arms. Obviously, a lot of people who are very smart about music are wholly besotten with Owen's playing and songwriting. So far, I find myself more in the "admire and respect" camp, but there's no question that he is a hell of a musician, and an excellent choice for a BOAC collaboration.

Anyway, after a short solo set, the All-Starts retook the stage and Owen gave a long, tongue-in-cheek preface to his commissioned work, Twelve Polearms, spinning an elaborate yarn about a "great interdimensional conflict" and the musical culture of  an alien race of one-dimensional beings. The piece seemed to hang from an omnipresent undulating two-note figure that ran like a suspension wire through the work. It ended with the BOAC players laying out while Owen manipulated their sounds via captured loops.

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Electronic artist Bora Yoon played ( ((PHONATION)) ), with live visuals by Luke DuBois.

I missed this. I needed a break, and needed to get some food in me.

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SIGNAL (conducted by Brad Lubman) played Steve Reich's Daniel Variations.

SIGNAL is a new new music supergroup containing members poached from Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, Gutbucket, and NewSpeak, and conducted by Brad Lubman (last seen by me conducting Johnny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver at a Wordless Music hit back in January). This is the NYC debut for the group but they are meant to be a going concern. In his intro, Reich emphasized that his music needs an ensemble (i.e., a collection of players who are emotionally invested in both the group and the music they play), not an orchestra (i.e., an ensemble from which "indifferent professionalism" is pretty much the best you can hope for), and talked up SIGNAL as an American counterpoint to the great European new music powerhouses like the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. (There are lots of small new music bands in the US, but few large ones, other than Alarm Will Sound.)

SIGNAL is dominated by younger players because, with a handful of notable exceptions, older generations of classical musicians just flat-out do not get rhythm. They do not believe it is, at minimum, a co-equal element to pitch, and consequently, they just do not spend that much time on rhythm. A singing, fluid rubato line is their comfort zone (which is great for Romantic music, not so much anything else), and  they cannot make the conceptual leap to music that requires a strong, steady pulse. (Often they are disdainful of such music.) They are unable to take personal responsibility for the time. They can't distinguish between playing on top of the beat vs. rushing, or playing behind the beat vs. dragging. They don't get what a profound impact such tiny rhythmic nuances have on the music. They don't know how to lock in with other players. They do not know what a full-body groove feels like. They lack an emotional connection to rhythm.

Everyone in SIGNAL has an undeniable emotional connection to rhythm.

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So Percussion played David Lang's the so called laws of nature

They did this one on the steps at the back (see pics below fold), making the already cavernous Winter Garden sound even more like an aircraft hangar -- Alan Pierson said the walnut planks sounded like crickets. For the second movement, the percussionists moved up a stage to the toms and kick drums. For the third, they moved down to tables where they played on teacups and tuned flowerpots, the sound of which was oddly mesmerizing.

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Marnie Stern played guitar.

At every Bang On A Can Marathon, there is always one artist whose job it is to do everything they can to signal "What the hell am I doing here?" short of actually coming out and saying it. Last year that band was the rap-metal band Dälek. This year, it was scruffy shredhead Marnie Stern, who normally plays and sings with an actual, you know, band. Instead, for the Marathon, she came out alone, set up a wall of squall with her pedals, and only occasionally pierced the veil with some scrabbly double-tapping or a pair of klunky power chords.

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Dan Deacon wrote the electronic parts for Ultimate Reality Part 3. He pressed "play," and then I think he probably left the stage and got his groove on down on the dance floor (and there was a dance floor for Dan's set), but I can't be sure. Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman played the live drum parts.

Kids these days, they love the conservatory-trained Baltimore-based electronic dance guru Dan Deacon. His sound palette is bright and supersaturated with analog warmth. I don't know if he normally uses live drummers, but Omeara and Hyman were both on fire. Jimmy Roe Roche's entertaining video accompaniment mirrored and distorted many of the Governator's greatest cinematic moments. (It struck me that many in the audience were not even born when The Terminator was first released.) Deacon's rapid-fire synth arpeggios sounded a bit like a dance-pop remix of Music in 12 Parts. Good clean fun (with crowd-surfing, even), but seriously, this was way too short -- one 15-minute tune, and that's the whole set? Those kids came down to the Winter Garden at 4 AM to party -- what were they supposed to do now?

