Lindsay makes her big dead-tree debut with an investigative piece on the cover of this week's New York Press.
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November 2006
29 November 2006
26 November 2006
And I noticed he was carrying a pamphlet
It's that time again... more allies and pamphleteers for the sidebar:
SpiderMonkey Stories - Taylor Ho Bynum
Taylor is a killing trumpet/cornet player and it's great to see more NYC jazz musicians getting into blogging. The clear must-read posts so far include his take on the already-legendary Cecil Taylor-Henry Grimes-Pheeroan akLaff hit, and his reflections on working with Anthony Braxton, but I'm also digging the frequent bookblogging and this anecdote.
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The Beauty of Disappointment - Seth Gordon
Seth is notorious for his acerbic comments over at Sequenza 21 and NewMusicBox -- any greatest hits compilation would have to include his contributions to this thread -- but I can testify that in meatspace, Seth is the most laid-back pro wrestling fan I've ever met. I've been bugging him to get a blog since a few months after I started mine, and I'm happy to report he finally caved. His "first impressions" of Phil Kline's John The Revelator is the kind of earthy-but-informative review I wish I had the chops for, and Seth has actually seen O.C. and Stiggs, which must be worth at least 2000 hipster-points. Added attraction -- Clint Eastwood: hack or genius? (see comments)
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The Concert - Anne-Carolyn Bird
I don't know how I could not link to someone who sang on one of my my favorite recordings of the year
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Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches - Hank Shteamer
Hank Shteamer writes for Time Out NY and plays in Stay Fucked. He also gave Secret Society our first positive mention in print, which I think means he has dibs on my firstborn or something. Anyway, check out the love for Capt. Beefheart's other records (here and here), the unpretentious foodblogging, and his description of Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye and Elliott Gould's Trapper John as proto-hipsters. (I think the key difference is, Hawkeye and Trapper are actually good at what they do.)
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Los Amigos de Durutti - DJ Durutti
Boston-based jazz/soul/hiphop/politics/etc blog, with a timely helping of Sun Ra -- I'm sure you all know by now that Mass. governor-elect Deval Patrick is the the son of Arkestra bari saxophonist Pat Patrick, but in honor of the Bay State's first interstellar elected official, go check out the sounds of the Afro-Futurist underground.
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Frequent commenter/occasional troll (and you know I say that with love) godoggo is jazzblogging from LA. He has a nice appreciation of Anita O'Day up, from the perspective of someone new to her music. I was away from the blog when news of Ms. O'Day's passing reached me, but godoggo has the roundup of obits, as well as links to some outstanding performances. Definitely check out the YouTube'd clips from Jazz on a Summer's Day
21 November 2006
17 November 2006
15 November 2006
Composer Portraits: Julius Hemphill @ Miller Theatre, 9 Nov 2006
I'm wary of the repertory movement in jazz. Ghost bands who linger on decades after their founding figure has passed, institutional jazz orchestras who dutifully recreate the music of Ellington and Strayhorn, Fletcher and Horace Henderson, et al., for a concert-hall audience... all of this seems ultimately self-defeating. It continually reinforces the idea that jazz is something that happened a long time ago, and that the proper role for younger musicians is not to stand on the shoulders of giants, but to lurk in their shadows. And with the audience for orchestras that bind themselves to that kind of subscription-warhorse-nostalgia model dwindling every year, it's a bit hard to see why anyone in the jazz world thought this would be a good model to emulate.
This isn't to say that past masters shouldn't get their due -- of course they should. This is especially important for artists whose contributions have been largely -- and deliberately -- excluded from the jazz canon. As I think that already-famous hivemind-spawned 1973-1990 discography demonstrates, there are an awful lot of unsung heroes in jazz. But even in that pack of underdogs, Julius Hemphill stands out.
So despite my reservations about "museum jazz," it was heartening to see Miller Theatre include Hemphill in this year's Composer Portraits series. (The season opener featured John Zorn; concerts yet to come will spotlight the music of Varèse, Zappa, Reich, and Kimmo Hakola.) But I also wondered whether Thursday's performance would be true to Hemphill's maverick spirit, or whether it would collapse under the weight of too much well-intentioned reverence.
