Secret Society

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part six (CMJ Day Five)

I spend closing night at CMJ in the cozy confines of Union Hall's basement. I can't really see shows there without thinking of time (over three years ago, now) when we somehow managed to squash Secret Society into that space. Good times. Anyway, Saturday was kind of an unofficial roots/folk-rock night there, which suited me fine.

 

La Strada were in mid-set when I arrived. As you can see, they've got kind of a postmodern Williamsburg troubadour vibe going on, with strings and accordion added to the usual guitar-bass-drums setup -- in fact their MySpace page talks about "the romance of old-world instrumentation through new world amplification." The songwriting, too, inclines more heavily towards the current indie scene, with only occasional Balkanisms or nods to pre-WWII Paris cabarets -- though I must admit, those explicitly retro, "lost-in-time" gestures were among the most interesting parts of the set.

 

On behalf on broke-ass bloggers like myself who must rely on lowly consumer point-and-shoots instead of DSLRs with serious glass, I'd like to thank Mia Riddle & Her Band for bringing their own string of lighting. (See how pretty Union Hall's tin ceiling looks?) Mia & co. have that windswept, folksy-but-with-mallet-percussion-and-a-Nord sound that's engendered comparisons to Neko Case and Cat Power. I don't know that her pipes are quite in that league, but she's a charismatic, engaging singer and her band plays really well together. Her blog is fun, too -- I love the double-sided "Nailed It - Hosed It" sign (surely this means her producer is Canadian).

 

The Loom was the band I came to see -- my friend Lis Rubard, who can often be found on Pulse projects, plays horn and trumpet in the group. They were surely one of the hardest-working bands at CMJ, playing six shows in four days, including the Brooklyn Vegan loft party on Friday night. This was the last of the six, and their final show before heading into the studio. Despite the presence of Lis's plaintive horn lines (this is a great sound, by the way -- more indie rock groups should use horn), The Loom was the most deliberately rustic-sounding of Saturday's bands. John Fanning's voice is gruff and plain in that pre-Dylan folk style, and makes for a dramatic contrast to Sydney Price's sweet, airy sound -- though like the Arcade Fire's Régine Chassagne, Sydney had her own personal floor tom, on which she launched a thunderous assault whenever she wasn't otherwise engaged.

 

Pete and J were not in the CMJ book, but I ran into Jill from Feministe who knows the dudes in this band. She convinced me to stay and I'm glad I did. The band delivers straight-up sixties Americana-drenched pop-rock: jangly guitars, good-time shuffle beats, sugar-sweet three-part vocal harmonies, and shamelessly direct hooks. Luckily, they do all this very well, with a hint of taking-the-piss playfulness that never crosses over into smug posturing.

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CMJ Day Zero
CMJ Day One
CMJ Day Two
CMJ Day Three
CMJ Day Four

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part five (CMJ Day Four)

My own personal CMJ companion and erstwhile guide, Amanda Marcotte, had to fly back to Austin Friday AM, so for the last two days I was left to my own devices. I elected to revisit Le Poisson Rouge and the Bell House to see what the showcases there had to offer. (You know what they say about the lure of returning to the scene of the crime.)

 

I got to LPR in time to catch about half of the set by Staten Island's own Cymbals Eat Guitars. It's hard not to love a band named after a sonic phenomenon. They are a very young outfit that's been getting a fair bit of love this year from the indie blogs (and Pitchfork, natch) -- to the point where they're about to open for Wilco and the Flaming Lips on some European hits. Frontman Joseph D’Agostino sings in heartfelt yelp that doesn't really do a whole lot for me, and it sounds like the kids could use maybe a touch more road-seasoning yet, but their blend of sunny hooks and grungy lo-fi textures is very artfully done.

 

Speaking of road-seasoning, sweet Christmas has it done wonders for singer-songwriter Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson. I first saw him a couple of years ago, opening for TV On The Radio at a very wet McCarren Pool Party. He was (endearingly) awkward in front of all those people; he clearly had a long way to go as a performer. Since then, he's released a critically-praised, confessional self-titled debut record, and his more ambitiously-produced followup, Summer of Fear, is just out. (FWIW, Time Out New York listed him as a "Musician to Watch in 2009" -- along with, uh, yrstruly.) 

MBAR gets the Dylan comparison a lot, on account of his quirky, conversational phrasing and slightly nasally voice, but what really drives the point home is his band (which I am almost positive are not the same players I heard at McCarren), who all sound like they have committed every frame of The Last Waltz to memory. 

In particular, MBAR's drummer is by far the best drummer I heard at CMJ -- even doing a simple backwards groove with hihat on 1 & 3, bass drum on 2 & 4, and a basic eighth pattern on maracas, he grooved like mad. Meanwhile, Miles has transformed himself from a shy, gawkish, introverted singer-songwriter into a full-bore showman -- I mean, check this shit out:

 

(Note the socks.) This all might seem just a little bit much if MBAR wasn't so disarmingly sincere and unaffected -- and the songs still feel intimate and personal, too, just painted on a bigger, brighter canvas. Plus, he was clearly having a fucking great time up there -- and how could you not, with such a killing band?

 

That was it for the LPR lineup, so I decamped to the Bell House for the Polyvinyl showcase. When I got there, James Husband & co. were on stage, clearly not having a good time. The leader's appeal for silence from the talkative, mostly indifferent crowd (who were there to hear the headlining band, Japandroids) did not have the desired effect. According to Wikipedia, this hit was their second ever gig as a band (the first was earlier in the day) and boy did it show. It seemed like there were probably some good songs in there, but when the rhythm section isn't hooking up, nothing else really matters.

 

Headlights did not have that problem. I'd never heard of the Champaign, Illinois-based group before, but they were the revelation of CMJ for me. The four of them share an authentically deep pocket and they listen to each other really well (which is a much, much rarer quality than you'd think). The first thing that strikes you are the gorgeous, ethereal vocal harmonies -- Erin Fein and Tristan Wraight's voices are surreally well-matched. And the songs are full of clean, jangly guitar lines and Franco-pop synth, with the occasional foray into noise and distortion. But even when all that is done impeccably well, I get bored really quick if the groove isn't happening. What made Headlights work for me was the great rhythm playing all around, (including Erin's tambourine playing -- always nice to see someone defy the usual but not-entriely unfair stereotypes about what happens when a singer picks up the tambourine).

I had a nice chat with Tristan after the show -- he kindly allowed me to buy him a Maker's and listened patiently while I gushed about his set. He also told me a great anecdote: as the band was loading up the vehicle from another CMJ set earlier in the day, they were approached on the street by a stooped and grizzled gentleman who buttonholed Tristan. Here was their conversation (approximately, as far as I remember): 

"Guitar player, huh? What amp do you like?" 

"Uh, Fender Twin, usually." 

"That's a good amp."

"So you're obviously a player yourself. What's your name?"

"Jim Hall."

At this point, Headlights bassist Nick Sanborn interjects:

"Wait. You mean Sonny Rollins' The Bridge Jim Hall?"

"That's me."

"You have got to be shitting me!"

Apparently a very enjoyable 20-minute conversation ensued.

 

Japandroids are a two-piece guitar-and-drums outfit from my hometown, Vancouver. They are loud and heartfelt and enthusiastically sloppy and their choruses are half-shouted on-the-nose lyrics like "We used to dream, now we worry about dying."  It's crunchy, loose pop-punk, and the eighteen-year olds in the crowd went absolutely apeshit for it. I'm told at one point there was crowd-surfing, which I did not see because I left after three songs. My problem is this -- when you have a two-piece band, I think it's pretty important that at least one of you actually be able to sing and/or play an instrument at some minimally competent level. Two is good. One is sufficient (the White Stripes being the obvious Exhibit A here). Zero is problematic.

I definitely respect their balls-to-the-wall commitment, and it sincerely pains me to slag my hometown boys. I recognize I'm pretty much alone here, and I'm not proud of the curmudgeonly instincts this band brings out in me, but seriously. There's a fine line between a gritty, messy, primitive beat and an actual mess, but these guys are so far out on the wrong side of that, I cannot even begin to relate.

PREVIOUSLY:

CMJ Day Zero
CMJ Day One
CMJ Day Two
CMJ Day Three

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CMJ Day Five

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part four (CMJ Day Three)

 

On Thursday afternoon, I was out at Queens College, running through some of my music with the student bigband. This was fun but also unbelievably draining, and by the time I got home and dropped off the music folders, it was already getting kinda late -- but it was also Amanda's last night in town, so I quickly refueled and headed back out to meet her at Ace of Clubs for the French/Brazilia showcase. We both got there too late to catch any of the French groups, but the Brazilian rockers Sweet Fanny Adams and The River Raid were both endearing, if not precisely what you'd expect when you learn a band is from Brazil. If there was a hint of CSS or Os Mutantes in Sweet Fanny Adams's slack pop-punk or in The River Raid's cheeky over-the-top swagger, it seemed buried pretty deep. Obviously, not everyone is obliged to fly the flag for the music of their native land, even when it's as rich and as deep as Brazil's -- but on a gut level, even though I enjoyed both bands, it's impossible not to feel that something is somehow amiss when you hear Brazilian musicians play in a rhythmically inflexible style.

 

According to the official schedule, that should have been it for the night, but as we were walking out, we spotted a girl holding an accordion. We learned she belonged to Kagero, a self-described "Japanese Gypsy Rock" band. Their flier has a quote which compares them to "'Fiddler on the Roof' starring 'Panic at the Disco,'" which honestly did not inspire confidence... but then the acoustic guitarist jumped up on a table and began strumming, and the other members of the group -- on violin, bass, and strap-on marching-band style drums -- circulated through the audience with an all-acoustic prelude. It worked -- we stayed.

 

Unfortunately, once Kagero took the stage and began playing, technical gremlins began multiplying. The leader's acoustic guitar wasn't coming through in the PA, and the band and sound tech squabbled over what (and who) was to blame. Guitars and DIs were swapped out, to no avail. It was looking increasingly unlikely that the show could be salvaged, but finally the leader made the obvious call -- "Fuck it -- we'll play acoustic." He brought the vocal mic into the middle of the room, and the band came down from the stage to play a truly cathartic set of clap-and-stomp-along Gypsy party music in the middle of the crowd (which at this point was, like, a dozen people). But the energy of the moment touched off a crazy dance party amongst the Brazilians, who also began dismantling the on-stage drum kit, bringing the toms into the audience so they could join in the madness.

And that's when Kagero started busting out some traditional Brazilian songs...

 

 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

CMJ Day Zero
CMJ Day One
CMJ Day Two

MORE:

CMJ Day Four
CMJ Day Five

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part three (CMJ Day Two)

Wednesday night was Secret Society's actual CMJ showcase night, a co-production between our label, New Amsterdam Records, and Cantaloupe Music, which is of course part of the Bang on a Can empire. The evening began with a lovely piece of solo piano music (Wed) by last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, David Lang, played with heartfelt grace by Ning Yu. Our New Amsterdam compatriots NOW Ensemble followed, with a mix of NOW staples like Judd Greenstein's Sing Along and some new works, including pretty sweet pieces by John Altieri (Not Yet) and Joshua Penman (The Whisper Gallery). The group was coming off a mini-tour, having played shows in DC and Baltimore on previous nights, and sounded very strong -- as tight as I've ever heard heard them, in fact.

The multi-talented Matthew Welch followed with Julia Wolfe's Lad, a piece for nine bagpipes -- or, in this version, eight prerecorded bagpipes and a lone live piper. It's a long slow burn full of densely microtonal glisses, and just at the point where we reach total sonic saturation, a keening folklike melody finally rises through the murk. The piece clearly divided the audience (partly due to sheer volume -- it was loud) but I absolutely loved it. It was kind of a punkrock move, even.

Interspersed between all of these performances were clips from (untitled), Jonathan Parker's new romantic comedy about a beautiful and fashionable Chelsea gallery owner (Marley Shelton) who falls for a nebbishy, self-obsessed new music composer (Adam Goldberg) -- David Lang contributed the music. The film opened in NY this weekend, to mixed reviews. I am torn: on the one hand, I am congenitally allergic to romantic comedies; on the other, David Lang has offered to "personally buy a cup of coffee for anyone who can identify every single real-life musician who appears on screen."

As for our set, it was recorded by WQXR's Q2 and should be streaming there before too long, so if you missed it, you'll be able to judge for yourself (watch this space). Again, a massive shout-out to sound engineers Justin Balch and LPR's own Matthew Duane. Also: these CMJ showcases always involve a frantic dash to get set up and get playing as quickly as possible after the previous group finishes, and the LPR crew did a frankly astonishing job of getting the stage reconfigured for myself and my 18 co-conspirators in what is surely record time.

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CMJ Day Zero
CMJ Day One

MORE:

CMJ Day Three
CMJ Day Four
CMJ Day Five

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part two (CMJ Day One)

 

On Tuesday, for the first night of CMJ proper, I picked up my badge and put myself at the mercy of Amanda Marcotte, who was up visiting from Austin. Amanda is a veteran of countless SXSWs and is exactly the kind of hardcore concert companion you want for this kind of event. She suggested we start with the English band Angry Vs The Bear at Bowery Electric, but when we got there we learned their show had been cancelled. (Still no idea what happened.) 

Undaunted, Amanda suggested we head down to Santos Party House, which had bands going in the downstairs bar as well as the main upstairs space. The downstairs bands turned out to be a lot mor entertaining. We heard Dinowalrus, Harlem (who are actually from Austin), Flexions, Lovvers, and Unnatural Helpers. 

Unnatural Helpers made the best impression on us. Their drummer contributes the lead vocals -- normally this is a sonic nightmare, but in the tiny downstairs space the open vocal mic actually gave the cymbals a presence they'd been missing for the early bands. (It always makes me crazy when the guitars are louder than the drums. This is so deeply wrong I can't even begin to tell you.) Anyway, these guys rocked hard and definitely won over the smallish but appreciative crowd.

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CMJ Day Zero

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CMJ Day Two
CMJ Day Three
CMJ Day Four
CMJ Day Five

Now isn't this an excellent adventure - part one (CMJ Day Zero)

 

(Photo: Lindsay Beyerstein)

My week at this year's CMJ Music Marathon unofficially began a day early, with our bigband three-way Monday night at the Bell House -- this one of my favorite venues in town and a hotbed of CMJ activity later in the week. It's a pretty sweet room, as you can see from the photos, with totally unobstructed sightlines (no columns!) and a beautiful arched wooden ceiling that does wonders for the sound. 

Speaking of which, I've very grateful to the Bell House's Jeff Stultz and Infernal Machines engineer Paul Cox for doing such an amazing job on the live sound -- and of course to the Bjorkestra and the Industrial Jazz Group for making it a memorable night of postmodern bigband music.

In case anyone was wondering... I was utterly unprepared for the ambush Stefan Zeniuk's Baritone Army sprang just seconds after our last tune had finished -- more bari sax players than I could count bum-rushed the stage, honking and wailing as they ran through the crowd. Josh, of course, jumped down to join them, heeding the call of his people. It made for a surreal and inspired epilogue.

Deepest appreciation to Search and Restore for helping us get the word out, and to everyone who came down to hear us play. We love you all.

MORE:

CMJ Day One
CMJ Day Two
CMJ Day Three
CMJ Day Four
CMJ Day Five

Matana Roberts' Illumination @ Roulette

Matana Roberts took a furlough from her long-running, ongoing blood narrative Coin Coin to present some new music at Roulette last night -- a suite called "New York Stories," performed by Roberts, Vijay Iyer (piano), Liberty Ellman (guitar), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Damion Reid (drums). (Tenor saxophonist JD Allen was also on the bill but could not appear due to a last-minute tour conflict.) The music sounds patient, varied, organically freeflowing with plenty of room to breathe... but achieving that effect in a musically satisfying way usually takes a bit of work.

