Night After Night

Order Up… Burnt CDs for Five.

John Shiurba

Jazziz
May 1999

Bay Area guitarist and free-improvisor John Shiurba hit upon the idea of his new Limited Sedition record label soon after buying a CD burner last year: "I just wanted to put out CDs of my music, and music that I think is worthy," he explains. "But the idea of shopping tapes of this kind of music to labels seemed like a dead end. When the CD writer opened the door to small editions, it just occurred to me that here was the perfect medium for improvised music. If you have an audience of five people, then you can make five CDs and not have a closet full of aluminum coasters."

Free improvisation and the recording industry have endured a troubled union from the beginning. Improvisation is a fleeting mode of musical communication, felt by many to exist purely in the moment of creation, and to be resistant to documentation. And the audience for the music is so comparatively small that it renders recording improv too costly for most record companies, anyway.

But the falling cost of home-recording technologies has enabled less marketable musicians to document their work and to sell it to enthusiasts in a creative and cost-effective way. Shiurba's Limited Sedition (www.sfo.com/~shiurba/sedition.html), for instance, documents his own music and that of his fellow Bay Area improvisors with extremely limited-edition runs on recordable CD (or CD-R).

Such a D.I.Y. approach is not without precedent. In 1973, British guitarist Derek Bailey released a series of four solo-guitar recordings on reel-to-reel tape, making individual custom copies to order. (These rare recordings were issued on CD as Incus Taps on the Organ of Corti label in 1996.) But Shiurba is among the first to devote an entire record label of strictly limited, numbered editions of well under 100 copies that will never be re-pressed. He has released eight hand-designed recordings since founding Limited Sedition last July. His production costs average around four dollars per disc. This, coupled with grassroots promotion via the Internet, helps him turn modest profits into new recordings quickly in order to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the music and its creators.

Already, Shiurba is not alone. Saxophonist David Gross has begun to release limited-edition CD-Rs of music recorded live at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on his Tautology label (members.aol.com/Tautology3). And Splatter Trio percussionist Gino Robair, who runs the more conventional Rastascan label (www.rastascan.com), has taken the notion a step further, creating individual "private concert" releases on CD-R. "They're more than just a live improv," Robair explains. "I do a bit of digital hacking on the material before burning a CD-R. They're one of a kind, and I've made them to order. I think this is the way that many improvisors will be working very soon."

Beyond the obvious benefit of low overhead, this approach to recording allows an artist to explore even the most unlikely creative impulse. Saxophonist Dan Plonsey gave Shiurba a whimsical solo-oboe recording made on the day he purchased the instrument. And Robair, who has played on two Limited Sedition releases and compiled a disc of Splatter Trio rarities for the label as well, has plans for an album of music performed entirely on…Styrofoam? "A handful of Styrofoam and a bow and that's it," says Robair. "You can see why we need a label like Limited Sedition."

Swing shift.

Sometimes the road ahead is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time…and knowing the right people. Back in the spring of 2000, with my illustrious public-relations career at an impasse after BMG Classics eliminated almost everyone in the department, I got an interesting offer from Larry Blumenfeld, then the editor in chief of Jazziz magazine.

Jazziz was and is based in Palm Beach County, Florida, but Larry worked from New York City, coordinating his labor with another editor, R. Dante Sawyer, down at the home office. The magazine, which started out as a smooth-jazz-friendly vehicle and always retained a place for commercial sounds, flourished under Blumenfeld and Sawyer. Major articles on artists like John Zorn, David S. Ware and Dave Douglas became newly prominent under their watch.

The reason Larry approached me in 2000 was that Dante was leaving Jazziz, en route to India and a spiritual trek. Would I be interested in taking on his position as associate editor of Jazziz, with the understanding that Larry himself would be leaving the company in four months' time?

The answer, of course, was yes. Not just any magazine editor would have taken a former publicist on board as an editor. But Larry, who'd done P.R. work himself in the past, had been assigning me freelance pieces for some years by the time he hired me outright, and trusted my objectivity. Having been laid off by BMG, I was unemployed only for a single weekend.

This, then, was my bridge back to journalism, from which I'd stepped away in 1993 for the sole reason of finding my way to and in New York City. Larry was a terrific colleague and guide, and I got to work with some extraordinary writers: among them Neil Tesser, Steve Dollar, Harvey Pekar, Ed Hazell, Steve Futterman, Lee Jeske and a new face on the scene, Lara Pellegrinelli.

Larry reasoned that when his time to depart arrived, Jazziz might invite me to stay on and perhaps even replace him. An invitation like that did actually come, with the stipulation that I'd have to relocate to Florida to take it. The notion was tempting, but I'd worked far too long and hard to get to New York in the first place; leaving after seven years didn't feel like a viable option. Happily, Billboard magazine came calling, and with it, a return to classical music after a five-year hiatus.