Those who know Hemphill's work usually know him via his association with the World Saxophone Quartet, so it's easy to forget that he also has a formidable body of concert music written for nonjazz performers, much of it as-yet unrecorded. Thanks to a transit snafu, I missed the concert's opening, but I was very glad to arrive in time to catch Ursula Oppens and Ethel perform Hemphill's One Atmosphere, premiered fifteen years ago but only recorded
Next, concert organizer and Hemphill associate Marty Ehrlich took the stage, accompanied by cellist Erik Friedlander, drummer Pheeroan akLaff and... holy shit, is that Baikida Carroll? It is Baikida Carroll -- this is the guy who played trumpet on Hemphill's legendary 1972 debut Dogon A.D. (never issued on CD, though not for lack of trying), as well as the followup, Coon Bid'ness (which is on CD, and even iTunes, albeit with the less, uh, "provocative" title "Reflections
This quartet returned in the second half to play the two other cuts from Dogon A.D. First was "The Painter," with its beautiful, conversational flute lines and folkish cello strumming. This rendition featured a long interactive dialogue between Erhlich and Carroll, with almost telepathically supportive accompaniment from akLaff and Friedlander. "Rites" is a sharp contrast to "The Painter," opening with abrasive siren-like horn wails interrupted by fiercely angular, virtuosic lines. The improv is a kind of fast, loose rubato, full of flurries and slicing attacks, but everyone seemed attuned to the natural ebb and flow and kept the music moving. Just before the head out, Pheeroan unleashed a steamroller of a drum solo, one of the most intense moments of the night.
Ursula Oppens and Ethel were both back after the break as well, in separate performances. Oppens played "Parchment," a piece Hemphill wrote with her in mind. It's a reflective, post-impressionistic work in much the same vein as many of the pieces I heard the night before. Hemphill's expert balancing of chromaticism vs. diatonicism, and of density vs. spaciousness seemed almost effortless. And who doesn't love Ursula Oppens's playing? Damn.
Ethel returned with Mingus Gold, a "contemplation" for string quartet of three Mingus tunes -- "Nostalgia in Times Square," "Alice's Wonderland," and "Better Get Hit in Your Soul." "Nostlagia" began straightforwardly before veering into Hemphill's spiky harmonic vocabulary; "Alice's Wonderland" entrusted the yearning melody first to the viola, then to pizzicato cello, closing with a staggering waltz. Cellist Dorothy Lawson opened "Better Get Hit In Your Soul" with her best crack at Mingusian grittiness. The most successful parts of Mingus Gold were the most thoroughly reimagined ones -- the arrangements tended to bog down whenever the adaptation got too literal. But Ethel played this music with intensity and commitment -- their sincere passion for both Hemphill and Mingus was unmistakable.
The hit was anchored by the Julius Hemphill Sextet, a group founded in 1987 and rebooted after Hemphill's untimely death by Marty Ehrlich, an original member of the sextet. Also on board were Matana Roberts and Andy Laster (altos), J.D. Parran and Andrew White (tenors), and Alex Harding (bari). The group has a massive collective sound, full-throated but intensely focused, with Ehrlich's bittersweet tone singing out on top, rendering Hemphill's unmistakable melodic lines with graceful abandon. They brought a glimmering clarity to Hemphill's densely-packed harmonic blocks on "Mirrors" and "JiJi Tune," and a surging energy to "The Moat and the Bridge," a McCoy-ish modal workout refracted through Hemphill's own idiosyncratic sensibilities.
The sextet closed the night with a couple of soulful 12/8 romps. If "Spiritual Chairs" is a blistering gospel sermon, then "The Hard Blues" -- originally cut at the same session that produced Dogon A.D. -- is the front end of a three-day bender, It pits Alex Harding's menacing bari ostinato against clipped staccatos, searing long tones, and swaggering triplet lines, before exploding into a frenetic-but-tight freebop bridge. "The Hard Blues" is anthemic and irresistible -- in fact, it ended with a parade through the hall, with Ethel, Ursula, and Pheeroan joining the line for the final blowout. (Tim Berne, another of Hemphill's most tireless advocates, was in the audience -- I was hoping he might make a cameo appearance on this tune, but it was not to be.)