What separates Matana from a lot of her peers -- beyond her balls-to-the-wall commitment, a virtue which is already far-too-scarse -- is her attention to shaping the details of her music in the service of a larger structure. Those details may be fairly loosely specified, but they are specified. I stole a few quick glances at the written parts for "New York Stories" after the gig -- there's a lot of graphic notation involved, with glyphs for "density w/space," "non-tonal texture," "lock in," etc., as well as passages of notated music that can be read in the clef of the player's choice. (Which in this context is realistically going to be either treble or bass -- jazz musicians don't really rock the C-clefs.) There's also an overall structural plan for the piece, with many repeated and cued sections mapped out in advance.

The music included a lot of satisfying timbral variety: the full ensemble was deployed sparingly, and there were many stripped-down moments -- solos, duos, and trios in various instrumental configurations. These were (subtly) cued on the fly by the composer. The upshot is that the judicious deployment of all of these techniques affords Matana the ability to exert ownership over this music. This isn't to denigrate the sensitive, spontaneous interplay amongst all of these great improvising musicians -- but Matana's "New York Stories" are clearly her own.

More photos below the fold...

Now if you ain't runnin you ain't handicappin your vision

Milford Graves Quartet

Saw the Vision Festival in their new digs at the Abrons Arts Center on Saturday. Abrons is a real theatre, so the acoustics are much improved from the beautiful-but-cavernous Angel Orensanz Foundation (which is still ground zero for the VF's final night tonight). Unfortunately, the amplified sound was a wee bit... over-enthusiastic, let's say, and the piano especially suffered from persistent, piercing brightness. This was a shame as the evening featured some real masters of modern improvised pianism, beginning with a dazzling, tightly focused solo set by Matthew Shipp.

Alto saxophonist Rob Brown followed up, in a kinetic bass-less trio with Craig Taborn and Nasheet Waits -- the unbelievably intense sparks generated between piano and drums contrasting sharply with the leader's more cerebral, floating approach. (I recommend you fire up the wayback machine and check out Ben Ratliff's now 10-year old profile of five up-and-coming NYC drummers, including Nasheet.)

The next drummer, Milford Graves, has a few years on Waits. Graves is probably best known for his contributions to the New York Art Quartet back in the 1960s, but he has been active since then as both player and educator (he's a longtime faculty member at Bennington). He began his set offstage with a plaintive chanting-and-talking-drum incantation, before making his way behind an impressively expanded drum kit. Graves invited his collaborators to the stage one by one -- pianist D.D. Jackson, bassist and festival honcho William Parker, and young DC-based tenor saxophonist Grant Langford -- who is, I presume, the first active member of the Airmen of Note to ever perform at the Vision Fest. I am not sure this diverse group of personalities, brought together here for the first time, ever quite gelled as a unit (except Graves and Parker, who have an undeniable hookup), but Graves certainly proved his free-flowing energies remain undiminished by age.

I did not catch singer/pianist Lisa Sokolov's set, but I made it back in time for the Stateside premiere of Boston bassist (and guitarist, though he played only bass in this band) Joe Morris's "GoGo Mambo." This band is a tribute to original Mambo king Pérez Prado -- the free-blowing horns (notably Tony Malaby on tenor sax and Bill Lowe on trombone) over straight-up Afro-Cuban grooves reminded me a bit of some of Don Byron's projects, especially Music for Six Musicians. I especially enjoyed the interplay between Kwaku Kwaakye Obeng on congas and Willie Martinez on timbales -- it made for a fun and satisfyingly earthy close to a night that otherwise embraced a more abstracted rhythmic perspective.

* * *

The next day, I hit Search and Restore's festival-within-a-festival at Public Assembly (AKA "the old Galapagos"), stupidly leaving my camera battery in its charging cradle. Urg. Anyway, I was definitely impressed with the healthy Sunday afternoon turnout, and more impressed still by the rapt attention paid to Steve Coleman's austerely intimate music -- the curious quartet of Coleman's alto sax, Jonathan Finlayson's trumpet, Jen Shyu's voice, and Miles Okazaki's guitar made some of the most beautiful and unusual "chamber jazz" I have heard in a good long time. I'd never experienced Coleman's music without a rhythm section before. In a situation like that, everyone's personal responsibility for the time ramps up dramatically, but Steve's command of rhythm is, of course, legendary, and it was quite something to hear him and his cohorts put it all out there for an extended spell. I really enjoyed everything I heard at Public Assembly -- Ken Thompson's ambitious new compositions, Kneebody's groove-drenched electrojazz, and the life-affirming energy of Andrew D'Angelo's Gay Disco trio -- but Steve Coleman's set revealed facets of his artistry I hadn't previously appreciated.

Vision Fest photos are below the fold.

Skirl Party @ Bell House, 11 April 2009

The Bell House is a very cool somewhat newish music venue owned by the Union Hall/Floyd crew. It's located in the same block of repurposed industrial Brooklyn No Man's Land that also houses IBeam. This was an event for Chris Speed's Skirl Records, with brief sets by four bands, each presenting a different facet of the current scene. No bocce here, but great sound -- a titch louder than your usual jazz hit but enjoyably so -- clear, balanced, exciting. 

Briggan Kraus played a fully improvised (or "fully improvised-sounding," at any rate) trio set with Ikue Mori and Jim Black, which tended towards the introspective and textural, with occasional bursts of fractured free-rock energy.

Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone's longstanding duo (they actually performed immediately before us on our very first gig, back at CB's almost four years ago now) remains haunting and wonderfully elusive -- too spiky to be new-artsong-pop, and too unabashedly melodic to fit most people's notions of what avant-jazz is supposed to sound like.

Curtis Hasslebring's latest edition of The New Mellow Edwards (this one with Chris Speed, Trevor Dunn, and Ches Smith) brought both whimsy (including a Casio keyboard interlude) and swagger to Hasslebring's ambitious long-form architecture.

The closer was the trio from Andrew D'Angelo's Skadra Degis -- D'Angelo, Trevor Dunn, and Jim Black -- which he has christened "Gay Disco," after that record's closing track. Andrew mentioned they were headed into the studio to record a followup, which is great news. Andrew's playing is as compellingly visceral as ever, and Dunn and Black are the perfect foils for his knotty, tightly-focused tunes.

How to dismantle an atomic bomb

My friend Isaac Butler very kindly lined up early yesterday in order to snag us a pair of rush seats for the final performance of Doctor Atomic at the Met. Isaac is a very smart theatre director who doesn't regularly go to the opera, so he brings a professional's eye but also an outsider's perspective. His critique of the staging is totally on-point and the flaws he points out are -- in my admittedly ultra-limited experience at the opera -- rather widespread. (Is it really too much to ask that performers move with a purpose whenever they are on stage?)

Also, Mark Adamo is totally right about the libretto. Look, it's an opera. Sung text takes longer to deliver than spoken text. Even when your show lasts for three and a half hours, you only have time for so many words. Make them count. (I quibble only with his critique of the John Donne "Batter My Heart" aria, which is both awesome in and of itself, and a welcome injection of energy into an otherwise moribund production.)

Adams's music is great -- the orchestration is spectacular, and the final ten minutes are especially gripping. But the libretto is a high-concept cop-out and the staging is inert. I can't help but be disappointed -- I so wanted to like this.

Ingrid Jensen, Eric Vloeimans, Tim Hagans - FONT @ Jazz Standard, 25 Sept 2008

Ingrid Jensen, Eric Vloeimans, Tim Hagans

More pics below the fold...

Signal Ensemble @ LPR, 13 Sept 2008

Signal Ensemble^[1] is the latest and largest assemblage of youngish NYC new music all-stars, a team-up band featuring the entirety of So Percussion alongside players from Alarm Will Sound, Gutbucket, and various other  avant-classical groups -- basically a kind of Legion of Superheroes for the Bang on a Can crowd. Signal in fact made their official debut at this year's Bang On A Can Marathon, and last Saturday was their first NYC solo show, in the new home for the Wordless Music series, Le Poisson Rouge. In case you are keeping track, this is a major new American chamber orchestra whose initial New York appearances have taken place in a shopping center and a nightclub.

Signal are, so far, heavily invested in performing the music of Steve Reich -- they did his "Daniel" Variations at the Marathon, a whole mess of Reich rep out west at the Ojai Festival, and on Saturday and Sunday at LPR, they paired a recent piece, You Are (Variations), with the work pretty much everyone considers to be Reich's masterpiece, 1976's Music for 18 Musicians. Chances are that if you know only one piece of classical music written by a living American composer, this is the one you know.

I would hazard a guess that most of the musicians in Signal grew up listening to Music for 18 Musicians in pretty heavy rotation. Some of them would probably not even be classical musicians today had they not encountered that piece during their formative years. But the thing about Music for 18 is, it requires a completely different skill set than the the one music most classical musicians train so very hard to develop. There's no conductor, for starters, which is unusual for a piece with this many players involved, and especially for one that requires such intricate rhythmic coordination. There are a ton of open-ended repeats, so it's on the players to decide when it's time to cue the next section. There are phrases whose length depends on how long the musicians can sustain a single breath. But the thing that makes Music for 18 unlike the overwhelming majority of the classical music that came before it is that the overall aesthetic effect depends almost entirely on the musicians' understanding of and command over the emotional consequences of nuanced rhythmic placement in relationship to a steady pulse. Another way of saying the same thing is that the players need to know how to groove for the piece to sound good.

The parts in Music for 18 are written in such a way that everyone in the group is required to take personal responsibility for the time. Not just for their own internal time feel -- which has to be unyieldingly solid and precise, but also relaxed, unforced -- but also, their ears have to be open to the aggregate of everyone else's time feel. The players need to stay constantly focused and engaged in what is effectively an hour-long conversation amongst themselves about where the time currently is and where it ought to be.

[Think of it like this: imagine a group of 18 people standing in a circle, each holding a magnet. There's a small iron sphere in the middle of the circle, maybe a little smaller than a golf ball. If all of the magnets are positioned just right, then the combination of those 18 magnetic fields is sufficient to lift the iron ball up off the ground and keep it hovering there in midair. That is what you are trying to do. Robots could do this; they could be programmed to first move the magnets in just the right way to raise the ball, and then to keep it aloft and stable by holding each magnet perfectly steady in the perfect position relative to the ball and to the other magnets. Humans being humans, though, keeping the iron ball floating and centered requires both intricate communication and constant tiny adjustments -- you see the ball twitch in one direction, so you move your magnet ever-so-slightly to compensate... and then someone else is forced to compensate for the way you just moved your magnet by adjusting their magnet, and so on. If anyone moves too far or too fast, or too slow or not fast enough, or simply loses their concentration, then the delicate equilibrium will be broken and the iron ball will go flying off, or clattering to the floor, and it's all over.]

Anyway, sustaining an ongoing conversation about the time isn't something that most classical musicians are even aware they might need to do at some point -- especially not in the context of maintaining a collectively locked-in, stable, trancelike pulse. But it's different for the players in Signal -- for most of them, Reich's music wasn't something new and alien and suspiciously un-classical, involving a whole set of heretofore unfamiliar skills they needed to sweat and toil to acquire. Music for 18 was already an established part of the classical music landscape back when they were first getting comfortable with their instruments. These are players who must have known from the beginning that if they ever wanted to play that kind of music, well then obviously they would have to get their groove together.

Signal has their groove together, without question. The results are inspiring, often breathtaking -- the vibraphone fanfares that herald each new section were so deep in the pocket, so right, that they made me giddy. It's undeniable that this is how Steve Reich's music was always meant to be played. It's exciting be in a time and a place where so many young classical players have become fully engaged with the art of the groove.

The opening work, You Are (Varitations), was performed under the direction of Signal padrone Brad Lubman, who worked the air with big gestures and Jet Li-like precision, totally unfazed by the occasional audience member bearing drinks squeezing past right behind him. Reich has said that You Are is a bit of an intentional throwback to his earlier works, but I actually don't hear it that way. Unlike Music for 18, You Are is dense with time-signature shifts, and harmonically it really stretches the boundaries of Reich's usual pan-modalism, with lots of crunchy, tightly-packed sonorities, and even the occasional burst of implied polytonality. It doesn't have the epic sweep and hypnotic warmth of the earlier work, but Reich's interlocking rhythmic structures have recently become much more intricate and complex without sacrificing their immediacy. It's clear that despite what some of his critics have alleged, Reich hasn't been spinning his wheels. Even when he's (in his own words) "not trying to consciously do something new," the results are quite distinct from his earlier output.

Melissa Hughes is one of the singers in Signal. She has posted an inside look at this gig on her blog. You should read it.

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1. Warning: Signal's website is absurdly difficult to navigate due to some pretentious web designer's notion that scroll bars are, like, Diabolus in Folio or something.

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More pics below the fold...

Charlie Parker Jazz Festival - 23 Aug 2008, Marcus Garvey Park

Robert Glasper with Vicente Archer, Chris Dave

Rasheid Ali with Lawrence Clark, Lakecia Benjamin, Greg Murphy, Joris Teepe

Vanessa Rubin with Danny Grissett, Lonnie Plaxico, Alvin Atkinson

Barry Harris and Charles McPherson with Ray Drummond, Leroy Williams, plus the Barry Harris Jazz Choir

More pics below the fold...

J&R MusicFest - 22 Aug 2008 @ City Hall Park

MP3: Aaron Parks, "Nemesis" (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download)
From Invisible Cinema. Aaron Parks, piano; Mike Moreno, guitar; Matt Penman, bass; Eric Harland, drums. Posted with permission of the artist.

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So clearly the J&R MusicFest people do not fuck around when it comes to punctuality. Last night's mini jazz showcase was scheduled to start at 5 PM. I walked up at 5:02 and Aaron Parks & co. were already a couple of minutes into the anthemic 7/4 rocker "Nemesis" (see above). You know, even Carnegie Hall starts at five after.

Anyway, Aaron's Blue Note debut (and his first record as a leader in six years) dropped on Tuesday and he's been a busy boy this week, co-headlining (with Kurt Rosenwinkel) four sets over two nights at Smalls earlier in the week, and then this. I was at the first Small's set Tuesday night, sitting directly behind Aaron's piano bench (onstage, in fact, on the Rhodes bench), and the experience was kind of mind-blowing. Tuesday night was also the first time Kurt and Kendrick played together -- I do not believe it will be the last. The drummer on the record is Eric Harland, who is also great, but as I overheard one young jazz student at last night's hit tell his compatriot: "I love Kendrick's style, it's so fucking marching band."

The thing is, though, Kendrick is boundlessly inventive -- I've heard him play Aaron's music several times and he's always surprising me. One of his newly acquired toys are these special drum mallets with shakers inside the mallets -- he used them in dramatically different ways on Tuesday and Friday. And nobody plays the surging multimetric straight-eighth grooves that have become the lingua franca of modern mainstream jazz better than Kendrick.

As for the leader, Aaron has a real gift for spinning memorable, attractively folksy themes (like the pentatonic-based "Peaceful Warrior," which I have heard in a few different incarnations over the years) into mutlisection long-form workouts. He's always been kind of a scary technical wunderkind (like many jazz pianists, his piano guru is Sofia Rosoff) but what makes his recent music a thrill to listen to is the combination of effusive joy and an ambitious, architectural sense of structure and large-scale design.

 At this point the music industry's operatically extended death throes, EMI releasing a creative jazz record by an up-and-coming artist kind of feels like staging a jam session on the Hindenburg, but hey, I am not complaining. Good on them for putting Invisible Cinemas out there, and also putting some of that major-label mojo behind an eminently worthy young musician.

WBGO's Josh Jackson has a nice interview with Aaron (including some live-in-the-studio versions of songs from Invisible Cineams). BGO aslo recorded the J&R Fest and all of these performances should be available for streaming soonish now. When that happens, I will update this post. (Post has been updated.)