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Contact played Allison Cameron's 3rds, 4ths, & 5ths and Brian Eno's Discreet Music (arr. Jerry Pergolesi).

Well, one option for the Deaconites was to stick around for the Toronto-based new music band Contact, and actually, a fair number of them decided to sit tight. (Although some of them appeared to be under the impression that Brian Eno himself would be showing up.) Anyway, Allison Cameron's piece for Contact was a pretty postminimalist ballad, after which they geared down even further into Eno's gauzy dreamscape. I really enjoyed Suzanne Bocanegra's simple but effective video, which involved a hand stacking olive-colored pieces of cardboard. The arrangement didn't quite draw me in the way the All-Stars' version of Airport Music did last year, but it did make for a pleasant bit of sunrise-music. (I think Stimmung was supposed to be the sunrise piece but the Marathon was running a bit late.)

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Toby Twining Music sang Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung. Sonically, it's an incredibly striking piece, constructed almost entirely from overtone singing. (If you've heard Tuvan throat singing, you've heard overtone singing.) It's built from a single, unvarying sonority -- a Bb9 chord, in just intonation (on account of the vocal overtones). It involves "magic names," words and phonemes in multiple languages, and the passing around and transformation of material. You can actually get a pretty good basic sense of the processes that fuel the piece from the work's Wikipedia entry, but if you want the long version, with score excerpts, go here.

Stimmung is a very beautiful and original and transfixing piece of music. The performance was outstanding. (One of the singers was Sylvie Jensen of the M6, a vocal group I have raved about previously, and she was a powerful and charismatic force throughout.) It is also, I feel I should point out, almost 80 minutes long. This was about 20 minutes past the expiration of my patience, at least at that point in the Marathon. Honestly, programming it immediately following the similarly quiet, tranquil, static Brian Eno piece seems a little bit perverse.

I say this only because for the first hour or so, I was completely under the spell of Stockhausen's remarkable work. I didn't want that fugue state to end, but unfortunately, I ran out of gas before the piece did. I stuck it out, of course, but mentally I was spent. I felt like the runner who collapses 400 meters shy of the finish line, and has to drag himself across on his hands and knees.

Maybe I oughta train for these things.

Pictures are below the fold.

OTHER PLACES: Steve Smith in the Times and on his blog.

Bruce Hodges (Monotonous Forest) also went the distance.

Justin Levine (Hey! Student) has a great writeup of the 12 AM - 5:30 AM stretch -- plus video!

Stereogum and Brooklyn Vegan [heart] Dan Deacon. There's YouTube of the first 4:43 of Deacon's set.

Lauren Cartelli (Notes From a Subway Journal) [hearts] Owen Pallett.

Alex Ross is ill, but stuck it out until half-time.

Guest of a Guest does amateur sociology.

Uberthings, via tumblr (which I gather is like Twitter, which I too do not get) "At Bang on a Can. So many people here at 3am. Crazy yngwie style female guitarist rocking out."

(Pics below the fold... )

Todd Sickafoose @ Tea Lounge, 16 May 2008

Todd Sickafoose's writing is just like his playing -- warm-hearted and propulsive, smart and subtle, extroverted and and conversational, patient and unerringly directional. I hear so much music out there right now that falls into one of two equally alienating camps: either it's joyless, torturedly complex, and inward-looking, or it's unremittingly, self-consciously "badass," with no room for the music to breathe or grow. Both are a chore to sit through.

So it was an incredible relief to hear Todd's band last night at the Tea Lounge. Todd's music earns its momentum honestly, as his ideas gradually evolve and adapt to a changing musical environment. Best of all, everyone in the band -- including Society co-conspirators John Ellis (tenor sax) and Alan Ferber (trombone), plus Brian Coogan (keyboards), Mike Gamble (guitar), Jenny Scheinman (violin), and Ben Perowsky (drums) -- seemed precisely attuned to the leader's wavelength.

This is a group that really knows how to ride the crests and shoot the curls, and together they make some of the most exciting new jazz I've heard in a while.

Here's the opening track from Todd's upcoming (June 10) release Tiny Resistors (on Cryptogramophone), a disc I wholeheartedly recommend.

MP3: "Future Flora," Todd Sickafoose (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download)

(MP3 courtesy Cryptogramophone/DL Media)

More pictures below the fold...