This is jazz rep I can get behind -- a long-overdue celebration of a neglected master, featuring heartfelt performances by musicians who have a deep personal connection to the artist. This was the rare posthumous tribute that didn't feel like dancing with zombies; it felt like dancing with spirits.
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* While I'm told Hemphill actually notated the tune in 11/16, if you were transcribing it, you'd probably put it in 11/8.
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For more on Julius Hemphill, I recommend this interview with Tim Berne, and this post on "Dogon A.D." at Destination Out.
Tickets to this event were provided by the concert promoter.
Photos below the fold...
Continue reading "Composer Portraits: Julius Hemphill @ Miller Theatre, 9 Nov 2006" »
14 November 2006
13 November 2006
Keys to the Future @ Greenwich House, 8 Nov 2006
Keys to the Future bills itself as "New York's only festival of contemporary solo piano music." The event is only in its second year, but it has already expanded to a three-day, six-pianist, 32-composer blowout. I made the second night (Wednesday), which featured pianists Tatjana Rankovich, Lora Tchekoratova, and festival founder Joseph Rubenstein.
Tatjana was first up, opening with a 1997 work by the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, called simply Music for Piano. (In case you were wondering, Azerbaijan is across the Caspian Sea from Kazakhstan.) It begins with a simple ascending left-hand line pitted against florid right-hand arabesques, with a light buzz supplied by a beaded necklace placed over the strings -- an effect intended to evoke a tar. At several points, the meditative mood is disrupted by an explosion of low-register rumbling, only to return to the original free-floating melodic figurations During these recapitulations, I found myself focusing more on the sound of the necklace buzzing against the strings than on the notes themselves -- it sounded separate and disembodied, almost like a running commentary on the piece.
Next were four selections from Philippe Hersant's piano cycle Éphémeres, a collection of short haiku-inspired pieces composed between 1999 and 2003. Miniatures like these are tricky to pull off, but all of the included pieces were distinctive and satisfying: a tentative folklike melody played in parallel; vertiginous flurries against left-hand Morse-code punctuations; an intentionally muddy sprint through the low register, ending abruptly; and, my favorite of the four, a simple, open-sounding piece reminiscent of Keith Jarrett channeling Copland.
Luciano Berio's Brin (1990) is another miniature, beginning with various strands of vaporous lines that seem to blow by aimlessly, but eventually coalesce into a single repeated chord. Berio's music doesn't normally do much for me, but this piece is actually quite powerful and affecting -- perhaps the dosage was right.
Tatjana closed with Joseph Fennimore's Fifth Romance (1984), which draws heavily from the Great American Songbook -- I heard somewhat abstracted allusions to "Tea For Two," "Lover Man," and "Body and Soul," among others. Fennimore skillfully weaves Bill Evans-derived extended harmonies in with more purely expressionistic sonorities, but the the result was more like an ultra-highbrow showtunes medley than a cohesive piece in its own right. Still, Tatjana Rankovich was a model of understated expressiveness throughout.
Batting second was Lora Tchekoratova, who kicked off her set with a jaw-droppingly virtuosic reading of Lowell Liebermann's Nocturne No. 5 (1996), which opens with simple arpeggios and an unadorned melody, before unleashing, without warning, a torrent of fearsomely difficult chromatic commentary, which takes over the right hand and threatens to engulf the piece. But then the storm passes and the canonic melody returns to lead us into a wistful ending. This is a staight-up, old-fashioned Lisztian tour-de-force, with the music sometimes taking a back seat to Tchekoratova's formidable pianism.