[As always, I don't pretend to be remotely objective about anything I write here, but especially not about Aaron -- he is a friend, he's subbed in Society rehearsals a few times, and he's the person responsible for introducing me to Lizz Wright. But, you know, if objectivity is your thing, what are you even doing reading blogs in the first place?]

Listen to Aaron's set.

Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has had the kind of storybook success I honestly did not think was still even possible for a jazz artist -- she grew up home-schooled in a single-parent family in Portland, Oregon, landed a full ride at Berklee, was hired to teach bass at her alma mater as soon as she graduated, started gigging with Joe Lovano, put out a couple of records as a leader, and recently ended up playing on Letterman(!) and -- like Nico Muhly -- featured in the Times' Fashion & Style section.

This was my first time hearing her. Live, she's an engaging and charismatic performer with a wispy, attractive voice. She easily enthralled the big, diverse crowd, especially on the neo-soulish "Precious," and a cover of Nina Simone's "Wild Is The Wind." I'd like to hear her inhabit the songs a bit more -- Esperanza somtimes comes off as self-consciously putting on a performance instead of sublimating herself into the song. She's hardly alone in this --  jazz singers in general tend to be more concerned with sound than story -- but I have trouble connecting to that.

My other gripe was that for most of the set it, was well-nigh impossible to hear her bass playing. You could feel her notes, sure, but there was practically no pitch definition, and the bass drum was amplified so excessively it masked most of the low-end frequencies anyway. Now I love the communal experience of the outdoor summer gigs, and I'm glad that this year there are a few more jazz shows in the mix, but sweet jeebus is the live sound at these things ever atrocious. I'd like to catch her band again under more favorable sonic circumstances.

Listen to Esperanza's set.

Mallet percussionist Dave Samuels -- of Spyro Gyra fame -- led his Caribbean Jazz Project in an energetic set that included the Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo classic "Wachi Wara" and a Afro-Carribeanized versions of Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments" and Monk's "Bemsha Swing." The band is made up of very talented players, but the set suffered from a lack of contrast -- I wanted to hear more dynamic variation, more ebb and flow, more drama.

It's been a long time since I've heard Roy Hargrove and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. He's spent recent years concentrating on groove-oriented fusion projects and hiphop collaborations, but his most recent album, Earfood, is a back-to-bop testament. Roy brought the Earfood band to City Hall Park -- Justin Robinson, alto sax; Gerald Clayton, piano; Danton Boller, bass; Montez Coleman, drums -- and any worries I might had about dry, lifeless museum jazz were quickly dispelled by Coleman's swirling, billowing energy and Hargrove's swaggering intensity. (Dig the sneakers with the shiny black suit.) Clayton was another highlight, especially his impressive stopped-string work during his solo on a funky romp through Cedar Walton's "I'm Not So Sure." Hargrove showed us a few different facets of himself over the set, reaching for the fluegelhorn on an uncannily intimate ballad, but he seemed happiest when he was soaring out above the furiously churning rhythm section. Seriously, Montez Coleman is a total badass and he makes the perfect foil for Roy's unbound exuberance. A really fun closing set.

Listen to Roy's set.

More pictures below the fold...

A lifetime of devotion

Some days, New York really grinds you down and destroys your will to live.

Today was not one of those days:

Congratulations! You have been selected to receive tickets for a special taping of "Spectacle: Elvis Costello with... Smokey Robinson."

Not even blog-related... as far as I know, this was just because I'm on Elvis Costello's email list and happened to get lucky.

"Spectacle" is a talk show with music (it starts airing on Sundance Channel in a few months). So this was over two hours of geeked-out shop-talk between two genius songwriters, bookended by live performances. Smokey had an inexhaustible supply of great stories, the best of which was about showing up at the Apollo with the Miracles for a show in the group's earliest days. They were too green to know that when you played the Apollo, you had to bring arrangements for the house big band -- which happened to be, that week, Ray Charles's band. But all the Miracles had was onionskin lead sheets for "Bad Girl." The house manager threw a massive fit and wanted "those ignorant Detroit boys" flayed alive, but Ray calmly intervened, asking the (terrified and starstruck) Smokey to play through a chorus of his song at the piano. Then he took over at the piano, started playing the tune like he'd written it, and began dictating an arrangement on the spot -- "Here, saxophones, you play this" (and Smokey proceeds to sing Ray's lines like this all happened yesterday), "trumpets, you play this; trombones, you play this; guitar, you play this. Write that down, okay?"

Costello and the Imposters opened with "Going To A Go-Go," and a few lesser-known Smokey tunes (including "The Hunter Gets Captured by The Game"). After some conversating, Smokey sang Norah Jones's superhit "Don't Know Why" (penned by Jesse Harris) and a cruelly abridged version of "The Tracks of My Tears" with just Steve Nieve on piano.  More confab ensued -- including an embarrassed admission by Costello that the dancing in this video was the Attractions' best effort at some Miracles-style choreography -- and then he and Smokey closed with a close-harmony duet on (of course) "You've Really Got A Hold On Me," which is clearly the definitive obsessive/destructive love song.

After L. and I signed our first lease in the city (just about five years ago now), we wandered down the street to find a bar where we could get ourselves a celebratory drink. As we were anxiously toasting to our new life in NYC, someone put "I Second That Emotion" on the jukebox. I took that as a good omen.

The Bad Plus 1 featuring Kurt Rosenwinkel @ Society for Ethical Culture

The guitar-piano-bass-drums quartet is rarer in jazz than you'd expect. There's this classic joint from the Wynton Kelly Trio plus Wes Montgomery, of course. And there's Grant Green with Sonny Clark, although those records sat in the vault for years. There are others, to be sure, but I'm actually having a bit of trouble coming up with more than a handful of classic, swinging jazz albums that use the "guitar quartet with piano" lineup. Perhaps this is because it's so easy for guitarists and pianists to start feeling more like competitors than collaborators, boxed in by each other's harmonic choices. And sonically, absent a horn player or two to give focus to the front line, there's a certain sameness, a lack of contrast in the color palette and the sound envelope. (Everything decays, nothing sustains.)

The advent of rock changed all that. Suddenly, jazz guitar players with open ears found themselves with access to a much broader and more expressive range of possibilities. They could hold notes like a horn player, moan and wail like a singer, sculpt sound like a studio wizard. This sea change seemed to make the guitar-piano-bass-drums bands a much more attractive lineup for jazz musicians. Beginning in the late 1970's you started to see these quartets more frequently and prominently: Pat Metheny with Lyle Mays, John Abercrombie with Richie Beirach, John Scofield with Jim McNeely, and so on.

My generation of jazz musicians and jazz listeners is the first that grew up taking rock-influenced jazz guitar sounds for granted. And our generational favorite guitar player is, without a doubt, Kurt Rosenwinkel. Back in those bygone pre-Napster days (i.e., the mid-1990's), imported bootleg tapes of Rosenwinkel's unreleased studio sessions and live hits circulated faster than designer drugs in an afterhours nightclub. His fluid lines and unabashed heart-on-sleeve romanticism made him the object of near-universal adulation. And Rosenwinkel has always had a clear, sympathetic relationship with piano players like Michael Kanan, Scott Kinsey, Brad Mehldau, Aaron Goldberg -- and, on Heartcore and some of those cherished bootlegs, Ethan Iverson.

When Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner were rewriting the template for melodic, long-form original jazz at Smalls last decade, Ethan was there -- and bassist Reid Anderson, too. So when Ethan and Reid emerged from that scene in a trio with some insane Minneapolis-based drummer that became an unlikely major-label sensation -- just a few years after Kurt's Verve debut was finally issued -- well, it felt like a vindication. To many musicians I know, it felt like our music was finally coming into its own, finally garnering some recognition and support from the jazz mainstream.

(Of course, in retrospect, that seems deeply silly. It wasn't our music. We didn't make it. We just admired the hell out of it from afar, and tried our best to cop what we could. But hey, we were young and idealistic.)

This is basically a long-winded way of saying that Tuesday's JVC Jazz Fest concert featuring Rosenwinkel, Iverson, Anderson and King seemed like a much-anticipated reunion gig -- never mind that Dave King had never previously played with Kurt, and Kurt had never previously played the Bad Plus songbook. And to be honest, the four of them got off to a bit of a rocky start -- after King's opening drum solo, when the quartet launched into "Big Eater" there was a fair bit of internal jockeying going on, made worse by some sputtering distortion in the sound system and the Society for Ethical Culture's boomy acoustics.

Things loosened up considerably during Reid's Chopinesque "Love is the Answer" (from TBP's comparitively little-known debut on Fresh Sound) -- Kurt had room to stretch out a bit more, and Ethan's comping was especially tasty. By the start of the third tune, "Guilty," the sound issues had been mostly sorted. The Bad Plus usually treat "Guilty" as a kind of blues abstraction, and Ethan's spacious, conceptual solo was completely line with that view. Kurt was having none of it. When it came time for him to blow, he led things in an unrepentantly earthy direction.

The two Rosenwinkel originals that came next -- "Turns" and "Use Of Light" -- were transfixingly beautiful, especially the latter's rustic melodicism. Then they forged ahead with a spirited romp through Ornette Coleman's "Song X" -- Ethan's solo began with some refined, quasi-Mozartian turns, an offbeat impulse that paid dividends down the line. The set closed with an extended take on Reid's "Silence Is The Question," which built upwards from the composer's solo intro into a languid rubato melody accompanied by lightly brushed guitar harmonics, and slowly, gradually blossomed like time-lapse footage, until it had become a glorious, ecstatic, breathtaking collective rush. When it was over, everyone in the audience stood up as one.

There's really no following up a moment like that, but the crowd was not about to let the band go without an encore. They obliged us with a time-shifting routine on "Have You Met Miss Jones" -- I got the feeling this is a little something from the heyday of the Smalls scene -- capped with the Morse Code stabbing section from "Physical Cities." (Kurt remembered to turn over the page on his music stand just in time.) Fanservice? Maybe just a touch, but it was all in good fun, and hey, if you can't pull that kind of trick in front of a jazz festival crowd in New York, where can you do it?

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The opening group, which received no advance publicity whatsoever, was the British quintet Empirical, making their New York debut. Very young, very clean-cut, and sharply dressed, they looked and sounded a bit like a throwback to the old "jazz wars" (i.e., Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch and Ken Burns and Jazz at Lincoln Center versus basically everyone else), with extended original tunes that owed a lot to the more conceptual 1960's Blue Note "new thing" records. Their music had many attractive moments but their vibe was a bit discombobulated -- I wanted to hear a more coherent through-line. The players are all incredibly talented musicians who never seemed to quite hit their stride. And the venue's swampy sound did them few favors. It felt a bit like a really solid Master's recital. These guys could benefit from a little more road-seasoning and a healthy injection of "kill your idols" attitude.

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Other views:

Composer Ted Hearne.

Terri G. (Terri's Music Blog)

Nate Chinen (NYT).

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Tickets to this event were provided by management.

Stevie Wonder @ Jones Beach Theater, 18 June 2008

Attention blogdonia: where's the love for Stevie Wonder? He's one of a handful of legitimate contenders for "greatest living musical genius." Vocally and instrumentally, he remains at the very top of his game -- I am dead serious, his voice seems supernaturally ageless, and we are talking about one of the most astoundingly flexible, powerful, evocative voices in the entire history of music. As a pianist and keyboardist, the depth of his groove is unassailable -- anyone who's ever touched a clavinet or an analog synth of any kind is wholly in Stevie's debt. (And we haven't even mentioned his first instrument... )

His band, who kicked off the first hit of their summer tour on Wednesday at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, is led by the great Nathan Watts on bass -- Watts has been playing with Stevie for 34 years. He knows how this music is supposed to go. He evidently did an incredible job conveying that knowledge to the band, during 8-10 hour rehearsals every day for the eleven days leading up to the gig, because I'm pretty sure this is the hardest-grooving band I have ever heard in my life. I know the only thing anyone wants to talk about is the Vampire Weekend show in Central Park last weekend, but seriously. Stevie fucking Wonder, y'all. It's not like he plays all the time, either -- last year's tour was his first in a decade. I can't be the only music blogger who thought it was worth taking the LIRR+shuttle bus combo out to Jones Beach.

The full-capacity crowd was as diverse an audience as I've ever seen, twentysomething hipsters cheek-by-jowl with septuagenarian black ladies who've been fans since "Fingertips" first dropped. Everyone in the audience was amazingly good-natured, even after the skies opened up and we all ran for the concourse stairwells, huddling under cover from the torrential downpour and lightning storm that threatened to scuttle the show. But the storm eventually passed and once the stage had been thoroughly wet-vac'd, Stevie took the stage in front of a damp but fervent crowd.

The pair of women next to me sang along (well) to practically every word all night, but their breakaway favorites were two of the extra tracks from Original Musiquarium -- "Ribbon in the Sky" and "Do I Do." (I had no idea those songs had such a dedicated following.)

I didn't take notes on the setlist but the early hits were "My Cherie Amour" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," the ballads included "Lately," "Golden Lady," "Overjoyed," "Laugh You Right Out of My Life" (a feature for his daughter, Aisha), and -- unfortunately but probably inevitably -- "I Just Called To Say I Love You," which a radio contest-winner sang alongside Stevie. (Against all odds, she was not awful.) The new material sounded really strong, which makes me cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming album. But the best performances -- the "oh my god kill me now these are the greatest sounds I've ever heard in my life" performances -- were on "Master Blaster," "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing," "Livin' For The City," "Higher Ground," "Sir Duke," "I Wish,"  and the closing jam on "Superstition," especially when Stevie led the ecstatic croud in a chant of "It's time... for America... to be better than it's ever been." (No mystery what he meant.)

Most surprising additions to the setlist: "Spain" (including the introductory gloss on 'Concierto de Aranjuez,' a last-minute addition which keyboardist Victoria Theodore blogs about here -- so great to have the inside story from a member of Stevie's touring band!) and... "Giant Steps"? Yes, Stevie played (and soloed on) "Giant Steps." I did not expect that.

Stevie must have also had something planned with Q-Tip, because at one point he called him up to the stage. But -- dammit -- something must have gone awry, because Tip never materialized. Nice tease there.

I don't know if the set was cut short due to the storm delay, but Stevie played for about two hours and I would have blissfully listened to at least two more. The problem with having such an incredible body of work is that any given concert is only going to scratch the surface, but the only real disappointment was the choice of ballads -- I would have ditched "Ribbon in the Sky," "Lately," and "I Just Called…" in favor of "Knocks Me Off My Feet," "All In Love Is Fair" and "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)", and I truly desperately wanted to hear "As," "Big Brother," or "You Haven't Done Nothin'." Maybe next time. Keep touring, Stevie, we need you.

Also, how is it that I did not know about this?

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... )

Is it a "term of art," are we bound by it...

On listening to Henry Threadgill's ZOOID (= Dana Leong, cello; Liberty Ellman, guitar; Stomu Takeishi, acoustic bass guitar; Jose Davilla, tuba, Elliot Humberto Kavee - drums) at the Jazz Gallery last night:

Elusive and elliptical ensemble music woven from interlocking, purposeful, overlapping bursts, full of disorienting back-and-forth volleys and barely concealed tension, it felt a bit like watching an old-school David Mamet play performed at twice the normal speed. After injecting meth.

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.

Black night

The last time I saw eighth blackbird, they were responsible for injecting a little "high-minded severity" into last summer's Bang on a Can Marathon. That was also when I learned they'd commissioned a "combo piece" from Bang on a Can's founders -- Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and the recently Pulitzer'd David Lang. The Blackbirdians have double-billed this with another ambitious commission from Steve Reich, who is effectively the granddaddy of the Bang on a Can approach to classical music -- which is, in a nutshell, "less high-minded severity, more grooves."

This program , collectively called "The Only Moving Thing," was premiered three weeks prior in Richmond, VA, and they've also done it in Ann Arbor, San Fransisco, and Costa Mesa, before bringing the show to NYC for Thursday night's hit at Zankel Hall.