Cut me short

TYFT (Hilmar Jensson, Andrew D'Angelo, Chris Speed, Jim Black)
30 April 2008 @ The Stone

short take: Andrew D'Angelo still kicks ass.

(Also: he is selling t-shirts with a CT scan of his brain on them. I bought one.)

Making Music: Frederic Rzewski (with Stephen Drury and Opus 21)
01 May 2008 @ Zankel Hall

short take: Steve Ben Israel owns "Attica."

Mohair Time Warp with Corey Dargel
8 May 2008 @ Joe's Pub

short takes: Corey's irresistible songs are even subtler than you think. Don't believe William Brittelle when he claims to be out of his fucking mind.

Redhooker, Build, and Oliphant
13 May 2008 @ Lit Lounge

short take: Three new-to-me indie classical bands with three very different approaches (saturated, limpid, refractory) to building textural music.

I got a picture of a photograph

Carroll Park, Brooklyn, 17 March 1928:

I swear, you still see those exact same three guys hanging out in the neighborhood every day.

[Via Pardon Me For Asking. See also Lost City for more of this sort of thing.]

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Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, et al @ Randall's Island

When Arcade Fire's Funeral first hit in the fall of '04, accompanied by the legendarily torrential hype, I was perplexed. This band is from Montreal? That's not what Montreal bands sound like. Montreal bands sound like Bran Van 3000. (Remember them? "Drinking In L.A."? "Couch Surfer"?) That was the slacker neosoul sound everyone seemed to be chasing back in the 1990's when I lived there. So what the hell was a vocal jazz major from my alma mater doing in this shambly, punky, anthemic indie rock band, featuring what at the time sounded to me like a really quirky instrumentation -- accordion, recorder, xylophone, harp, etc. -- plus all those great Owen Pallett string arrangements.

A lot has happened in the three years since Arcade Fire broke. At the time, the whole indie rock scene was barely on my radar at all. But I heard Funeral and I thought, hmm, maybe I ought to check out more bands like this.

Meanwhile, Arcade Fire blew up even bigger with this year's Neon Bible, to the point where they are now anchoring an all-day, five-band outdoor festival at Randall's Island. I'm not normally a fan of standing packed cheek-to-jowl on the blacktop for eight hours on an unseasonably hot October afternoon. But since I'd been either busy, out of town, or cruelly thwarted in all of my previous attempts to see Arcade Fire live, I figured it was worth giving it a go. Turned out Saturday's show is their last NYC hit for a couple of years.

Since this was my first, I can't compare this to other Arcade Fire shows, but I strongly suspect that the soaring "uhh-- ahh-- uhh ahh uhh ohh ohh-- ahh--" chorus on "Wake Up" gains a little something from being sung in delirious unison by something like 25,000 people. Despite the band's famously manic stage show (Will Butler upped the ante by climbing the scaffolding next to the jumbotron, King Kong style, with a field drum strapped to him) and the  instrument-juggling that has become almost de rigeur for indie bands these days (Régine Chasagne and Win Butler both took turns behind the genuine pipe organ, and Régine even played kit on a few tunes), the band (mostly) kept up their road-seasoned tightness.

My only complaint is the sound -- it had been admirably clear and balanced all day, but for Arcade Fire, the mix did okay by the front line but mostly buried the two violinists and the pair of horn players at the back. I do love how Régine's voice slices right through even the densest textures, though, and her stage presence is adorable.

Brooklyn Vegan has the setlist and more photos/links. The highlights for me were the haunting extended take on "My Body Is A Cage" and the "Tunnels"/"Power Out" pairing. One amazing moment came after the end of the main set -- instead of the usual "we demand an encore" rhythmic clapping, a bunch of people up front just kept chanting the long "ooh" background vocal line from "Rebellion (Lies)" -- is there another band where the best-loved hooks are all wordless melodies? I'm sorry I missed the now-famous "secret" second encore, but that's what YouTube is for, innit? (Perhaps Win Butler could take a moment to explain the internets to Keith Jarrett.)