The Downtown contingent was represented by the premiere of Phil Kline's Mambo No. 1, the most rhythmically muscular work of the night. The groove does not actually resemble a mambo of any kind (Phil was instead riffing on the Voodoo priestess), but it was the first piece of the night to include a regular pulse. The music is dense, almost claustrophobic, but a quarter-note bass line soon arrives to keep us grounded. At times, the music would grind to a sudden stop, only to shoot off into a new and unexpected direction. After quite a lot of introspective music, I was glad for the Kline's in-your-face approach here, and it was fun to see Lora bobbing her head in time with the complex but on-the-grid rhythms. But it also seemed like Kline had stuffed too many ideas into too small a frame.
With Toru Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch II (1992), we return to the wispy, introspective post-Debussy works that dominated the evening. Dedicated to Messiaen, the vibe here is mystical, reverent, occasionally mysterious but ultimately uplifting. This is a beautiful and well-crafted work, played with tremendous focus and patience, but at this point I began to wonder if the program wasn't a bit top-heavy with this kind of piece.
Next, Keys to the Future head honcho Joseph Rubenstein took the stage, with... Arvo Pärt's quiet, meditative, introspective Für Alina (1976). So yeah, at first, I'm thinking, "Okay, I know pianists love to play the navel-gazing tunes, but this is really getting to be much too much..." -- but Joseph quickly won me over. His performance of Pärt's obsessive refraction of a folk-like melody was completely transfixing. The work is as much about the silence between the phrases as the phrases themselves, and while the silence is never perfect at Greenwich House, if anything, the sound of the falling rain and passing cars outside made the gaps even more heart-rending.
I hadn't actually heard any of Christopher O'Reilly's solo piano arrangements of Radiohead songs before Wednesday night. But if you're going to do that sort of thing, "Exit Music for a Film" is perhaps the most obvious choice, what with all those moody oblique-motion progressions lifted straight from Chopin. O'Reilly strips away the original's grim, plodding inevitability in favor of a loosely flowing rhapsodic treatment -- and while the adaptation works well enough in strictly musical terms, I also can't help but feel that returning the song to its roots in the Romantic piano literature is one of the least interesting things you could do with it.
However, it did make for an intriguing transition into the first of Bruce Stark's Five Preludes (2003), which opened in a similar tonality, with a very Radiohead-sounding 7/8 figure. This was followed by a halting, tentative ballad-like piece, again with harmonies painted from the Bill Evans palette. The third prelude generated some momentum with a bright, mid-register ostinato, leading into the unabashed pop lyricism of the fourth prelude. The melodic lines were, at times, undermined by deliberately skewed harmonies, but such doubts were ultimately vanquished by the sincere, unadorned ending. The last of the five was a brisk chase-piece inflected with blue notes -- while I would have preferred to hear a more assertive approach, with stronger, fiercer accents, Rubinstein clearly has virtuosity to burn. I enjoyed his take on this music, even if his playing in the final prelude was a bit too refined for my taste.
Speaking of "refined," though, I found it a bit incongruous that, for a festival of contemporary solo piano music, the presentation was strictly old-school. The pianists all wore formal dress and didn't address the audience. Some of the composers were on hand, but they didn't speak, either. The sequencing of the program seemed to cater to the needs of the performers, without apparent consideration to the flow of the concert as a whole. Many in the audience spent the evening with their heads dutifully buried in the program, instead of actively watching and listening. The night had all the trappings of a recital of 19th-century warhorses, and while the music was, for the most part, appealing and invigorating, next year I'd like to see a presentation to match.
Definitely check out composer Jeff Harrington's reviews of all three nights of Keys to the Future: One. Two. Three.
Tickets to this event were provided by the concert promoter.
10 November 2006
08 November 2006
06 November 2006
We are not afraid of you and we will beat your ass
I don't care who you are or what's in your dayplanner, you do not have anything more important to do tomorrow than to go vote.
"Oh, but both parties are corrupt... ," "Nobody's speaking out about the issues I care about... ," "Voting implicates me in a corrupt system... ," "What's the point, they're just going to steal it anyway... " Listen, I don't want to hear it, okay? Just shut up and vote. Drag a friend to the polls, too, while you're at it.