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The Reich piece was a double sextet called (you can probably see this one coming) Double Sextet. It's in the lineage of stuff like Electric Counterpoint and Triple Quartet, wherein one or more live musicians plays against their own prerecorded backing tracks. But most of those works have a uniform palette to them -- Electric Counterpoint is all guitar (Pat Metheny, actually, in the original recording) and  Triple Quartet is for string quartet and their recorded doppelgaengers. But the Blackbirds are a heterogenous flock (flute, clarniet, violin, cello, piano, percussion), which makes Double Sextet a very close cousin to Reich's Eight Lines for mixed double septet (4x violins, 2x each of violas, cellos, flutes, clarinets, and pianos). Readers of this blog are all really smart people so I'm sure it has not eluded your notice that you could easily play Eight Lines in the same manner as Double Sextet, with seven musicians playing live against seven prerecorded tracks. (Also, if you are wondering why a piece called Eight Lines is scored for fourteen musicians, see here.)

Eight Lines is one of my favorite lesser-known Reich pieces, and Double Sextet resembles it in more than just instrumentation. The engine underneath the hood of 2x6tet is an intricately interlocking piano-based perpetual motion machine, in this case assisted by mallet percussion. Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duval both have a crisp, consistent sense of pulse and a very sympathetic hookup, propelling the two fast sections that bookend the piece through a virtual minefield of time-signature shifts. The outer movements were satisfying, if a bit familiar: a methodical execution of pattern-based rhythmic processes, unpredictable on a micro level, but following exactly the trajectory you'd expect. However, the middle movement was unexpectedly lyrical, with a beautiful high cello and violin line that sounded like Reich channeling Piazolla. This is a good sound.

The harmonic sequence in each movement is based on some combination of D, F, Ab, and B (and/or their relative minors) -- this use of four equidistant key areas is similar to "Coltrane Changes" (i.e., "Giant Steps" and its offspring), which exploits three equidistant key areas. Reich is a Coltrane nut so I assume that's where he got this idea. This approach to pan-modalism is totally characteristic of Reich's music, but much of Double Sextet has a definite bite to it -- Reich doesn't go so far as to allow chromatic notes from outside the mode to infiltrate, but he does go out of his way emphasize the tensions inherent within each mode. There were a lot more minor second grinds in the sustaining instruments than you usually hear in Reich's music. This is also a good sound.

I did have one minor frustration when listening to the piece, which was that the amplified sound in Zankel was noticeably muddy. Colors that ought to have been bright and sparkling were thin and piercing, and timbres that should have been rich and resonant were dull and characterless. There didn't seem to be enough separation between the recorded tracks and the live playing -- the piano and mallets were clear, but little else was. Some of this may have been due to the live mics picking up bleed from the monitors -- I don't really know enough to say. I do know that I don't envy the Blackbirds' sound tech -- all of Reich's music which involves blending prerecorded parts with live players is extremely difficult to balance correctly, and those pieces tend to sound more satisfying on record than they do live.

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The Bang on a Can "combo piece," singing in the dead of night, opens with a quirky, skittish prologue by David Lang (these broken wings part one), dominated by high-register timbres -- glock, piccolo, accordion, pizz cello at the top of the range, etc. This transitioned into Michael Gordon's the light of the dark, in which the cellist lays down a cascade of buzzsaw glisses and the rest of the ensemble alternately try to swat him with sudden clangs, or ignore him and concentrate on their own folksy melodic lines. It concludes with a great bit of staging (by choreographer Susan Marshall), where Matthew Duvall steals Lisa Kaplan's accordion and gets in her face with it while she tries to focus on the piano part.

eighth blackbird are known for their staging, and the most strikingly theatrical moments came during part two of Lang's these broken wings, a strung-out Handelian passacaille, during which clarinetist Michael Maccaferri was loaded up with metal objects and, with an expression of infinite pathos, began to slowly drop them. And Julia Wolfe's "episode," also called singing in the dead of night, began with some soft, dreamy piano-and-marimba figures, before Kaplan and Duvall abandoned their instruments to lay their heads down on a leaf-covered table with a contact mic strapped to its underside. (In previous performances, the role of "leaves" has been played by "sand" and "barley, quinua, & millet." Presumably the leaves are easier to sweep up, but they also seemed more metaphorically apt.) This bit of business is repeated several times, which some reviewers have complained about, but I saw it as setting the scene for an incredibly tender and unexpected moment when, during a later repetition, Kaplan sleepily reaches out and puts her arm around Duvall.  (You get the sense she's forgiven him for having stolen her accordion earlier).

I thought the best music in singing in the dead of night was David Lang's epilogue (aka these broken wings part three). It opens with a driving, disjuct piano figure that sounds like a pixillated version of the "Tainted Love" chord progression, with slamming pedal bass drum hits, piercing piccolo stabs, and a complex interlocking groove. It made for an exciting close to a well-executed theatrical-musical work. I liked that the balance between the choreography and the musical materials was constantly shifting -- the more active music didn't require much movement to come off, but in the more spacious, atmospheric moments, the onstage action was allowed to take on a more important (and necessary) role. I was also genuinely impressed with how well the Blackbirdians executed the choreography -- everything looked purposeful and motived without seeming contrived or pretentious, and that's no easy feat.

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Tickets to this event were provided by Carnegie Hall. Also, Tim Munro invited me to the post-concert hang, and I went.

Pocket Concertos Year Three - Miller Theatre 27 March 2008

My friend Seth suggested it might be fun to check out what John Zorn has been up to lately, so last night we headed up to the Miller Theatre to catch the premiere of The Prophetic Mysteries of Angels, Witches, and Demons, presented as part of the third and final installment of Miller's "Pocket Concertos" series, wherein composers are commissioned to write something for soloist plus chamber orchestra. Or, you know, whatever.

In Zorn's case the "whatever" was the impressive smörgåsbord of percussion you see above (some of it custom-built by Kenny Wollesen and friends), as performed by Alex Lipowski and William Winant. Half the fun of the piece was waiting to see how and when each "instrument" would be used -- the wash basin, the sandboxes, the squeaky door... Zorn knows very well that if in the first act he has hung a pair of umbrellas from a rack, in the third act they must be used. And so they were, in a spirited face-off between the two percussionists.

Yeah, it was a lot like John Cage performing "Water Walk" on I've Got A Secret (a deliberate homage? Who knows, Zorn scorns program notes). But it was still a hell of a lot of fun, especially with the additional theatricality of having two percussionists going at it, sometimes in strict synchronization, sometimes in opposition to each other.

The drama of an old-school Romantic concerto comes from the epic struggle of a single rugged individualist pitted against Borg-like massed orchestral might. But here, flutist (can't bring myself to type "flautist") Tara Helen O'Connor has an even more difficult challenge -- as the ostensible soloist, she has to compete for attention with a couple of guys spraying seltzer into a glass and cranking the wheel on a homemade wind machine -- when they're not smashing cymbals and thwacking gongs.  She's cast as the exasperated straight man, responding to the general onstage ridiculousness with "serious" melodic lines and incisive phrasing. But she also gets the last, and biggest laugh -- in a piece full of sonic slapstick, the only time the audience really lost it was watching O'Connor trying to wrangle the contrabass flute into playing position. The concerto closes with beautiful, otherwordly tones from this inherently absurd instrument.

My one (minor) quibble with this bit of high-class ha ha was the inclusion of Ikue Mori on laptop. I mean, I get why Zorn included her -- she often supplied the connective tissue between moments, allowing Lipowski and William time to reposition for the next bit of business. But conceptually, it felt like a bit of a cheat. The percussionists were working very hard to generate an array of organic sounds from a all manner of objects, and the effect depends on our being able to see just how they are getting the sounds they are getting. Adding invisibly-generated electronic sounds to the mix drains a bit of magic from the piece.

Then again, Matmos does almost exactly the same thing and I love it. Which leads me to suspect I'm being wildly inconsistent on this. If not downright hypocritical.

The other pocket concertos on the program were from composers previously unfamiliar to me -- Laura Elise Schwendinger and Ichizo Okashiro. Schwedinger's Chiaroscuro Azzurro featured violinist Jennifer Koh. Okashiro's The Starry Night (named after, yes, that "Starry Night") featured pianist Christopher Taylor. Both found a worthy adversary in the chamber orchestra incarnation of ICE, directed by Jayce Ogren. Everyone played their assess off -- ICE is kind of a band-of-Theseus but they always seem to deliver the goods.

I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot to say about these two works, though. Schwendinger's piece was vividly orchestrated -- I am particularly fond of one passage where she elegantly supported Koh with harp, piano, and pizz. strings. But while the opening of each movement was striking and full of promise, I found every time I quickly lost the thread. I heard a succession of well-crafted individual moments, but they didn't really seem to add up to a satisfying musical narrative.

Okashiro's The Starry Night was very static and full of expressionist angst. Unremitting, unshakeable angst, all the way through. It's a two-movement work, and while the second movement is more spacious, it's otherwise extremely similar in mood and vocabulary to the first. Pitch-wise, the piece is at the very margins of "extended tonality" -- it has audible key centers and a few yearning , Wagnerian melodies, but the harmonies are packed tight, with lots of precise, stabby clusters in the piano.

On the one hand, I applaud Okashiro for trying to reclaim Van Gogh's ubiquitous masterwork from the over-familiarity brought on by  being reproduced on millions of coffee mugs, greeting cards, mouse pads, et al. It seems like he's trying to capture in sound the more unsettling aspects of the painting --  and the artist. On the other hand, there are already quite a lot of works from the first half of the 20th century that take a similar approach to depicting both night-time and, well, angst. The concerto was well-crafted and extremely well-played -- Taylor's professorial exactitude at the piano was particularly well-suited to the demands of the part -- but it was also a bit hard to escape the feeling of déja vu.

While this is technically the end of Miller's run of Pocket Concerto concerts, we were told the concept would live on, folded into its excellent, ongoing Composer Portraits series -- presumably this means that living composers featured in the series will be commissioned to write a pocket concerto for their Portrait gig. This is a great idea -- I think the good ol' soloist vs. ensemble bout has a lot of possibilities as-yet unexplored, and I'm looking forward to hearing what comes next.

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Tickets to this event were provided by Miller Theatre.

The M6 sings Meredith Monk @ Symphony Space, 6 March 2008

My concert companion, ACB, has kindly read my mind and already written everything I wanted to say about this exceptional show, a concert of Meredith Monk compositions performed by The M6, a group of ridiculously talented young singers, including Sid Chen of The Standing Room. ACB and I exchanged many astounded "did-you-just-fucking-hear-THAT" glances throughout the show, and shared an intense chat at intermission on the nature of virtuosity (which inspired this post). In this case, the tremendous virtuosity on display actually did hit home, in a thrillingly visceral way, because (A) it was fresh -- the extended vocal techniques Meredith Monk pioneered are still a long way from being tapped out, and (B) it was meaningful -- these songs require virtuosity, but they are not about virtuosity.

I'm no expert on Meredith Monk's music by any means -- I've heard a few things of hers before here and there (including a charming concert at BAMcafé a few years back with Theo Bleckmann and Gary Versace), but her stuff has never hit me as hard as it did last week. Tablet, especially, was fucking primal, an epic in some imagined pre-grammatical language.

Meredith Monk's music requires a significant buy-in from the audience, because if you're not familiar with her style, your first reaction is likely going to be "what in the hell is this -- early minimalism meets Shooby Taylor?" But the M6 singers were so committed to the music and so engaged in their roles that it was impossible not to get drawn into the world they were creating. The songs may not have words, but they do tell stories, and The M6 made these imagined narratives absolutely riveting.

Like ACB says, "I saw more true communication between people tonight than I’ve seen on many an opera/theater stage, where there are actual words in actual languages." I could say much the same thing about many, many jazz singers, who value making pretty sounds over singing the lyrics like you own them. Hell, even originals often come across like professional-but-indifferent covers.

On the way back to the subway, ACB suggested that if The M6 were to expand beyond their current mandate of representing Meredith Monk's music to include other composers, they have the potential to become the Eighth Blackbird of new vocal music. I concur.

Spotlight on Frederic Rzewski with Lisa Moore (piano), 28 Feb 2008

In a lot of ways, Frederic Rzewski is a man out of time. Almost everything about him is anachronistic or contradictory or both -- he's a straight-up virtuoso composer-pianist in the Lisztian tradition, an old-school rugged bohemian whose chosen instrument remains a powerful symbol of class privilege, a distinctively American composer who has lived abroad for over 30 years, a gifted improviser who has recorded with fellow bohemians Steve Lacy and Irene Aebi, a student of arch elitists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions who fell in with the wild boys of the New York School crowd (John Cage, Christian Wolff & co.), went on to write some influential early proto-minimalist works, and who in recent decades has returned to an austere 12-tone pitch vocabulary that would seem at odds with his proletarian politics. Throughout his career, he has freely combined serial, conceptual, minimalist, improvisatory, and collage-based techniques with folk songs and explicit political appeals.

Rzewski's output is so varied and chimerical that some people have accused him of not having a style at all, but I think what unites all his music, from the broadly anthemic to the grimly abstract, is his respect for the listener and his authentic desire to communicate. Babbitt, famously, doesn't care if you listen -- Rzewski, even when he's every bit as serially thorny and complex as Babbitt, wants you to keep up, and is willing to meet you halfway: "it seemed to me there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners." This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world -- "of course music can and should be expressed in a form that people can actually understand, otherwise what's the fucking point?" -- but for some reason, this is still a controversial idea in some circles.

Rzewski's 70th birthday is coming up soon (April 13), but the occasion is not exactly being marked with the sort of fanfare previously bestowed on Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Corigliano. This is kind of instructive -- Rzewski primarily writes for the piano, and is clearly the most important and influential composer of  works for piano of the past 25 years. In the 19th century, if you wrote great piano music you were a titan -- in the 21st century, you're at best a marginal cult figure. So big ups to the Keys to the Future people for giving Fred his due, in a recital featuring Bang on a Can All-Stars vet Lisa Moore.

I recently bitched about how empty and hollow virtuosic displays for their own sake feel to me. Much of Rzewski's music is extraordinarily difficult to play, and the composer himself is capable of some serious pianistic fireworks (which abound on the 7 CD set Rzewksi Plays Rzewski) but even in a technical tour-de-force like the hour-long The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, you never get the sense that the music is about virtuosity. (That is, if the title and form of the work -- a series of variations on a protest song by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega that became the anthem of the anti-Pinochet resistance -- didn't make the composer's intent clear enough from the outset.) However, the Rzewski works Lisa Moore selected for her Greenwich House gig mostly called for a different kind of virtuosity -- all but the first and last piece on the program relied as much on her ability to sing or deliver spoken text as it did her pianism.

The focus of the recital was De Profundis, a 1992 work for speaking pianist. The title and text are both drawn from Oscar Wilde's famous letter to his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, composed while Wilde was languishing in Reading Jail (Wilde's libel suit against his lover's father having proved somewhat... ill-advised). But the performance text includes not just Wilde's prose but gasps, rasps, whistling, and a few judicious honks on a clown's car horn.

The really striking thing about this piece is how incredibly patient it is, how slowly and spaciously it unfolds -- this lends a line of text near the end particular resonance: "And how slowly time goes with those of us who lie in prison I need not tell again." The spoken sections are all sparsely scored, with plenty of room for the words to have their full effect -- Wilde's unadorned prose is powerful enough, and Rzewski doesn't let the music oversaturate it. The spoken sections are stitched together by purely instrumental passages that serve as a kind of commentary on the text we've just heard.