As good as Arcade Fire were, though, James Murphy's LCD Soundsystem totally stole the show. And I say this as someone who is decidedly not a fan of the thumping, relentless four-on-the-floor club music that is the foundation of their sound. On record, this band doesn't do a whole lot for me, but live, drummer Pat Mahoney made me a believer, laying down an inexhaustible stream of perfectly placed hihat sixteenth notes and electro-snare backbeats. Tunes like "Get Innocuous!" made me realize that this band is a lot closer in spirit to my beloved Remain In Light-era Talking Heads than I'd previously given them credit for. "Someone Great" reminds me (in a good way) of a remixed version of Corey Dargel's music. And "Yeah (Crass Version)" distills the anthemic singalong chorus to its purest essence. Their set was so good, I almost didn't mind the coked-up swim team fratboy in front of me trying really hard to jump on my toes.

Blonde Redhead have been around for a while now, but I'd never quite gotten around to checking them out before. This is clearly a big oversight on my part, since they do that languid, stretched-out minor-key artrock thing that always grabs me -- one tune in particular sounded like a stripped-down Sonic Youth/Radiohead hybrid. However, the aforementioned coked-up fratboy and his pals would simply not shut the fuck up during the quiet bits, which tended to spoil the mood a tad. I'm looking forward to hearing them again under better conditions.

So yeah, Les Savy Fav... There's no way to say this without coming across as completely humorless, but... well, apparently at one of their first shows, frontman Tim Harrison -- who at the time, was wearing the emptied-out carcass of a huge stuffed animal -- asked the crowd "Is the shtick too loud?"

The shtick this time started innocuously enough, with Tim throwing dollar-store party favors out into the crowd while the band set up. The rest of the story is probably best told with pictures (see below). Tim's backing band -- and how could they be anything but a backing band, with a frontman like that? -- was soild enough, full of catchy, if familiar-sounding, punkrock hooks. But seriously, it's like they're playing a completely different show from their frontman. If the music was actually integrated into the spectacle (the Industrial Jazz Group know how this is done), then we might have something, but the near-complete disconnect between Tim's outsized antics and the comparatively pedestrian musical accompaniment really started to bug me after a while. If you're going to take it out, guys, then take it out, dammit.

I know this band is beloved and I sound like a total curmudgeon, but still.

Wild Light are a young band from New Hampshire. Clearly, there weren't many people in the crowd who had even heard of these guys before, but they came out strong and rocked hard. Their most memorable tunes were "Fuck California" (which, they observed, "always goes down better on the East Coast") and a sweet Rhodes-driven song I didn't catch the name of. They might have sounded a wee bit green and generic compared to the other bands on the bill, but I gotta respect them for playing their hearts out for a crowd that had only just began to gather.

Many thanks to my concert companion, whose company made the day's events that much more enjoyable.

More pics below the fold...

Andrew D'Angelo-Curtis Hasselbring Big Band @ Tea Lounge - 31 Aug

As expected, this was a really good time. I hadn't realized this, but Andrew D'Angelo has been writing big band music for a long time now -- since he was a teenager back in Seattle, in fact, where he first started playing with Jim Black and Chris Speed. Both D'Angelo and Curtis Hasselbring did stints in Boston's Either/Orchestra before moving to NYC, but this is the first time they have joined forces, co-leading this brand-new 13-piece outfit. Obviously, D'Angelo and Black are thick as thieves, their most notable collaboration being Human Feel. But by Andrew's count, over half the band are people he's never had the opportunity to work with before.

The music was a lot more freewheeling and improv-oriented than the stuff I write for Secret Society, but even though the vibe was pretty wild (and very, very loud), the compositions were deceptively complex -- there was a lot of ink on the parts, and some tricksy time-shifts for the band to negotiate. Open-ended intros would lead into a barrage of thorny clusters, raggedy sing-song whole-band unison themes, or interruptive punctuations. Think of a big-bandized Human Feel -- in fact, a few of D'Angelo's charts were exactly that.

There was ample room for distinctive individual contributions, like trumpter Nate Wooley's unpitched soundsculpting and trombonist Ben Gerstein's air-raid wailing, but the sparks really flew during the duets -- especially when D'Angelo and McHenry went at it together. Curtis Hasselbring's charts tended to be slightly less relentlessly in-your-face than D'Angelo's, but only just -- the group's punk-jazz energy can only be contained for so long, especially with Jim Black behind the hit. A few tunes culminated in full-on go-go beats (sometimes in odd meters), with Black's cymbals crashing like thundersheets.