As a noncitizen, I can't pull a lever myself, but I'm going up to Westchester to knock on doors for Andrea Stuart-Cousins. Why this race in particular? Lots of reasons, but primarily because I'm furious about this. They are desperate, and are clearly resorting to voter suppression and intimidation and dirty tricks all over the country, in an effort to nationalize the tactics that worked for them in Ohio '04. Don't let them do it. If you see a problem at the polls, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE right away, then report it here. And if they do try to steal it, be ready to get all Orange Revolution on their ass.
But fercrissakes vote.
03 November 2006
Post-Cologne blogging 2
Thursday, Oct. 25 - first rehearsal with the Cologne Contemporary Jazz Orchestra at Stadtgarten, 10 AM. I head up there around 9:30 and knock on the front door, but nobody answers. The side service entrance is open, so I wander in that way. One of the guys from the café unlocks the door to the Konzertsaal for me. I'm a bit confused at first -- there's no piano, no drum kit, no amps, no chairs, no music stands... just a wide open empty space with a stage at the front and a bar at the back. Hmm. I eventually find the piano in a side room, boxed in by several stacks of audience chairs (i.e., chairs with armrests -- useless to us).
After a while, I notice some guys with instrument cases loitering around outside. I open the side door and introduce myself to them. I'm glad to meet them, but it turns out they don't know anything more about the situation than I do. I wonder if maybe we're rehearsing downstairs in the studio space, but that can't be right... there's no room for us down there, and no gear either. Just before 10, my CCJO contact, Marcus Bartelt, arrives and takes matters in hand. The Stadgarten techs are apparently running a bit behind, but he assures me they will be there in a few minutes to unlock the storage closet with all the drum gear, chairs, etc, so we can set up. Hmm, I'm thinking, it seems the German reputation for punctuality is trumped by the jazz musician's notoriously elastic concept of time. We eventually get everything set up in the room and get rolling around 11 AM, minus the bassist and drummer, who are coming in from out of town and are delayed by traffic snarls. (On the autobahn? Another myth about Germany shatterred!)
Paradoxically, this initial bit of disorganization reminds me of home. The CCJO isn't a full-time salaried jazz orchestra -- they are a bunch of local players who get together once a month for painfully low-paying gigs, purely out of a quixotic, irrational love of playing large ensemble jazz. The vibe is great, but it also means there are the same problems with scheduling and people needing to partially sub out of the rehearsals and and all the rest that any big band leader has to grapple with all the time.
The guys can play, though. From the opening chorale of "Transit," it was evident that these German cats really know how to play in tune. It actually takes me a little aback at first, that the intonation is so beautiful right out of the gate. Okay, that's one less thing to worry about.
Leading the rehearsal definitely required a major realignment for me -- the players are all incredibly strong, but the group's specific strengths and weaknesses are very different from what I'm used to in New York. Some things that we struggled with in Secret Society come together almost instantaneously. Other things that are second nature for most NYC musicians require more work and, often, more explanation.
I'm extra-conscious of my conducting. As a pianist playing with a bassist and drummer you've never worked with before, it always takes a bit of time to adjust to their pocket. It's the same with conducting, except that there's even less room for error -- the band depends on you to be every bit as solid as the drummer, and totally locked in with him, which is always hard to do with a drummer you're hearing for the first time. Eventually, I begin to get a sense of where Jon Schröder is putting the time, and my conducting gets a little more solid.
The first rehearsal is a long slog for everyone, from our 11-ish start until 6 PM. I can feel us getting bogged down trying to navigate some of the more difficult charts, like "Induction Effect" and especially the premiere, "Habeas Corpus," which is the hardest thing I've written to date. Its difficulties are compounded by the fact that this rehearsal is the first time I've heard it or conducted it. This is always a problem -- while the composer in you wants to listen to the piece and evaluate what you wrote, the conductor in you needs to block out any such thoughts and focus all of your attention on the job at hand: beating strong time, making sure people don't get lost, and deciding which problems need the most immediate attention. I do my best to keep the energy up even when things start to drag, but the band and I are both running on fumes by the end of the day. However, there's clearly a strong desire from everyone to get the music right. The players are all responding well to what I wrote and seem to understand what I'm after, which is pretty solid for day one.