I actually liked Moore's reading of De Profundis a bit better than the composer's -- heresy, I know, but she was less declamatory and her flow was less halting. Her voice seemed to capture an impish spirit, almost but not quite broken down by circumstances, which is closer to how I hear Wilde's voice in my head than Rzewski's more bitter, spiteful rendition. But of course, this is a work that invites a diversity of interpretations, as Rzewski himself says:

[I]t has been performed by a number of pianists, gay, straight, male and female. All of the different interpretations it has received so far have been original, interesting, and different from each other. The music demands a combination of virtuoso technique and a total lack of inhibition on stage, thus virtually guaranteeing that no mediocre or conventional performer will dare go near it.

The other played+spoken piece on the program was a movement -- or "mile," in this case, Mile #42, "The Prodigal Parents" -- from The Road, Rzewksi's recently completed 10-hour "novel" for solo piano plus "theatrics" (here including banging on the closed piano lid and an ironic burst of self-applause). The text, Rzewski's own, called "The Prodigal Parents," is a plea for forgiveness addressed to subsequent generations. To His Coy Mistress is not a narration, but an actual song, a setting of Andrew Marvell's famous paean to getting it on. The music sounded inspired by several of Steve Lacy's poem settings, which are in a similar vein. This was the one piece where I was not sold on Moore's interpretation, which didn't really capture the seductive urgency of the poem.

The concert was bookended by two purely instrumental pieces, both from the late 1970's. Moore opened with Piano Piece No. 4 another Chilean-inspired piece, which begins with creeping high repeated notes that gradually coalesce into chords, and then a low rumble. The haunting folksong melody struggles to be heard amongst the dark ostinatos and high stabbing figures.

A similar process fuels Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, which has the singular distinction of being a blues-inspired piece of classical piano literature that does not suck. Before playing it, Moore treated us to a hilarious recreation of Rzewski's ultra-stiff manner of singing the workers' song the piece is based on. But a huge reason Winnsboro succeeds where so many others have failed is that there is no artificial, stilted "jazzing up" of the material -- the theme is treated almost entirely mechanistically, grinding against looping left-hand figures and churning clusters. Winnsboro was the most impressively virtuosic piece on the program, but all the flash in the world is nothing without the ability to dig in and maintain a relentlessly steady pulse throughout -- and luckily Moore has rhythmic authority to burn. It made for an explosive conclusion to a great recital.

Moore will be appearing again at Greenwich House as one of the eight pianists featured at this year's Keys to the Future Festival, which is coming up soon (March 25-27).  My review of a night from last year's festival is here. Frederic Rzewski will be appearing at Zankel Hall on May 1 alongside Boston pianist Steven Drury (they'll be doing the two-piano version of Winnsboro) and new music ensemble Opus 21.

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Tickets to this event were provided by the presenter.

Fighting vainly the old ennui

Is there anything more boring than virtuosity?

I mean, when you're young and you first make that ill-advised decision to seriously dedicate yourself to your instrument, hearing someone with superhuman technique is thrilling beyond belief. Also daunting and depressing, for sure, but mostly thrilling. And chops envy is often the only thing keeping you going in the practice room, because honestly, why else would you voluntarily spend countless tedious hours drilling scales and patterns and those godawful Hanon and Czerny exercises if you didn't desperately want to be more impressive than your peers? Yeah, yeah, "passion for music," whatever -- we are talking about kids here. And kids whose music-making takes place within the constraints of long-established, adult-approved institutions, at that.

But at a certain point in your musical development, you come to realize that technique is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You become aware that there's no such thing as objectively, universally "good" technique -- you might need one set of skills to excel at one type of music, but other musics present completely different technical challenges. You also realize that music that requires the performer to clear large and obvious technical hurdles is not always better than music that seems easier to play. You learn that the flashiest elements of virtuosity -- like the ability to play very fast with a lot of accuracy -- are not necessarily the most important, and that subtlety and nuance are both more meaningful and more elusive. You recognize that musicians that have developed a highly idiosyncratic and individual technique (i.e., musicians that play "the wrong way") are often playing the right way for them -- their unorthodox approach might actually be perfectly suited to their individual voice as a musician.

At least, I hope you come to realize these things. Not everyone does. When you've devoted a significant portion of your formative years to the single-minded pursuit of virtuosity, it can be dispiriting to learn that better technique doesn't make you a better musician. But you can't actually become a for-real grown-up musician unless you are willing to suck it up and admit to yourself that chops aren't everything. Otherwise, you will continue to live your life believing truly perverse things -- things like "Theolnious Monk wound have sounded better if his technique had been more like Oscar Peterson's" or "Buckethead is a better guitarist than Albert King" or "Charles-Valentin Alkan's music is more meaningful than Erik Satie's."

Because the reality is, a pageant of virtuosity for its own sake is skullfuckingly tedious. For anyone who has a post-adolescent relationship with music, fearsome chops alone don't impress, not even as pure athleticism. To make an impact, the virtuoso also has take genuine risks, and all all that skill has to be in the service of real musical expression.

When John Coltrane first recorded "Giant Steps," that was thrilling because it was new and daring and original. The energy of discovery is all over that recording, and it remains vivdly etched into the tracks even if you weren't born until decades after Coltrane recorded it. But nobody cares how deftly you negotiate "Giant Steps." These days, everyone and their dog can play over "Giant Steps" changes. It doesn't mean anything anymore -- especially not when it's coming from someone who has nothing of his own to say other than, "Look, Ma, I can nail 'Giant Steps'!"

Same goes for Gaspard de la nuit, Rach 3, the Liszt Transcendental Etudes and all the other legendary finger-busters -- nobody cares. Seriously. 

Look, I know this repertoire is fearsomely difficult and you have dedicated your entire life to getting to the point where you can credibly negotiate these works, but in case you hadn't realized (because you were too busy practicing) -- lots of people can and do play the shit out of this stuff. I don't care if you are even more flawless and even more polished than the currently reigning heavyweight champion of polished flawlessness, this stuff is just not impressive anymore. Even if your sole objective as a musician is to blow us away with your l33t skillz, the only way you can actually accomplish that is by doing something we haven't heard done a million times before.

The question of the perception of virtuosity and its relationship to new music was very much on my mind during two recent concerts: an all-Rzewski recital by pianist Lisa Moore last week, and an all-Meredith Monk concert by The M6 earlier tonight. Monk and Rzewski are both members of an increasingly endangered species -- the composer-virtuoso. But they are both the best kind of virtuosos -- in fact, their virtuosity is the only kind that still actually registers as such, because their respective musical languages involve techniques that only the composers themselves and a handful of others in the world have mastered. This also makes it extremely daunting for anyone to attempt a piece by Rzewski or Monk, because the composers themselves are such fearsome and authoritative performers of their own works.

I'll have more to say about those two concerts -- both of which were extraordinary, and virtuosic in non-boring ways -- in a couple of follow-up posts.

"Egna Ot Waog" - Andrew D'Angelo (from Skadra Degis)

MP3: "Egna Ot Waog" - Andrew D'Angelo (click to listen/right/ctrl-click to download)

I picked up Andrew D'Angelo's new trio record (with Trevor Dunn, bass and Jim Black, drums) at the Tea Lounge benefit on Friday night. It came with two free beers. I am of the opinion that more CDs should be sold in this manner.

It's a really great record, and quite different from anything else in Andrew's catalog. It is both incredibly varied and tightly focused -- all but one tune is under five minutes long, and most of them either sustain or slowly develop a single, simple idea for the duration. Andrew is known for his jugular-attacking intensity and that's certainly in evidence in tunes like "Bo Bee Bo Bee Bee" and "25 Hits" (which you can sample over at Feast of Music), but what I've always loved about Andrew is that he combines that take-no-prisoners freepunk swagger with warmth, humor, and a composerly sense of form and scale. Some of the best moments on this record are the more intimate ones -- the haunting subtones that open "Fichtik," the chamberlike bass-clarinet-arco bass counterpoint on "Rutloosic," the heart-on-sleeve diatonic Ornetteish balladry of "Fam Hana." But my favorite track so far is "Egna Ot Waog," a sinister, trancelike piece that, like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, doesn't need gunpowder to make an impression.

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You can buy Skadra Degis from Skirl Records. All proceeds go to help pay for Andrew's medical bills. Thanks to Skirl for permission to post the MP3.

Also: Secret Society co-conspirator Josh Sinton is playing a benefit show for Andrew tonight (Tuesday 26 Feb) at the Bowery Poetry Club with his band Holus-Bolus.

Andrew D'Angelo Benefit Show @ Tea Lounge, 22 Feb 2008

Amazing turnout at the first NYC Andrew D'Angelo benefit show last night -- the Tea Lounge was packed stiflingly tight, and trying to make your way up to the bar or back to the bathrooms was a major excursion. There were so many musicians in attendance that John McNeil, in his usual deadpan, suggested that someone ought to blow the place up, enabling them to step in and snap up all of our lucrative gigs.

I got there a bit late and only caught the tail end of Matt Wilson's set, but what I heard was, as usual, nimble, spirited, and warm-hearted. Wilson's regular quartet includes D'Anglelo, and he also leads a band called Arts and Crafts with Dennis Irwin on bass, so this can't be an easy time for him. Stepping up to the mic at the conclusion of their set, his voice was understandably a bit overwhelmed with emotion.

Bill McHenry passed out earplugs to his usual Sunday night co-conspirator and donned Blues Brothers shades before taking the stage with Jamie Saft and Mike Pride, who both know how to throw down when it comes to facial hair. (ZZ Top beard and horseshoe mustache, respectively.) The noir-metal vibe sounded like the music Robert Rodriguez should have used for his Grindhouse segment. (Instead of, you know, hiring himself.)

Trevor Dunn's Trio Convulsant contrasts the smart, spiky modernism of guitarist Mary Halvorson with the unslaked primal bloodlust of drummer Ches Smith, whose playing I had not previously heard. Clearly this was a major oversight. Ches, Mike Pride, Matt Wilson and Jim Black, all in one night... sweet Christ.

Chris Speed first met Andrew D'Angelo and Jim Black playing in a youth big band, back when they were all Seattle-area high school students. They moved to Boston to go to Berklee together, formed Human Feel together, and then moved to New York together. Last night they, joined with Trevor Dunn, who also plays bass on Andrew's new record, Skadra Degis, and one of Andrew's closest friends, saxophonist Oscar Noriega, in a set of D'Angelo originals. I think everyone felt the need to bring the heat, to infuse the music with Andrew's nitroglycerin spirit. Which they did, most especially on the blistering, incisive "Sich Reped."

Andrew has been heart-rendingly candid about his situation on his blog, but the good news is that Nate Chinen's Times piece apparently attracted the attention of a doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the best cancer treatment center in the country.

If you can, please donate.

Photos below the fold.

UPDATE: Comic artist Jeremy Arumbulo has posted video of this hit to YouTube. Here's "Sich Reped":

Black Tie White Noise

Caught the second of two nights of the Wordless Music Series's first orchestral show at St. Paul the Apostle, headlined by the US premiere of Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver -- parts of which you may already be familiar with via the sountrack to There Will Be Blood. (Have not yet seen, want to very much.) Also on the program -- John Adams's Christian Zeal and Activity -- gamers will recognize this one from the Modern Age of Civ IV -- and Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic.

In Allan Kozinn's piece in the NYT on Wordless Music, series founder Ronen Givony expresses some surprise that the major US orchestras were not falling over themselves to program the BBC Orchestra-commissioned Greenwood work:

So I wrote to Radiohead’s management, thinking: ‘I’m just some kid in New York with this little threadbare series. Surely Esa-Pekka Salonen and 10 other conductors and orchestras already have this in the pipeline.’ But I got an e-mail back the same day, saying, ‘No, you’re actually the first person who’s asked me about this.’ ”

I'm actually quite happy to see that the first stateside performance went to the "Wordless Music Orchestra," a superb group handpicked by Caleb Burhans and conducted by Brad Lubman. The band includes many of Caleb's Alarm Will Sound cohorts and other NYC new music specialists, most of them in their 20's and 30's -- and almost all of them Radiohead fans, I'd wager. Isn't this scenario infinitely better than the professional-but-indifferent reception (at best) or ritualized hazing (far more likely) Greenwood would have gotten from a "real" orchestra? This was one of those rare concerts of recent orchestral works where you got the sense that the players actually had some personal investment in the music. I wish this happened more frequently.

As for the pieces, I thought the Bryars was brilliant -- maybe not A Man in a Room Gambling brilliant, but The Sinking of the Titanic more than rewarded my patience by making me think differently about harmony -- as its languid progressions began to blur and seep into each other, I realized that "progression" isn't even the right word. I mean, the harmonies are mostly consonant and "tonal," I guess, but without much sense of direction. Plus, the recorded and percussive sound elements were beautifully and organically integrated into the piece (love the bells and chains at the beginning). Also, the lighting design was outstanding. More of this, please.

By contrast, Christian Zeal and Activity is almost Wagnerian in its directionality, with one suspension pulling you inexorably towards the next one in the chain. It's very pretty, but not nearly as interesting as the Bryars, and the abrupt insertion of prerecorded sound (a revival preacher's sermon) was too loud and too intrusive. And then there's that "down home" 1-5-1-5 pizz bass line, out of nowhere? Not my favorite John Adams work, I'm afraid.

In what would no doubt seem like a surprising and ironic twist -- that is, if you were an old-school classical purist so cloistered you'd never heard a Radiohead record -- the piece by the "rock star" was by far the densest, most chromatic, most challenging work on the program. Greenwood wrote 32 individual string parts, full of microtonal glisses, wide vibrato, and shimmering clusters. Johnny name-checks Penderecki's Threnody in the program notes, but mostly it came off like Ligeti in his most overtly Debussy-influenced moments -- a kind of Modernist hyper-impressionism, thick but still light and wispy.

This was fine as far as it goes, very sonorous and well-crafted -- but there were two moments in particular that really stood out: one about midway through when more familiar harmonies started to take shape below the cloud cover, and another nearer to the end, when the pizzicato strings began to generate a sense of urgency. Both felt more like Greenwood's own voice than the rest of the stuff. And both could have lasted much longer and been developed more fully -- the recap at the end came far too early and stopped the piece dead in its tracks.

See also David Salvage at Sequenza 21 for a contrasting take, and Chris Owyoung at Brooklyn Vegan for some outstanding photos.

UPDATE: See also Hank Shteamer at Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, who has a good rant about "live instrument(s) + tape" pieces. And Kozinn's NYT review is here.

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Tickets to this event were provided by the Wordless Music Series.

We can have a few decent days and nights

Just as it's not possible for Ethan to write impartially about Bill McHenry, I am hardly the one to give you a disinterested account of Maria Schneider's Thanksgiving week run at Jazz Standard. Nate Chinen has some on-point observations -- me, I reliably revert to slack-jawed fanboy mode whenever I hear the band. I went late on Friday night -- a bit too late, as I missed the opening of the set-opener, Allegresse, and walked into Ingrid Jensen's effects-enhanced trumpet solo in medias res. The electronics serve the music well, although the best moment came later when Ingrid and saxophonist Steve Wilson sparred while drummer Kendrick Scott surged.

This was a real thrown-in-the-deep-end situation for Kendrick, subbing for Clarence Penn in the middle of the run with no opportunity for rehearsal. Maria's music lives and dies by the drummer -- it's by far the most demanding and elusive role in the band, and most of the truly vital information about how to play it can't be conveyed on the page. There aren't many drummers who could have responded as well as Kendrick did under that kind of pressure, navigating the whitewater rapids of Allegresse, the stuttering gestures of Choro Dançado and the unmetered balladry of Rich's Piece, reading like a madman but bringing his own flow to the music.

(I was lucky enough to have Kendrick play with Secret Society around this time last year -- you can listen to that show here.)