It's not easy music to pull off, even with such outstanding players, all of whom invested a serious chunk of rehearsal time putting this hit together. Big bands need regular gigs to grow into the music, but that's not always economically viable, especially for (ahem) struggling bandleaders. Last night at Tea Lounge was a hell of a first hit for these guys, not least because you hear so much potential there, some of it as yet untapped. Obviously, a lot of these players have busy schedules of their own (including the co-leaders), but it would be great if D'Angelo and Hasselbring could find a semi-regular home for this group. The world needs more badass kick-down-the-door big bands.

More (grainy and blurry, sorry... it's dark in there, yo) pictures below the fold... there was also some dude videotaping the whole thing, so keep an eye on the YouTube.

Feist, Kevin Drew, Grizzly Bear @ McCarren Park Pool

Listen -- I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Not all jazz musicians are as interested in indie rock as I am. I'm sorry. I know this must come as a terrible shock to you. I'll understand if you need a moment.

Feist's music isn't explicitly "jazzy" (except for the odd splash of fluegelhorn or Nina Simone reference) but she does make it easy for jazz musicians to love her. She's a ridiculously skilled singer with a sweet clear voice, colored with a tiny, heartbreaking rasp. Her delivery is almost unnervingly direct and personal, and her songwriting is tender, wistful, transparent, and unapologetically melodic. In fact, listening to the mellower tracks on The Reminder, it's sometimes a bit hard to hear the principled difference between Feist, whose hipster cred has remained intact despite the fact that you can buy her latest record in every Starbucks, and Norah Jones, who gets no love from the likes of Pitchfork or Stereogum.

Or at least, that's what I thought before I saw Feist live.

Having never seen Ms. Feist perform, I was honestly a bit skeptical that her songs would be able to carry a sold-out, thousands-strong outdoor throng. After all, as she told us from the stage, her first NYC hits were singer-songwriter gigs for a handful of people at The Living Room, and her solo records sound like they are geared towards the hushed intimacy of that kind of small venue. As it turns out, my lack of faith was wholly unwarranted -- Feist knows exactly how to command the attention of a huge crowd but still make you feel like she's singing for you and you alone.

Her punky roots showed in her fierce vocals on tunes like "My Moon My Man" and "Past In Present," both of which rocked way harder than the album versions. But she brought just as much emotional intensity to moody, spacious ballads like "The Water" -- which was so good it gave me goosebumps -- and countrified weepers like "In My Hands" (a cover of a tune by Sex Mob bassist and, ah, Norah Jones associate Tony Scherr).

For me, the best thing about Feist's songwriting is the seamless way she integrates her influences. I mean, you could pick it apart -- "Oh, here's a bit of folksy Canadiana via Joni Mitchell, mixed with a touch of electroclash on loan from Peaches, laced with some unabashedly retro Dusty Springfield/Burt Bacharach stylings" -- but you don't, because everything is so well integrated and so personal.

My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that apart from drummer Jesse Baird (who was outstanding), the rest of her band didn't even seem to try to match her energy. Ultimately, it didn't matter much, since she was more than capable of carrying the show on their own, but I'd have liked to have seen the other guys step it up a bit.

Incidentally, one of those Feist-loving jazz musicians is Amy Cervini, who covers "Mushaboom" on her new release Famous Blue. Amy has graciously allowed me to share that track with readers of this blog, so here you go:

MP3: Amy Cervini Quartet - "Mushaboom" (click to listen/download)

This hit was the NYC debut (and, as far as I can tell, second-ever gig) for Feist's boyfriend Kevin Drew's post-Broken Social Scene solo project, "Spirit If." (Warning: audio launches instantly, and might be mildly NSFW if your W is really uptight.)  The lineup is great and features Brendan Canning (bass) and Justin Peroff (drums) from BSS. They don't really sound very much like Broken Social Scene, though, even when they broke from Kevin's solo stuff and, uh, "covered" BSS tunes.

I worry Kevin is falling into the trap Calexico did with Garden Ruin -- he's trying very hard to do something different than what he's done before, which is commendable. Except that what he did before, with BBS, was distinctive and unusual and cool, and what he's doing now just sounds listless and generic. And also a bit sloppy... but like I said, I think it's only their second gig playing this stuff, so that's at least somewhat forgivable -- even if Kevin did need his bandmate to hold up the lyrics sheet for him at one point.