As it turns out, one of the subs in the second half of the rehearsal is Gabriel Pérez, who has recorded an excellent album of his own compositions with the CCJO. There were also couple of outstanding subs in the trumpet section, covering for Fred Koester and lead player Jan Schneider, who had a morning rehearsal across town with the WDR band before joining us at Stadtgarten in the afternoon. Two more CCJO regulars, trumpeter Matthias Schriefl and drummer Jens Düppe, are unavailable for this hit because of a conflicting festival gig (of which more next time) -- their places are taken by American expatriate Ryan Carniaux and the aforementioned Jon Schröder. Clearly, the local talent pool is deep.
To be continued...
02 November 2006
Post-Cologne blogging 1
Okay, so my plans for multiple "Cologne liveblogging" installments obviously fell by the wayside -- there simply wasn't time. But I'm back with the full report.
Tuesday, Oct. 24 - subway to Penn Station, NJ Transit commuter rail to Newark Liberty Airport, farking AirTrain to the terminal (for non-New Yorkers, AirTrain is your first introduction to our charming local custom of naked extortion -- welcome to New York, now pay up, motherfucker), short flight from Newark to Montreal (the one nice thing about Newark airport is that it's not busy, so you don't get the insanely long lines typical of JFK or LaGuardia), long flight from Montreal to Frankfurt. I mark up my scores, engage in some small, surreptitious hand-waving as I try to figure out how I'm going to conduct the new piece ("Habeas Corpus"), do my best to ignore the movies (Nacho Libre and [shudder] The Notebook (would anyone want to watch this if they weren't trapped on a plane?), and try to steal a little sleep.
Wednesday, Oct. 25 - touch down in Frankfurt, clear German customs (surprisingly laid-back compared to any other border I've crossed), attempt to locate the Deutsche Bahn station so I can catch the train into Cologne. The high-speed train is a very civilized way to travel -- none of the hassles of air travel, totally smooth and almost totally silent, very comfortable, great view of the German countryside. This is my first trip to continental Europe as an adult, so I'm trying to soak it all up.
I arrive at the Hotel Leonet just in time for breakfast (with, oddly, some of the best croissants I've ever had), followed by an exhausted collapse. I get up again at 4 PM and do some walking around. Within the first few steps, I'm almost run over by some crazy dude riding his bike right in the middle of the sidewalk. What the hell... ? Then I look down. Bike lane. They are all over (the bike lanes and the cyclists). I'm told Cologne isn't as good as Amsterdam when it comes to bike-friendliness, but it sure schools any North American city.
Within less than five minutes, I ran into a small protest march. I have no idea what it was about -- they disappeared around the corner before I could catch up to them.
I went to the concert venue (Stadtgarten) to check it out. It's a great spot, located (as you might expect) in the Cologne City Garden, with a large outdoor beer garden area for the summer months, a very good café/restaurant, a smallish club space downstairs (Studio 672), and a larger main space (Konzertsaal) on the main floor. This is where the visiting jazz artists normally play (Cuong Vu, Marc Ribot, John Scofield, Joey Baron, and uh, me), although their lineup is very eclectic, with hip hop, new music, rock, etc, and musicians from all over the world. It's the kind of venue that doesn't exist in North America -- it gets some funding from the City of Cologne, and this, along with the revenue from the beer garden and restaurant, helps subsidize the music and other cultural activities. It's also the main home of the Cologne Contemporary Jazz Orchestra -- they play there about once a month, normally performing music written by some of the players in the band.
After dinner, I met my contact with the CCJO, bari saxophonist Marcus Bartelt. Marcus is an alumnus of Brookmeyer's New Art Orchestra (he played section bari on New Works). He took me to a very cool bar called Metronome, a tiny space that spins from the library of wall-to-wall of classic jazz vinyl, and occasionally even manages to squeeze in a live trio. This is the jazz hangout in Cologne. We drank kölsch and talked about the band, the next couple of days of rehearsals, the local scene, etc. Marcus is very chill and made me feel much more relaxed about the upcoming hit.
To be continued...
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