The band closed the final, too-short set with a piece they haven't played in many years. I'm very glad to have caught it, as this is the tune that quite literally changed my life -- for better or for worse, there is simply no way Secret Society would exist if I hadn't been slain by Wrygly back in '94. (That first Maria Schneider record could be the jazz The Velvet Underground and Nico -- everyone who heard it started a big band.) Charlie Pillow, Marshall Gilkes, and Ben Monder contributed some incendiary solos, but really, the band had me at the first three chords. I still think this is the greatest thing Maria has ever written.

Despite her stratospheric reputation in the jazz press, Maria seems paradoxically underrated (or sometimes just flat-out unknown) by the new music intelligentsia. Part of this has to do with her unabashed romanticism -- for a lot of the self-styled avant-garde, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that skronk -- and, of course, her enviable popularity inevitably generates a certain amount of skeptical backlash. But if we're going to celebrate Osvaldo Golijov's  remarkable musical alchemy and vivid orchestration -- and I certainly count myself among his admirers -- then we should also recognize that Maria has for almost 15 years now been working brilliantly with many of the same ingredients, transmuting deep reserves of contemporary jazz, flamenco, Brazilian music, Peruvian music, pop songcraft, and a classically-informed but entirely innovative approach to sound, color and structural unity. I can't help but feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with people who would dismiss music of such astounding vitality and artistry because it happens also to be very pretty.

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How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus

Just back from night two of Dudamania at Carnegie. (Thanks, Molly!) I am actually running up against a fast-approaching hard deadline trying to complete the music for my own orchestral debut, so for now at least, I will let Jon Stewart speak for me:

EDIT: And also Steve Smith. (The comment of mine that Steve references is that under Dudamel, Bartók's infamous pastiche of Shosta 7 was actually genuinely funny. This bit is, in my experience at least, never funny.)

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I'm out of phase and you're all stereo

MP3: Music for 18 Musicians, Section VI - Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble

The GVSU recording of Music for 18 dropped a few weeks ago. Since then there's been renewed interest in the ensemble, especially their 5 AM performance of this hourlong Steve Reich masterwork at the Bang On A Can Marathon earlier this year. A lot of people are surprised to learn that the Grand Valley State kids played for an audience of some 400 people -- "for reasons that no one could quite understand" to quote Alex Ross.

Well, speaking as one of The 400, it honestly did not occur to me that there was anything unusual about the size of the audience, even given the, ah, nontraditional timeslot. Of course, I'm the guy who thought it would be fun to liveblog the entire 27-hour marathon, so you may not want to put too much stock in my idea of what "usual" is. But I have received some email inquiries by people who are genuinely curious about what motivated those who turned out. (Perhaps some are thinking of launching their own 5 AM music series?)

It's tempting to be glib and say 'What part of 'The City That Never Sleeps' don't you understand?" On any given Saturday night in NYC, there are lots of people still out getting their fun on at 5 AM. (Obviously, it's not just NYC -- back in my callow youth, when we would hit Montreal's afterhours dance clubs, by 5 AM the party was just getting started.) When you've got close to a thousand people who came down to the Winter Garden to check out the free shows, including sets by The Books, Juana Molina, and a live version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, it didn't seem that surprising that many of those listeners would choose to stick around for the "afterparty" (or drift in after a night on the town).

The 5 AM set was planned to coincide with the rising sun -- the opening Pulses began cloaked in darkness, but by the work's end the Winter Garden's glass-enclosed atrium was flooded with daylight. (You can see the progression in the photos I took.) This experience now seems inextricable from the piece's story arc -- the maracas in Section VI will hereafter always evoke dawn for me.

•     •     •

Music for 18 Musicians is not an easy piece, and Grand Valley State University is not exactly a magnet school for young virtuosi. The students there mostly have their sights set on teaching gigs, not whirlwind international careers. But that actually makes the piece a better fit for them, in a couple of important ways.

First, given a certain basic level of competence, its difficulties are the same for everyone. It's no easier for a Juilliard wunderkind to learn to play Music for 18 Musicians than it is for anyone else. In fact, because the music allows so little room for individual showmanship, it may even be harder for the young hotshot to put aside his ego and submit to the demands of the music. (Kyle Gann talks about this equalizing effect in his post on coaching minimalist and postminimalist rep.)

Second, like all of Reich's music, Music for 18 Musicians is impossible to perform unless everyone involved has a highly developed sense of rhythmic authority. You need to be strong enough in your own sense of time that you can play your part securely and accurately, but you also have to be hyper-attuned to where everyone else is feeling the time, and sensitive enough to adjust your own placement to match what is happening around you. Without a conductor, a drummer, or a click track to impose the beat, it's almost inevitable that you will end up with an 18-way tug-of-war. Learning to play the piece is largely about everyone learning how to pull in the same direction. For these young musicians, being forced to take personal responsibility for the time in large group context... and then being forced to keep up that intensity of concentration for an hour or more -- this is the best, more important and relevant lesson you could possibly teach the next generation of music educators.

•     •     •

I've often found it a bit curious that for a composer who is both hugely influenced by jazz (especially Kenny Clarke's sense of forward motion and Coltrane's single-minded motivic transformations) and is himself hugely influential far beyond his own musical turf (to cite but the latest of countless examples, Radiohead's In Rainbows has at least two tracks that are explicitly built around Reichian techniques) -- Steve Reich's influence on jazz musicians has been practically nonexistent. There are exceptions, of course -- Pat Metheny, John Hollenbeck, Joe Phillips, and, uh, yrs trly -- but an awful lot of jazz musicians, from arch-traditionalists to ostensible avant-gardists, find Reich's music anathema. My own mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, drips contempt for all things minimalist. (He once had to be escorted out of a performance of a Philip Glass opera.)

A few weeks ago, I gave a workshop on Reich's music for some jazz majors out at Queens College. I started by having the class attempt to read through Clapping Music, which I hoped would (A) be fun, and (B) give everyone a first-hand taste of some of the difficulties involved in performing Reich's music. It's fair to say there was a wide range of reactions to this, from "enthusiastic curiosity" to "are you fucking kidding me with this shit?". The skepticism intensified considerably when I played them the first few minutes of Come Out. I was definitely expecting some pushback on that one, but I'd also hoped that the kids would at least be somewhat impressed by Piano Phase, especially with the help of these nifty video aids:

(Unfortunately, at the time the Aidu clip wouldn't load.)

Anyway, at this point the battle lines were clearly drawn, but we had a productive side discussion about the value of the avant-garde generally, and the merits of studying music you can't stand. I'm glad the people who were not into this music spoke up -- it's always much more fun when people say their piece instead of just gritting their teeth in silence. And I think even the skeptics found a little relief when we moved on to the comparatively lush Music for Mallet Instruments, Organ and Voices and the openly jazz-inflected New York Counterpoint. But the experience made me wonder how much grief GVSU New Music Ensemble director Bill Ryan got from his students when they learned they would be devoting the year to learning a piece that doesn't offer many of the obvious rewards most players expect when they perform music. It also got me wondering how and why the virtues of Reich's music -- propulsion, clarity, patience, audible development, complexity via the manipulation of simple materials, the gradual construction of an effective large-scale musical narrative -- do not seem to resonate with very many of my fellow jazz musicians.

New Pornographers @ Webster Hall, 24 Oct 2007

I heard something last night that I don't think I've ever heard at a rock concert before. I was standing up front, just behind the photo pit, directly in Neko Case's line of fire, and after a few tunes, I started to notice something -- whenever she backed off the mic a bit so she could belt one out, I could clearly hear the direct sound of her unamplified voice, right in front of me, ringing out above all the amplified sounds coming from the fill speakers and stacks on either side. Girl's got pipes.

I'm aware this is not exactly an original observation -- who doesn't love Neko's massive, seductive voice, with those tasty post-Patsy Cline inflections? For that matter, who doesn't go a little weak in the knees reading her righteous anti-autotune rant? But, you know, now that I've finally heard her live, I realize she is an even better musician than I'd given her credit for. When I saw the Pornographers at Summerstage last year, Neko was not with them. Kathryn Calder sang Neko's parts, as she does whenever they appear without Ms. Case. Kathryn is a very, very good singer, and I am a big fan of her own band, Immaculate Machine (who will take the opening slot tonight for the second of the two Webster Hall hits -- I'm going to try to catch them at Union Hall on Nov. 11). But Neko is to the New Pornographers' array of harmonizing vocalists what a good concertmaster is to an orchestral string section, or a good lead trumpet player is to a big band -- she is the point, the focus of the sound; she sets the time and the phrasing and the rest of it by being so strong up top that everyone else can't help but fall into place. And she does this even when things get totally fucked up.

Neko didn't look like she was having much fun last night. It appeared that the transmitter for her wireless in-ear monitor wasn't working, because they swapped it out a few tunes into the set. And her mic was clearly set way too hot for such a big voice (like, hello?) -- squeals of feedback marred much of the early set, especially "Challengers." But where at Summerstage the sound issues caused the band to seriously flub their harmony vocals, at Webster, no matter how bad the sound problems got, the group vocals were unfailingly tight and in-tune. Kudos are due to everyone in the band for this, of course, but I think Neko deserves an extra gold star. She was a real pro, working very hard all night to keep everything together. Her most valuable contribution wasn't her solo leads -- although she slayed on "Mass Romantic" -- but the way she led by example on the thick background vocals and harmonized choruses, making them seem effortless and fun and not nearly as tough to sing as they actually are.

The other highlight was the appearance of part-time Pornographer Dan Bejar, who usually contributes three or four tunes to each record but almost never tours with them. The indie rock blogosphere clearly favors Bejar -- who plays the charismatic, idiosyncratic louche -- over Carl Newman, the dependable, somewhat dorky pop craftsman. As an unreconstructed dork, I know where my allegiances lie, but I also really like the contrast between the impeccable Newman songs and the looser, weirder Bejar songs. And while I don't really get what it is that Dan is after with his own band,  his Pornographers tunes are mostly catchy enough that I find their quirks endearing instead of alienating. "Myriad Harbour" is his best yet -- in fact, it might even be the best song on Challengers. Bejar's onstage presence was really entertaining too -- kind of like Dean Martin meets Lou Reed or something. (Sorry, Carl. You know I still love you best. Even if the the NY Times indie rock pie chart dude has nothing but snark. If it's any consolation, I think "Failsafe" is a really good song too.) 

All told it was a great gig, despite the (seemingly inevitable, with this band) technical glitches. As fantastic as the records are, some things you really need to experience live, and the chorus to "Bleeding Heart Show" is one of those things.

It occurs to me that the Pornographers are basically a prog pop band -- a bit like Queen without the camp. (I mean this as high praise, I assure you.) It helps enormously that they are, you know, actually poppy -- their hooks are so instantly appealing that they fool you into thinking that the songs are a lot more straightforward then they actually are.

This got me thinking of a recent Nico Muhly post that included an aside about odd-meter pop:

I have to say, I am of the (possibly rude) opinion that there is very limited use for mixed meter in pop music – you always sense that the song, if it’s in 7/8 or a funnily divided 9/8 time stops being about the song and starts being about how clever one is to have achieved music in such a meter.

Though he is willing to grant absolution to Sufjan Stevens, "who seems to get away with it effortlessly (usually)."

While I am sure we can all name a lot of pop songs that are in odd meters for no good reason, and are vastly improved by just putting the damn thing in 4/4 (and, okay, having someone actually credible sing them), when it comes to elegant and subtle use of odd meter in pop songs, I think the New Pornographers cut Sufjan pretty badly. No disrespect to Sufjan, who is obviously brilliant -- and besides, I clearly have a much higher tolerance for odd-meter pop than Nico does. But since he brought it up... which song is more blatantly odd meter-y: "Come On! Feel the Illinoise!" or "Mutiny, I Promise You"?

MusicSnobbery has the setlist.

Photos below the fold....

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...

Beirut, Fifth Veil @ Brooklyn Masonic Temple (Wordless Music)

The last time I mentioned Beirut on this blog, drummer Peter Breslin (of Stochasticactus) remarked that to his "jaded ears," they "sounded like heavily diluted 'World Music.'" While I understand why you'd have that reaction if you were expecting authentic Balkan fire -- or even high-intensity ersatz Balkanisms à la Slavic Soul Party -- that's not really what this band is about. If, on the other hand, you're intrigued by the idea of a large, acoustic, mostly guitar-free indie rock band fronted by a fluegelhorn-playing sensitive boy whose formative influences as a songwriter are Stephin Merritt and Jacques Brel, sprinkled with just a light dusting of Kocani Orkestar, then you will probably see the group in a more positive light. Oddly enough, this improbable blend seems to be exactly what quite a lot of people are looking for, because it seems like everyone is going absolutely apeshit for Beirut, which played their first-ever gig just 16 months ago.

Of course, that first gig was, from all reports, a little rough. Last night's hit at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (a familiar scene) was the first night of their tour in support of their sophomore release -- a series of love letters to French cities called The Flying Club Cup -- and not everything went precisely according to plan. One tune -- a song by Owen Pallett -- had trouble getting off the ground, and then crashed and burned badly when the group hit the bridge in different keys. After some animated onstage discussion ("Welcome to Beirut rehearsal," frontman Zach Condon joked), they tried it again, but it was still a bit shaggy. The band eventually found their stride on more familiar material, like the slow-building "Postcards From Italy." The instrumentation is varied -- almost everyone in the band is a multi-instrumentalist -- and attractively ear-catching. (Glock with violin! Horn with accordion! Ukulele ukulele ukulele!) But Beirut really is fundamentally about Condon's songwriting and plaintive, slightly warbly voice. Honestly, I go a bit hot and cold on both, but with Calexico retreating into more conventional territory of late, it's definitely refreshing to see another talented and buzz-worthy indie band that have their ears open to music beyond America's borders.

FifthVeil (made up of players from Bard College) opened with a very credible version of Osvaldo Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. Clarinettist Conor Brown, who did an admirable job with the  klezmer inflections, mentioned to me afterwards that the group had gotten some coaching from David Krakauer, which is obviously a very nice thing to have on a piece like this.

Beirut are playing a second Wordless Music show on Monday, Sept. 24, at the Society for Ethical Culture. They are also playing at the Delacorte in Central Park on Wednesday, Sept. 26.

Tickets to this event were provided by Wordless Music.

Other good writeups:

Café Eclectica Music (Kyle Dean Reinford)
Brooklyn Skeptic (plainclothesman)

More photos below the fold...

More than words

Season 2 of Wordless Music kicked off last night with Electric Kompany and Do Make Say Think. (In case you missed it the first time, here's my review of the Season 1 opener.)

EK are basically a rock quartet with music stands. They played a couple of pieces by Nick Didkovsky, one by Marc Mellits, and Jacob TV's recent Iraq-inspired piece "White Flag" (minus the video -- there was a screen set up, but something must have gone awry with the projection). They sounded a lot more relaxed and authoritative than the last time I heard them (when they played Ethel Fair at Symphony Space). This time around, it seemed like they were digging deeper for the grooves, which made the stuff they performed much more convincing -- especially the Mellits piece they closed with.

Toronto's DMST were a revelation. I'd heard and enjoyed a few tracks from their records, but nothing prepared me for the full-bore intensity of their live show. Many of their tunes would slowly build up these gloriously noisy, super-saturated climaxes that sounded like they were right on the verge of breaking apart. At times they sounded like a supersized Sounds of Science-ish Yo La Tengo, and in certain hushed moments, like a noisier, synth-inflected Calexico. Their entire set was transfixing and cathartic.

Wordless Music continues next Thursday with Beirut and Bard College's Fifth Veil doing Golijov's The Dreams and Prayers of Issac the Blind, at a venue that sharp-eyed Society fans might find somewhat familiar.