I wish I'd known that Grizzly Bear were starting so early -- I might have hustled to get there sooner. Doors were supposed to be at 6 PM, and G.B. must have started fairly close upon, because by the time I got to McCarren, they were almost finished. Their stage presence is unapologetically, endearingly dorky, and what little I heard of their set sounded fantastic.

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No thanks to our efforts at trying to locate each other in the crowd via a series of increasingly farcical text messages, my comrade-in-blog ACB and I finally met face-to-face at the very end of the show. It's somehow fitting that a jazz composer and an opera singer would find common ground at a Feist hit.

More pictures below the fold...

Charlie Parker Jazz Festival - Aug 26

One area in which my prior ports of call -- Vancouver, Montreal -- cut NYC is in the quality and quantity of free summertime outdoor jazz shows. Neither of the big NYC jazz fests (JVC and Vision) have much to offer in this area -- Vision has nothing, JVC co-sponsors a single performance in Prospect Park. This year Celebrate Brooklyn included a second jazz hit in addition to the JVC show. There was also a token jazz hit at Central Park Summerstage (Cassandra Wilson), one at River to River (Marc Ribot), and a smattering of smaller shows here and there. But there's nothing remotely on the scale of Vancouver or Montreal during jazz fest time, with multiple outdoor stages jam-packed with gigs over the course of several weeks. They are far from perfect -- the live sound is often a problem (especially in Montreal), and the quality is highly variable. But the sheer quantity of shows means that programmers are free to take some chances with the scheduling, so there's always at least a few gigs that are both (A) free, and (B) worth seeing.

(Full disclosure -- my quintet played one of these free outdoor hits at the Montreal fest back in 2000, and we had a great time, so I am probably more positively disposed to that festival than some.)

What NYC has is the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, now in its 15th year. But the "festival" is just a couple of days in late August -- Saturday in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park, and Sunday the East Village's Tompkins Square Park. The headliners play on both days, which cuts down on the variety of the programming even further. And the sound, at least at Sunday at Tompkins Square, was notably atrocious.

On the other hand, one of the headliners was Chico Hamilton, who is just a few weeks away from his 86th birthday. So there's that.

The classic Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker-Bob Whitlock-Chico Hamilton quartet is one of my all-time favorite small groups. Obviously, Gerry's writing and arranging are top-notch, and the lack of any chordal instrument was a bold choice at the time, but what I really love is how the group manages to pull off this incredibly casual, laid-back, distinctively West Coast vibe while still swinging incredibly hard -- they come across like a irredeemable stoner who somehow never lets the pot blunt his conversational wits.

Chico deserves an immense amount of credit for this. His drumming is ultra-minimal -- never showy or bombastic, but everything is in its right place, and played with impeccable finesse. It's a very old-school, practically pre-bop approach to drumming, where the timekeeping is the focus, and whenever he breaks the pattern for a punctuation, a fill, or a bit of comping, it really means something. And his relationship to the time is deep and personal in a way that has all but vanished, while remaining apparently effortless. Hearing him live for the first time was a revelation -- it's not just that his playing seems undiminished by age, it's like he's actually taking you back in time to show you how it's really done.

Not that Chico's an arch-traditionalist -- the sextet he brought to the parks this weekend includes Paul Ramsey on fretless electric bass, and Cary DeNigris on electric guitar. Like Max Roach, Chico is an inventive composer -- in fact, he honored his late friend with an apparently brand new mallets-driven original called "Just Play The Melody." But Chico's always been interested in moving the music forward -- one of his first projects as a leader was a quintet with a then-unprecedented instrumentation of flute, cello, guitar, bass, and drums. This was in 1955, mind you. Oh, and that guitar player? Jim Hall. A later incarnation of this group appeared (as themselves) in The Sweet Smell of Success -- one of the hippest onscreen jazz moments.