I bring all of this up not only as a wallow in pleasant nostalgia, but also because Lara and I are digging through piles of Jazziz back issues retrieved from an emptied-out storage unit, and I'm about to start posting some of my old odds and ends here for safe keeping and convenient retrieval.

Thanks for everything, Larry. And hey, does anyone know what became of Dante?

Time Out New York interview with Lauren Worsham

Lauren Worsham, by Kristin Hoebermann

Interview with Lauren Worsham
Time Out New York, Feb. 21–27, 2013

An excruciatingly short snippet from a lengthy, wide-ranging and brilliantly fun conversation with Lauren Worsham (full name: Lauren Worsham Jarrow), who plays Flora in New York City Opera's stylishly spooky production of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

Worsham caught my eye and ear in Brooklyn Village, a wonderfully creative multimedia concert event staged by the Brooklyn Philharmonic at Roulette (reviewed here), then shook me to the core in a Peak Performances staging of David T. Little's opera Dog Days at Montclair State University (reviewed here).

Since both of those events made my list of Top 10 events for 2012 in Time Out, talking to Worsham about her City Opera assignment was a no-brainer. We covered her Texas roots, her training at Yale University, her early jobs, her relationship with opera and her flamboyantly stagey rock band, Sky-Pony, which she leads with her husband, theater composer Kyle Jarrow.

Someday, I'd love to get around to transcribing and posting the entire interview. Don't hold your breath right now, though. Instead, look out for Worsham as Guadalena and Manuelita in City Opera's production of Offenbach's La Perichole at City Center, April 21, 23, 25 and 27. And watch this video of Sky-Pony in action at Joe's Pub, then see the band's schedule for your next chance to witness it live… as of this writing, it's March 30 at Pianos on Ludlow Street.

Q&A, Caroline Skinner, Executive Producer of Doctor Who

Karen Gillan, Matt Smith, Chris Hardwick and Caroline Skinner outside the Ziegfeld Theater

Q&A, Caroline Skinner, Executive Producer of Doctor Who
The New York Times Artsbeat, August 29, 2012

Prior to the preview screening of the Doctor Who season premiere, "Asylum of the Daleks," at the Ziegfeld Theater last Saturday night, described in the previous post, I had an opportunity to sit down for a quick chat with Caroline Skinner (@CaroSkinner on Twitter), who became an executive producer on the show in the middle of last season. We talked about the the broadened appeal chief writer and show runner Steven Moffat and lead actor Matt Smith (The Doctor) have brought to the series; the bold ambitions of the season about to commence this Saturday night; the impending departure of Karen Gillan (Amy Pond) and Arthur Darvill (Rory Williams) and arrival of Jenna-Louise Coleman, who will play the Doctor's mystery-shrouded new companion; and the pressure already mounting to make next year's 50th-anniversary celebrations an even bigger deal.

As a Night After Night bonus-track postlude, here's one last volley that didn't make the final cut for Artsbeat:

Q. With the spring portion of the current season still underway, how do you maintain your focus when everybody wants to know what you’re going to do for next year’s milestone anniversary?

A. Ah, well, I multi-task a lot, and I never sleep. [laughs] We’re filming those at the moment – it’s August right now, so what better time to lay snow down in Wales? We’re shooting the Christmas episode right now, and we’ve already filmed three out of the eight episodes for the spring run. Next year is such an exciting year for Doctor Who; it should be the biggest year ever for the show, and it has to be, because it culminates in the 50th anniversary. And those plans – which I’m not going to tell you anything about – are just enormous, and really exciting. 

I think the show will reinvent itself with Christmas and Jenna’s arrival, and those stories, again, they’re very epic and ambitious stories every week. My aspiration would be that you’ve got this enormous stand-alone, really wonderful Christmas episode, which is a beautiful script that Steven’s written. Then we’ll come back, and every week you want to get to the end of each of those episodes and think, “How are they going to top that?” Then you’ll see the next one and go, “Oh, that’s how they’re going to top it.” We’ll be looking at making the series grow and grow over those eight episodes in the spring run, which will feel very fresh and very different, and it should be a brilliant springboard into all of the other darkly mysterious things that we’re going to do for the 50th.

Pauline Oliveros profile + Night After Night bonus track with Dana Reason.

 

Pauline Oliveros at the Bang on a Can Marathon, by Jennifer Taylor/The New York Times

 

"Strange Sounds Led a Composer to a Long Career"
The New York Times, August 12, 2012

Profiling the composer, improviser and teacher Pauline Oliveros for The New York Times was an incredible privilege; the only problem is that it feels like I barely scratched the surface of everything we covered in a long, generous conversation. This piece easily could have been twice as long, or even more. Still, I did manage to cover some important turf, including information about an amazing new 12-CD box set of Oliveros's trailblazing electronic music and details about upcoming performances: on August 21 at the Stone, where she is the guest curator August 17-31; and on September 7 at the New Museum.