Claudia Quintet, Todd Reynolds @ The Stone

John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet occupies an odd space in the topography of the contemporary jazz scene. There's a certain family resemblance to groups mining the post-Steve Coleman math-jazz vein, except that with Claudia, many of their most disorienting rhythmic contusions and collisions are layered over a simple 4/4 or 3/4 grid. John's music is complex, but he doesn't bludgeon you senseless with unrelenting density and abrasiveness. His long through-composed forms build up and draw down in elegant proportions, and new ideas are presented and transformed at a natural and satisfying pace. The music isn't driven by melody the way, say, Maria Schneider's music is, but it's still infused with an approachable melodic sensibility. The group find almost limitless coloristic possibilities in the combination of their five individual voices. This, along with John's entwinement with the Downtown new music scene (Meredith Monk, the Bang on a Can People's Commissioning Fund, etc.) have led some critics to call the Claudia Quintet a modern-day successor to the "chamber jazz" and "third stream" groups of the 1950's. To me, though, those terms imply a sound that's pretty far removed from Claudia's catchy hooks and trancelike grooves.

John handles the tension between dissonance and consonance, density and transparency, structure and freedom, darkness and light, repetition and transformation, etc., better than just about anyone else writing small-group jazz right now. I think this is because he really gets that these concepts aren't mere abstractions -- they are all deeply emotionally meaningful, and anyone who wants their music to actually communicate needs to learn how to blend them effectively. This may all seem painfully obvious, but much of the new music I hear -- jazz and otherwise -- seems willfully oblivious (if not downright hostile) to having an emotionally meaningful structure.  That's why it's such a joy to hear a group like Claudia play stuff that's intellectual and innovative and conceptually strong, and yet actually tells a coherent story and is fun to listen to.

Their set last night at The Stone was mostly material drawn from the new release, For, which I'd not previously heard. (I picked up a copy at the gig, and am listening to it now.) It's all pretty compelling, but the standout for me is "This Too Shall Pass," with Ted Reichman's cumulative accordion clusters melting into Matt Moran's ghostly bowed vibes, sustained over a simple half-note descending bass line courtesy of Drew Gress. The ensuing clarinet-and-accordion melody is simply heartrending. This was followed, as on the record, by "Rug Boy," the freest tune in the Claudia book. The opening drum solo sets up a surging, fast rubato five-way dialog, until Chris Speed joins Ted on the written melody. It concludes with a five-chord progression, each one softer than the last.

In his Max Roach memorial post, Ethan Iverson talks about Max having a bit of an "icy" beat, one with "fearsome clarity and control" -- in contrast to Kenny Clark's "warm glow." I think this is a useful frame -- jazz musicians will often talk about drummers with a "wide" beat (Klook, Elvin) versus drummers with a "narrow" beat (Max, Tony). John Hollenbeck definitely falls in the latter category. His playing is incredibly tight and precise, which makes it even more amazing that the group never sounds stiff or mannered, even when navigating the most fiendishly difficult passages. John isn't just the composer-bandleader, he's the rhythmic and dynamic center of the band, which gives everyone else the freedom to be fluid and expressive, knowing that when they need him, Hollenbeck is back there holding down the fort.

Todd Reynolds is revered by violinists and electronic music artists alike for his formidable chops in both fields., but what I like best is that everything he does is grounded in genuine earthiness. The whole "play, sample, loop, and hold" routine is well-worn by now, but Todd never sounds like he's just dicking around with loops and beats -- his layered creations are always succinct and satisfying, often evolving and grinding against each other in unexpected ways. Luke Dubois was on hand, manipulating the live video, which looked extra-cool projected against the exposed brick of The Stone's back wall. After a few solo tunes, Todd was joined by longtime collaborator (though he's new to me) Michael Lowenstern on bass clarinet for a couple of duets. The first of these was built up from a  percussive, slaptongued bluesy bass line, and the second led unexpectedly into an artfully deconstructed version of "Summertime." Todd's next guest turned out to be the charismatic Czech violinist/singer Iva Bittová, and then both she and Lowenstern joined in on the closer, a brand-new (as in, "written the night before") stomping, folksy romp.

This pairing wasn't mere happenstance -- John Hollenbeck is writing a new piece for Todd Reynolds and Claudia Quintet vibraphonist Matt Moran. Clearly, this is something I'm very much looking forward to hearing.

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...

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...

Noche Flamenca, Andrew J. Nemr & CPD Plus, Darrah Carr Dance @ Prospect Park Celebrate Brooklyn

I don't really get dance as an art form. It never seems to click for me. Granted, I've seen very, very little of it live, but my attempts to watch classic ballets on video have all left me very much of the same mind as David Byrne. So there's little chance I would have intentionally gone to see the triple-bill of "percussive dance" (i.e., dancing with lots of stomping) at Prospect Park last night, but since I evidently can't read, I ended up in the park and decided to give it a go.

First up was Darrah Carr Dance, which I'm sure to educated dance audiences comes off as something more interesting than Riverdance minus the slick production values. They kept the artificial perkiness and that godawful canned synth-Celt music, though, so I don't think there is any possible way I could have enjoyed this, regardless of how skilled the dancers may have been.

My expectations were not much higher for the tap troupe of Andrew J. Nemr & CPD Plus because... well, you know... it's, ah, tap dancing. But their casually stylized, kind of quaintly streetwise movements (if that makes sense) were not nearly as silly as I thought they'd be, and the dancers really sold it -- especially that young kid from Jersey. The physicality was great and the tapped rhythms were impressively tight, but also pretty predictable. (I almost said "pedestrian.") There was one (wholly unexpected) exception -- "Freedom Jazz Dance," which, after the head, turned into an improvised duet between Nemr and the troupe's trumpet player (whose name I didn't catch). I say this fully cognizant of the fact that you will never, ever believe me when I tell you that someone tap dancing to "Freedom Jazz Dance" was actually good. But it was. Unfortunately, their closer was "We Didn't Start The Fire." Is there a worse tune in the entire Billy Joel oevre? If there is, I'd very much appreciate it if you would kindly refrain from letting me know about it.

I might have left the park as soon as I realized I wouldn't be seeing Robert Glasper and DJ Logic, but I was intrigued by the possibility of experiencing a real Spanish flamenco company live and in the flesh. Noche Flamenca did not disappoint. They made the other two groups look irredeemably silly, in no small part because all the music was (A) played live (by two guitarists and two singers), and (B) unbelievably killing. Actually, this was one of the most riveting performances I've ever seen -- solemn but smoldering, virtuosic without empty flashiness, the emotions terrifically outsized but without veering into melodrama.

Noche Flamenca are at Theater 80 until July 29, and I highly, highly recommend checking them out.

More pics 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.

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 steely gaze reminded me a bit of my own musical mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, as did the glacial patience with which Dixon allowed his music to unfold.

Dixon did not touch his trumpet until his sound-world had been unequivocally established -- I didn't time it or anything but I'd guess it was almost half an hour into the piece. As with the previous cornet and fluegel solos, the band dropped out and Dixon was able to conjure his unique timbres without accompaniment. The sounds emanating from his horn are often barely identifiable as trumpet sounds in the first place, and this effect was further magnified by a long electronic delay. These extraterrestrial sonorities led so seamlessly into long tones, and then spare melodic playing, that the usual distinctions between "noise" and "notes" seemed arbitrary.

Dixon's solo was followed by a long, tumultuous, almost Mahlerian, buildup, with rolling cymbals and timpani fueling the advancing juggernaut. But again, it felt less like a group of individual musicians and more like a swarm of sound, gathering on the horizon, then surging toward you and, finally, enveloping you. This section ended with a fierce climax, abrupt cutoff, and a sudden explosion of applause, but the piece wasn't over -- after a long pause, the music resumed with an airy, fluttering postlude, ending with a languid unison theme much like the ones we'd heard earlier.

This was a really powerful work, not just on its own merits, but because it's imbued with virtues that are often frustratingly absent from "free jazz" (or most jazz, for that matter) -- mood, focus, development, momentum, balance, cohesiveness, clarity, scale -- and most of all, silence. Though Dixon was born in 1925, this music felt both bracingly contemporary and, somehow, ageless.

The new Henry Grimes (bass) - Marilyn Crispell (piano) - Rashied Ali (drums) trio came together for the first time on Wednesday night. As noted in the program, Grimes and Ali are the same age -- they are both from Philly and both seminal 1960's jazz musicians who started out backing more traditional players before becoming increasingly associated with the "new thing." But before this year, the only time they'd ever played together was on a 1965 Archie Shepp date. Grimes famously vanished from the scene at the end of the '60s, but since his return to active playing in 2003, Grimes and Crispell have performed together with relative frequency (often in a trio with drummer Andrew Cyrille). And earlier this year, Grimes and Ali started playing some duo hits together. So the Grimes-Crispell-Ali trio would seem like a natural outgrowth of those two projects.

However, these are three musicians with very distinct and forceful musical personalities, and their performance often felt like a spirited disagreement. I don't mean that in a bad way -- after all this performance was dedicated to Bill Dixon, who thinks people ought to get into fistfights about aesthetics. This wasn't a fistfight by any means, but everyone did seem intent on protecting their own aesthetic turf. Grimes began on violin with a kind of perverse bluegrass-through-the-looking-glass fiddling, briefly pausing to mention that they were playing a Dixon tune from the '70s. Ali followed with a light touch, taking the music to a more abstracted place, and when Crispell finally entered with sparse, impressionistic chords, the mood shifted again, this time towards consonance and harmonic stability. Grimes moved to the bass and Ali began playing some beautiful, swinging time -- time that Crispell would obliquely acknowledge but Grimes would determinedly push against.

Overall, the sound support was much improved after the first day's missteps, but Angel Orensanz remains a sonically treacherous venue, and out in the room, Grimes's bass sound was often somewhat indistinct. This was frustrating, as his phrases are often densely packed with notes, and you really want to be able to hear all of them. Marc Ribot has an interesting take on Grimes's current style (which is very different from his playing in the 1960's):

Henry has unbelievable ears and what he plays will always relate to what’s going on in some completely unpredictable and beautiful way. It’s tempting to write off the density of his playing as just him going off the deep end, but when you listen to it, you hear the melody of the tune you’re playing sped up, counter-pointed, harmonized, attacked, distorted, played backwards. He’s really a Cecil Taylor of the bass.

This was especially in evidence in a quieter passage near the end, with Ali on brushes and Crispell playing chordal passages that had a kind of rustic, open lyricism. Grimes would be bowing furiously, more texture than pitch, but every so often he'd drop down momentarily and reinforce Crispell's left hand with a long tone on the chord root. Crispell kept moving through different key areas and Grimes nailed it each time. It was a beautiful moment, as if after a long set of each musician asserting their individual vision, the three of them had finally found common ground.

Joe McPhee isn't from Chicago, but my understanding is that thanks to Ken Vandermark, McPhee has become somewhat associated with the Empty Bottle scene over there. (Dan, is that more or less correct?) The group he brought to the Vision Fest is made up of two Chicago-based musicians, Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello) and Michael Zerang (drums) plus the leader on alto sax and fluegelhorn. I don't know if there was ever a "Survival Unit I," but a 1971 concert featuring "Survival Unit II" was recently issued on Hat Hut, and McPhee calls this band "Survival Unit III."

I had trouble hearing the shape in this trio's performances -- to my ears, they seemed a bit static. Lonberg-Holm's pedal effects were way out of balance and when he started to manipulate the cello feedback, it tended to wash out the other two musicians in a wail of skronk. But mid-set, Zerang started up an ear-catching dialog with himself, playing some nice brushwork figures that were periodically interrupted by a weird rubbing effect -- I couldn't see exactly what he was using to create it, some kind of soft rubber mallet maybe? Anyway, it was a very cool moment, especially when McPhee began to play tenderly and melodically over the scraping bits. Later, McPhee switched from alto to fluegel, beginning with a soft, airy "thunk, thunk, thunk" effect that sounded vaguely like a fan blade, gradually leading into a brief, mournful, spacious melody. (It sounded like maybe he was paying tribute to Dixon here?) Anyway, the band sounded a lot more hushed and spacious playing under McPhee's fluegel than they had when he was playing alto in the first half of the set, and within this more intimate vibe, I was able to more or less shelve my concerns about the lack of directionality in the music and just enjoy it for what it was.

More pictures below the fold...

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Tickets provided by the Vision Festival.

See also Nate Chinen (NYT) and David Adler (JazzTimes).

Vision Festival - Day 1

Walking in the rain down Norfolk Street last night, past the remains of Tonic, you can understand why festival organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker opened the Vision Festival with a prayer. Accompanied by a tranquil groove laid down by William Parker and Hamid Drake, she called for "a million million tones, all ascending, taking all the willing travelers with them." But beneath the unreconstructed flower-child spirituality, there is a undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty about the future. This year's theme is "The Revolution Continues" but with venues for the kind of creative new music the Vision Fest celebrates getting wiped away by unchecked, unsustainable development in New York (and elsewhere), you get the feeling there might be an implied question mark -- "The Revolution Continues?"

Following the opening invocation, William Parker presented the premiere of "Double Sunrise Over Neptune," an old-school hour-long extended jam for 15 players. The piece is anchored by three different bass ostinatos, but Parker delegated the bass duties here to Shayna Dulberger, who along with drummers Hamid Drake and Gerald Cleaver, did an admirable job holding everything together. Full ensemble passages were used sparingly -- instead, there were many solos and duets, often bookended by Sangeeta Banerjee's melismatic vocal improvisations. The piece is dedicated to the late shehnai master Bismillah Kahn, and there were several passages where both Bill Cole and William Parker would go at it with dueling double reeds. Despite some excellent solo turns, especially from Joe Morris (guitar), Rob Brown (alto sax) and Shiau-Shu Yu (cello), the music sometimes felt a bit tentative and shapeless, and was plagued throughout by truly horrendous amplification (Dave Swelson's first entry on the bari sax was deafening and distorted beyond recognition; Jessica Pavone's viola solo was all but inaudible, etc.). But the  ending, with Banerjee singing English lyrics for the first time, and some beautifully phrased string passages, was dramatic and affecting.

Fieldwork -- a collective trio featuring Vijay Iyer (piano), Steve Lehman (alto sax), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums) -- exists at the imaginary intersection of Milton Babbitt and King Crimson. Basically, they rock out on algorithmically generated rhythmic structures and fiercely angular intervallic ideas. This might sound like a terrible idea, but it is redeemed by the warmth and conviction Vijay injects into even the most austere and deterministic material. Tyshawn Sorey is the ideal drummer for this outfit -- he's a wild card who brings a real loose-sounding vibe to the group. In the quiet moments, he can seem like he's floating above the time, but on closer listening you realize he's still locked into the grid. And when he and Vijay build up a head of steam together, the momentum can be downright scary. Steve Lehman is less uninhibited than the other two -- he's a smart and sophisticated player with tremendous control and precision, but his playing often seems to emphasize the music's most depersonalized qualities. Fieldwork is harder to warm to than the quartet Vijay brought to the Bang on a Can Marathon, but they are really pushing the limits of the post-Steve Coleman math-jazz thing and the bass-less trio thing, so you've got to respect their dedication and focus.

Next up was Cooper-Moore's Keyboard Project. They opened with trombonist Willie Applewhite's plaintive rendition of "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child," while the leader prowled the stage and began to testify: "Jazz! Jazz ain't nothin' but a fuckin' word! Jazz ain't got no Mama!" His theatricality was matched by a Mingusian earthy intensity from the band, especially the horns (Applewhite, Darius Jones and Assif Tsahar) and the deep grooving of drummer Chad Taylor. Cooper-Moore didn't even touch the keyboard until well into their set, but when he did, he played like a mad scientist, his stabbing and skittering triggering a metallic organ patch. Dancer Marlies Yearby seemed to feed off of the leader's wild energy, as well as the sick Dominican-based groove Chad and Isaiah Parker (on percussion) were laying down. The vibe was irreverent but good-natured, and it was fun to hear all these great players I'd never heard before.