Chico has a great ear for talent -- in addition to Jim Hall, he also discovered Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, Larry Coryell, and Thomas Chapin. He's also written a few film scores, including one for Polanki's Repulsion. The current sextet has great musicians and lots of evocative, cinematic tunes, contributed by leader and sidemen both -- check out the recent selections on Chico's MySpace page, especially the languid "Christina," which sounds like it's just begging for Calexico to cover it. And he plays with such irrepressible joy and such timeless elegance -- during an infectious shuffle called "Thunderwalk," a few young-at-heart old-timers got up to strut their stuff (see pics below). And, as Ben Ratliff pointed out in his review, this seemed to delight him to no end -- as he told the crowd afterwards: "People dancing! That's the best compliment you can get."

Here is a YouTube clip from the Chico Hamilton Quintet's 1958 appearance at Newport, featuring Eric Dolphy:

Yeah, that's right -- 1958.

 

Cassandra Wilson followed, a last-minute sub for an ailing Abbey Lincoln, using most of Abbey's rhythm section -- Jonathan Batiste on piano and Michael Bowie on bass, with the young phenom Marcus Gilmore on drums and Evan Schwam on tenor (borrowed from Chico's band). We were told Lincoln's no-show was due to the heat, though it wasn't actually that hot on Sunday. This week must have been unbelievably difficult for her, so here's hoping it's nothing serious.

I have to admit I haven't really followed Cassandra's post-Blue Light Till Dawn career, although I really admire her early work with Steve Coleman. But here she played the straight-up jazz diva, with loose renditions of well-worn tunes like "Caravan," "Blue Monk," and "Up Jumped Spring." She had trouble negotiating the bop blues "Now's The Time" and only really seemed to cut loose on a scorching "St. James Infirmary." The band had their moments, especially Batiste, but the horrendous live sound was particularly harsh on Michael Bowie's bass, and he never seemed to quite lock in with Gilmore. It felt like a jam session, which it basically was -- enjoyable enough, under the circumstances, but all these musicians are clearly capable of better things.

I missed Maurice Brown's opening set, but got there just in time to catch former Wynton Marsalis associate Todd Williams's quartet. I really honestly hate to go negative on this blog, but in this case I'm left with little choice -- their set was almost uniformly leaden, plodding, and ponderous. Pianist Eric Lewis had a few crowd-pleasing solos that left me totally cold -- he just seemed to move randomly from one flashy gimmick to another without any attempt to tell a coherent or convincing story. The leader's playing was flat and uninspired, as were his tunes. I found myself wishing the festival organizers had given this high-profile opportunity to a genuinely creative up-and-comer. It's not like they lack for choices. Maybe if they had more than a single weekend to work with, there would be more opportunity for creative programming and audience-building.

More pics below the fold...

The Hold Steady @ Prospect Park - 09 August 2007

The Hold Steady are, on a good night, like the burger at Bonnie's Grill, on a good night -- an immensely satisfying rendition of an American classic that has been so thoroughly debased by bland institutional indistinguishability on the one side, and absurdly pretentious ritzing up on the other, that it's easy to forget what made it so appealing in the first place.

Last night in Prospect Park was a good night. The the huge crowd needed only the first whiff of the opening lick of "Stuck Between Stations" before crashing the gates and flooding the front section (which is ostensibly reserved for VIPs and "Friends of Celebrate Brooklyn"). Security didn't even try to hold them at bay -- they had their hands full dealing with the fans who could not suppress their urgent need to climb up on stage.

While I think all the "Minneapolis Springsteen" comparisons frontman Craig Finn garners are a bit overblown -- especially since he's actually more indebted to Paul Westerberg's songs of teenage awkwardness and alienation -- there's definitely something compelling and even a bit subversive about irresistible, anthemic fist-pumping rock songs that tell really sad stories. But Finn's nebbishy take on rockstar stage presence -- prowling and pointing and spitting out lyrics in bursts -- reminded me a lot more of early Elvis Costello than The Boss.

Dork that I am, I first heard about The Hold Steady not through the usual channels, but as "the rock band that Franz from Anti-Social Music is in." Some people are, apparently, bothered by the disconnect between his more hifalutin' musical endeavors and his newfound notoriety as the keyboardist in America's Best Bar Band™. Me, I can't imagine begrudging anyone that much fun.

More pics below the fold...

The camera never lies

Keith Jarrett addresses the audience at the Umbria Jazz Festival with his usual sensitivity and good humor:

[Via.]

This has occasioned an open letter from Daniel Biro. And Jarrett has been officially banned from the Umbria Festival.

TV on the Radio @ McCarren Park Pool - 30 July 2007

TV on the Radio make records full of densely layered vocals, savagely untamed guitar sounds, and almost impenetrably thick sonic constructs. This is not the kind of sound that can be reproduced live (at least, not without relying heavily on prerecorded samples), but the band compensates for the absence of studio wizardry by rocking really fucking hard.

The Gerard Smith (bass) - Jaleel Bunton (drums) back line is fierce. Where the grooves on the recordings have a kind of studied abstract sloppiness to them, at yesterday's free show at McCarren Pool, everything was stripped down and locked in tight. Hearing the straight sound of frontman Tunde Adebimpe's vocals without the studio multitracking effects makes you appreciate what a great singer he really is. Same goes for Kyp Malone, whose falsetto backing vocals on record are kind of nasal, but live are pure and sweet, even a bit Curtis Mayfield-y. The rainy-day crowd sang along with almost every word.

TV on the Radio represent everything that is good and right about the Brooklyn indie scene from which they emerged -- they are restlessly experimental but grounded in irresistible melodies. They draw on a staggering variety of influences, but they blend them all so skillfully that the individual ingredients of their sound are barely recognizable -- it just sounds like them, and they don't really sound like anything else. They manage to appeal both to devoted indie rock hipsters and those whose primary musical interests lie elsewhere. Their music is abstract and artsy but genuinely connects to people on a visceral level. And, as I believe I mentioned, they rock really fucking hard.

This hit was one of those rare shows that made me feel good about the time and place I'm living in.

Photos below the fold...

Vision Festival - Day 2

How do you present a festival of forward-looking music when the innovators and shit-disturbers of previous eras are still largely unknown or under-recognized? How do you reconcile a commitment to the sounds of today with the desire to honor the contributions of past masters? That's the dilemma faced by the curators of the Vision Festival. While they have sometimes been accused of being, in their own way, as insular, preservationist, and stylistically dogmatic as the Wynton Marsalis-Stanley Crouch axis over at Lincoln Center, I think the overall scope of year's lineup is commendably diverse, and shows a genuine effort to find a balance between past and present. Day 2 was dedicated to a Lifetime Recognition Celebration of Bill Dixon, who is 82 years old, and so the focus on Wednesday was on older artists, most with some connection to Dixon -- but that doesn't make the music presented any less vital.

Of course, there's preservationism and then there's outright anachronism. Listening to Barry Wallenstein's straight-up beat poetry, with freeform accompaniment from saxophonist Daniel Carter and multi-instrumentalist Kali Z. Fasteau, it's impossible to not feel as if you've stepped through some kind of time warp. Wallenstein's poetry is much tighter than the clichéd beatnik rambling you're probably imagining right now, and his sincerity is commendable, especially during his elegy for his friend and collaborator, pianist John Hicks. Still, this stuff inevitably seems like a serious throwback compared to more recent spoken-word-with-music collaborations.

I am almost wholly unfamiliar with Bill Dixon's music, but my curiosity was definitely piqued by this post by Taylor Ho Bynum. The handpicked ensemble he brought to the Vision Festival was decidedly bottom-heavy, including not just bass (Andrew Lafkas), tuba (Joe Daley), bass clarinet (Will Connell Jr.), and bari sax (John Hagen), but the rarely heard subsonic sounds of bass sax (J.D. Parran) and contrabass clarinet (Michel Côté). The (as-yet-untitled) new work opened with a single sustained pitch on soprano sax (Andrew Raffo Dewar). As his note began to split and wail, it was quickly enveloped by dark, billowing stormclouds. It was difficult to pick out individual instruments from this emulsified group sound -- occasionally, one voice would peer out from the texture, but only for the briefest instant before being re-absorbed. It made me think of the more atmospheric, tranquil bits of Michael Gordon's Decasia, which I'd heard performed in this space back in January -- not in the details so much as the transfixing but deeply unsettling effect the music had on me.

When the first definite melody emerged, it was slow and solemn, in a uncanny and deep group unison. Everyone dropped out as Taylor Ho Bynum cried out in a series of squeezed bursts, before the contrabass clarinet began to sweep up underneath him, followed by the rest of the orchestra. There would be a series of climaxes as the sound became bigger and more saturated, with Dixon controlling the shape of the piece with emphatic cues and gestures. His gruff manner and s