Marc Ribot probably has more genuine rock cred than any other jazz guitarist out there, thanks to his contributions to records like Elvis Costello's Spike and Tom Waits's Mule Variations. It was really interesting to hear him so close to last weekend's Television hit, since Ribot's tangly, twangy sound is so indebted to another punkrock guitar hero, the Voidoid's Robert Quine. Spiritual Unity is a band dedicated to performing the music of the primal, blistering saxophonist Albert Ayler, and to that end Ribot has recruited respected free jazz veterans Henry Grimes (who played with Ayler back in the 60's) and Roy Campbell, but the music is definitely filtered through Ribot's own sensibilities. He's trying to draw parallels between the intensity and liberation of Ayler's music and the the intensity and liberation of the early punk scene, and his skronky guitar sound is the bridge between those two worlds. They opened with a beautiful, jangly chorale that built up from a low rumble to rhapsodic intensity and ended in a wail of feedback. Roy Campbell played trumpet (harmon-muted and open), pocket trumpet and fluegelhorn, bringing his entire arsenal of sounds, from clarion long tones to fluid freebop lines to barely squeezed-out cries. Henry Grimes was interactive and conversational, and at one point even picked up a violin for some fluttery high-register contrast. Chad Taylor unscrewed the top hihat cymbal and set it on his snare drum, using his hand to coax strangled sounds from it. But the foundation for all this sonic variety was Ayler's tuneful, anthemic melodies. Ribot talks about Ayler's music in terms of its religious/ritual qualities, and that aspect of the music was in full effect last night.

I'll be back at the Vision Fest tonight for Barry Wallenstein, Bill Dixon with the Sound Vision Orchestra (see Taylor Ho Bynum on this), Henry Grimes with Marilyn Crispell and Rashied Ali and Joe McPhee's Survival Unit III.

More pictures below the fold...

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Tickets provided by the Vision Festival.

See also David Ryshpan's take.

Television @ Central Park Summerstage - 16 June 2007

As you may have heard, Richard Lloyd -- or, as Tom Verlaine referred to him, "our regular guitarist" -- is still in the hospital. Jimmy Ripp subbed, but didn't take any solos. The first few tunes suffered a bit from the lack of soundcheck and the "shit system" (Verlaine's words) at Summerstage -- "Venus" was disappointingly listless. (I think the crowd was supposed to sing the "DIDJA FEEL LOW?" and "HUH?" bits, since the band did not, but it seemed like me and the guy next to me were the only people who were up for this.) But after that, things picked up with brilliantly deconstructed versions of "Little Johnny Jewel" and "Prove It." They followed with some newer, mostly unrecorded (I think) material, with "Glory" from Adventure sandwiched in there. The highlight of the new stuff was "Persia," aptly described by one of the commenters at Brooklyn Vegan as "that middle east meets James Bond theme by way of the 'You Really Got Me' riff extended tune." Verlaine's slide playing sounded absolutely otherworldly. Of course, they finished with a 20-minute "Marquee Moon," while the stage manager  kept furiously signaling them  to wrap it up. (Are you fucking kidding me?)

This hit had the most favorable risky-improv-to-wankery ratio of any rock gig I've ever been to. This is my first time seeing Tom Verlaine play live, and I think he's my new favorite guitar player, like, ever. His chops, which were merely impressive in Television's heyday, have become truly monstrous. He was able to get a mind-blowing variety of sounds out of a straightforward Strat-Vox setup, just by tweaking the pickup selector switch and the tone controls, and by changing up between picking, fingerpicking, and slide. (At least, that's all I saw -- I'm sure the guitar geeks will let me know if I've missed anything crucial... ) He somehow managed to be simultaneously quirky and earthy, wildly unpredictable and impeccably structured, dispassionate and blisteringly intense. If you are one of the few remaining jazz fundamentalists who think they have nothing to learn from rock players (ahem) you seriously need to check out some Tom Verlaine, preferably live.

A huge part of Television's appeal is the audible tension between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, and of course that absence was deeply felt. Jimmy Ripp did a fine job subbing in, but he did not attempt to challenge Verlaine the way Lloyd would have. As previously mentioned, this was to have been Lloyd's final gig with Television, had he not fallen ill. I sincerely hope Richard gets well soon, and when he does, I hope he and Verlaine and Fred Smith and Billy Ficca will get together one last time.

I arrived at the park over an hour later than planned (thank you, F train!) so unfortunately I missed all of Dragons of Zynth except their final tune. The stuff on their MySpace page is really interesting, though, so I'm looking forward to catching them some other time. The Apples in Stereo are a bubblegum power-pop band heavy on the of harmony vocals, jangly guitars, and analog keyboards, occasionally spiced with bits of psychedelia. I love this kind of sound when it's done right, but after a fun and catchy beginning to the set, they quickly wore out their welcome. It didn't help that it started raining and kept coming down for most of the set, but there's only so much of frontman Robert Schneider's super-nasal voice I can take, and the hooks started to wear thin by the end. Who on earth thought it would be a good idea to pair these guys with Television?

UPDATE: Truly hardcore Television fans will know this already, but I was curious whether any of the bootlegs of Televsion's 1970's live shows ever got the CD reissue treatment. I did some online digging, and of course the answer is "duh" -- there's The Blow-Up, which culls from a variety of live hits, as selected by Tom Verlaine, and Live At The Old Waldorf, which has superior sound quality, but Rhino only did a limited-edition run of 5000, hence the ridiculously inflated price of used copies. But you can listen to most of the cuts -- which are absolutely smoking -- on Last.fm:

Live At The Old Waldorf
The Blow-Up

And iTunes has a "box set" of both '70s studio records plus Live At The Old Waldorf, or you can get the live records individually.

More pics below the fold...

Clever Bastards

Guillermo Klein y Los Gauchos - 13 June 2007 @ Village Vanguard

Speaking of jazz in the 90's, Guillermo Klein's four-year run of Sunday nights at Smalls during the mid-1990's was spoken of with hushed reverence even up in Montreal, which is where I spent most of that decade. Guillermo left New York at the same time I left Montreal -- he's now based in Barcelona. A bit ironic that he finally scored a coveted Vanguard gig just last summer -- almost six years after he left the city. There was such buzz about that 2006 run -- my own review is here -- that they came back this year for a rare two-week run (which continues until this Sunday, June 17), followed by two days of recording at Avatar.

The gig last night was absolutely phenomenal. Miguel Zenon appears to have memorized the lead alto book, since he spent most of the night with his eyes either closed or intently focused anywhere except the page. The band is breathing together and phrasing together beautifully, and they have developed a casual authority that perfectly matches the leader's personal style. Even his (occasional) singing has become more confident and persuasive, without abandoning his endearingly deadpan delivery. The band was tight, but not in the constipated way many college big bands are tight -- Los Gauchos have become thoroughly relaxed and fluid in even the most mind-bending time-shifting passages. The soloists all brought their individual personalities to bear, lifting the music without veering away from the narrative. (I can't resist singling out Bill McHenry again -- his playing in this band is mindfuckingly good.) Everything sounds warmer, richer, and more heartfelt than last year. I can only imagine how killing this shit will be by the time they hit the studio. While I still have some lingering reservations about how some of the tunes are structured, the band played so gracefully that those doubts were rarely allowed to surface.

This time, it also struck me that Guillermo's music suggests some very compelling solutions to the problems we all face as jazz musicians in the 00's. Ethan Iverson rightly holds Guillermo up as a forward-looking exponent of the frustratingly rare and occasionally maligned virtue of "good melody played clearly." But Klein also shows one way -- not the way (which I'm not even sure exists) but his way -- to blend rhythmic complexity with elegant propulsion, individual expression with ensemble cohesion, harmonic sophistication with  clarity and concision, folkloric grooves with a modernist sensibility. There are a lot of jazz musicians, arch-traditionalists and uncompromising avant-gardists alike, who might want to step back for a minute and consider the powerful alchemy Guillermo is practicing here.

Pics -- just a handful taken on the down-low (the Vanguard does not smile on bloggers with cameras) -- below the fold...

UPDATE: Dave Douglas weighs in over at the Greenleaf blog.

Rivers - Holland - Altschul @ Miller Theatre - 25 May 2007

I should probably admit up front that Sam Rivers is an embarrassing blind spot in my record collection. He's someone that for whatever reason, I never really got around to checking out. At various points in my development, I heard, but never acquired, Miles in Tokyo and Conference of the Birds. And I'm afraid I've never even heard his 1960's Blue Notes, even though like everyone else, I've played "Beatrice" at a million jam sessions. But anyway, my first real exposure to Sam Rivers's music came at last year's Vision Fest, where he was being honored with a Lifetime Recognition thingy.

First up at last year's hit was Rivers's Florida-based big band, the RivBea Orchestra, which was... well... not the kind of thing I like to hear from a large ensemble. The cavernous sound at Angel Orensanz (a former synagogue with a very high vaulted ceiling) didn't do those dense, heavy clusters and thickened lines any favors. I tried listening from several different vantage points during their set, but the music never resolved itself into anything more than an indistinct blur. I've since heard a few recordings of Rivers's big band works, and those have all been tight and sharp, so I don't know quite what happened last year -- it's very possible that the players were just as stymied by the poor sound as the audience, and couldn't hear each other any better than we could hear them. But anyway, I knew Rivers would be up at the end of the night with his regular trio (with Doug Matthews and Anthony Cole) and I decided to stick it out in the hopes that a smaller group would fare better against the room's reverberant wash.

I'm glad I did. The trio's music was everything the big band set wasn't -- intimate, interactive, personable, and lyrical. And if you got in really close, you could hear the music well enough that it was possible to tune out the endless echoing. I started to get a sense of what I'd been missing by not checking out Sam Rivers earlier -- but despite that, I still ended up splitting mid-set, to my everlasting shame. My only defense is that it was coming up on midnight and I hadn't eaten a thing all day, so my brain had literally stopped being able to process any kind of sound at all. I knew I'd kick myself for it later -- Rivers was 82 and lives down in Florida and figured I probably wouldn't have another opportunity to see him perform. But I'm not sure the judge would have considered that sufficient cause for killing and eating the person sitting next to me.

But lo, here we are one year later and Sam Rivers is still going strong. Columbia's WKCR organized a reunion of Rivers's beloved (by Destination: Out readers, at least) 1970's trio with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul (i.e., the Conference of the Birds band sans Braxton). This was awesome -- another, hopefully better-fed opportunity to hear Rivers, this time in a venue that doesn't sound like the inside of an aircraft hangar. And together again with Dave and Barry -- damn!

Let's talk about those guys a little bit. First off, Barry Altschul -- where the hell have you been? Paul Bley claims to have discovered Barry when he was working as a janitor in a recording studio -- that's probably not quite true, but Barry is definitely a good example of an unorthodox self-taught drummer really shaking things up. I love his playing on those 1960's Paul Bley records, and he hasn't lost his whimsical touch -- at one point, when Dave Holland reached for his bow, Barry whipped out a bow of his own and started scraping on the tines of a Sputnik-like percussion instrument. His time is light, tight, and precise -- the antithesis of Elvin's loose-limbed wide-open feel -- but when they went into an "Equinox"-like vamp, or a Billy Higgins-ish swinging Latin beat, the groove was never in question. He's a master at the brilliantly unexpected choices that make this kind of free interplay work over the long haul -- he would do stuff like creep in with a subtly funky hihat beat underneath what had previously been shaping up to be a plaintive loping ballad. One drum solo ended with a pulp-worthy cliffhanger, and I found myself actually holding my breath waiting to see what would happen next. And his hookup with Dave -- another mercilessly precise player -- was outstanding.

Dave Holland doesn't play this kind of open-ended music very much anymore -- the stuff he writes for his small and large groups these days requires him to be more of an anchor and less of an instigator, but on Friday he was free to roam. His roaming is never quite casual, though -- he's much too much of a methodical player for that. His soloing, with its relentless working-out of all the iterations of a particular motive or idea, owes a lot to Coltrane, and Dave is one of the few bass players capable of approaching Coltrane-like levels of disciplined intensity on the bass. At first, I though his playing sounded a bit stiff and serious next to Barry's impish impulsiveness, but once he had his first showstopping solo under his belt, Dave seemed to relax a bit and settle into the natural ebb and flow of the evening. He and Barry are very good at pacing themselves, hinting at a new idea long before they actually bring it in. By the end of the first set, their transitions had become effortlessly supple.

But there was no doubt that Sam was the emotional core of the night. He's now 83, thin and small, and when he plays, he is very still, barely moving except for his fingers. But what you hear is the voice of someone who's spent a lifetime blurring the boundaries between tradition and innovation, inside and outside, melodicism and chromaticism, groove and rhythmic absraction. What surprised me the most hearing him this time was how different he sounded on each of his instruments. His tenor sound is pure old-school, dark and round in a way that you never hear anymore. He didn't so much float over the time as engage in a somewhat cryptic dialogue with the time -- it's like, he heard what Dave and Barry were saying, but he didn't want his own responses to reveal too much. There was an awful lot going on underneath the surface (as saxophonist Dan Blake observed after the show). By contrast, on soprano he seemed more playfully conversational and engaging, on flute his sound was breathy but  articulated and emphatic, and on piano he tended towards a flowing impressionism. I found this chimerical approach to playing multiple instruments fascinating -- it's the polar opposite of someone like Eric Dolphy, whose musical identity is unmistakable no matter what axe he's playing.

My favorite moments were the quiet, intimate sections where Rivers allowed himself to play some long lyrical lines, or just let a single note hang -- it was unsentimental and heartbreaking. But even when things moved along at a brighter clip, his reflexes seem undiminished by time and he listened like a demon, instantly picking up on fragmentary ideas suggested by Dave and Barry and throwing out his own spin on them. It was also remarkable to hear how well they all remembered what had come before -- at various points in the second set, there were clear allusions to some of the stuff they'd played in the first. The whole thing was thrilling and very deeply moving. And generously long, too -- but this time around, I was able to grab a quick slice between sets. Now all I need to do is fill those Sam Rivers-shaped holes in my record collection.

[Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the only recorded document of the Rivers - Holland - Altschul trio is Paragon, which I don't think has ever made it to CD... ? Someone should really record these guys now.]

My photos from the hit are here.

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PS As the FSM is my witness, I swear that I did not compare notes on the show with Nate Chinen, whose own review also just went up.

Histoire sans fin

Over at SpiderMonkey Stories, Taylor Ho Bynum has a great writeup of  the latest performance of Matana Roberts's sprawling, riveting musico-historical epic, Coin Coin. The performance he saw was of Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libre. I saw Chapter Two: Missippippi Moonchile at Tonic back in December, and while her collaborators for each iteration were completely different, it sounds like the overall effect was very much the same. Much to my regret, I didn't get the chance to write about Coin Coin back in December, but now I don't have to, since Taylor appears to have read my mind:

The music ranged from folky interlocking vamps [...] to two-beat shuffles and old-time waltzes, to the deconstruction of all the above, often by solo improvisers. Lyrical hockets would be interrupted by intense squalls [...].

[...] 

In terms of scope and structure, I’m reminded of John Carter’s “Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music”, his epic suite following the development of music in the African-American experience.

Be sure to read the whole thing -- Taylor has some great insights about the importance of independent artists pursuing unreasonably ambitious projects, of "going for the big one," even when the institutional support isn't there.

But that's where your support comes in, as fans of independent creative music -- Matana is performing both  Gens de Couleur Libre and Mississippi Moonchile at the Jazz Gallery on March 29. Coin Coin, while still a work in progress, is shaping up to be a powerful personal narrative from one of the scene's most probing and creative young musicians. I've been listening to Matana for a long time and Coin Coin definitely marks a major new phase in her artistic journey. It's exciting to hear the work unfold over time, like a serialized novel -- I can't wait for Chapter 3.

Take your TV tube and eat it

Score one more for the internets -- the closing number from the Miller Theatre Zappa Composer Portrait I reviewed not long ago is now up on YouTube. Here's the Fireworks Ensemble doing "G-Spot Tornado":