When I originally conceived this article, I'd intended to include reflections from Oliveros's associates, protégés and students. That didn't work out in the end, but I'm very pleased to be able to offer, as a Night After Night exclusive bonus track, some insights from Dana Reason, a Canadian-born pianist, composer, improviser and educator based in Corvallis, Oregon. Reason is the director of Popular Music Studies at Oregon State University, and has released 11 albums. From 1998 to 2003, she and Oliveros collaborated in a wonderful trio, The Space Between, which also included the superb shakuhachi player Philip Gelb. Reason will be performing at the Stone on August 28 at 10pm as part of Oliveros's series.

 

Dana Reason, by Norman Korpi

 

Night After Night: When and how did you first come to work with Pauline Oliveros?

Dana Reason: I heard Oliveros play the first Bang on a Can festival in NYC when I was 18 years old. The live performance of Sonic Meditations had a profound effect on me. Several years later, I was performing at the Newfoundland Sound Symposium and Oliveros was the featured composer in residence. She conducted several workshops that I attended and I introduced myself to her. In 1995, I went out to Mills College to study composition. In 1996, Oliveros was the Darius Milhaud chair and I had the tremendous fortune of studying composition with her.

After Mills, Oliveros, Philip Gelb (shakuhachi player and improviser) and I formed The Space Between – a trio that literally dealt with the huge tuning gaps between 3 unlikely musical suspects: a just-tuned accordion, a bamboo flute, and a well-tempered piano.

We performed various concerts and lectures (Stanford, RPI, Roulette, U of Colorado, etc.) and would often demonstrate a scale played in “unison” by the trio. The sound was quite thick and cluster-like but intriguing (full of possibilities). The idea with the trio was to place timbre as the focal point for the ensemble. The works were textural, sonically rich and expressive. I would often refrain from playing the piano with conventional fare and would seek alternate sound sources from the body, and inside of the piano. Our work together culminated in 4 CD recordings. Each recording featuring a fourth guest performer such as French bassist Joëlle Léandre, bassist Barre Philips, saxophonist Jon Raskin (from Rova) and the late Matt Sperry on bass. All the albums were concert recordings headed up by David Wessel at CNMAT at UC Berkeley.

Night After Night: What lessons would you say you learned from Pauline, either in a formal setting, in more casual circumstances, or both?

Dana Reason: First and foremost, Oliveros taught me how to listen. Her approach as a composer, performer and improviser is very refined. There is a virtuosic quality to the way she focuses her attention with each note, gesture or silence enacted. Her works could be heard as an extension and perhaps revision of John Cage's contested remark to “let sounds be themselves,” in that she provokes sounds to not only be themselves but also to be extensions of herself. Because of this, the sounds she elicits and emits are implicitly and explicitly connected to her as the originator. The sounds embody and heed Pauline’s sonological DNA.

Night After Night: Lacking the usual "classical composer" model of scores to be performed by other musicians, what form would you say Pauline's enduring legacy might take?

Dana Reason: Perhaps the apogee of Oliveros’ lineage is a body of writings, compositions and performances centered in “The Art of Sounding, Hearing and Listening.” Her works encourage individual and collective sonic actions and identities to form and be transformed. These sonic identities question performance practices ranging from the non-professional or conservatory bound musician to the music-cultural practices of contemporary and improvised music, notation and oral tradition.

Oliveros loosens and challenges western music's historical divisions between performer and listener; performer and composer, composer and improviser, listener and listening.

Dana Reason performs at the Spectrum on August 26 at 7pm, and at the Stone on August 28 at 10pm.

No dejes que...

Photograph: Roberto Sanchez

Interview: Caifanes
Time Out New York, Oct 6–12, 2011

In this article about the seminal Mexican alt-rock band Caifanes, recently reunited and now en route to New York's Hammerstein Ballroom for an October 12 show, I start by evoking the reunions of Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Pixies. For admirers of rock en Español, that's not a stretch. I discovered the band in 1992, when I noticed Adrian Belew's production credit on the back cover of their third CD, El Silencio, and saw them for the first and last time amid a teeming crowd at the Houston International Festival in 1993. For the article, I spoke with the band's previously warring factions, singer Saúl Hernández and guitarist Alejandro Marcovich—seen above playing to 70,000+ fans at this year's Vive Latino festival in Mexico City—about what caused them to mend bridges after 16 bitter years.

So far I've had no luck digging up my 2005 Time Out article about Jaguares, the spin-off band formed by Hernández and drummer Alfonso André, now on hiatus. But if you're curious about the long-term impact that aformentioned Caifanes show had on the local music community, I've located two smart Houston Press articles (not mine) from 1995 and 2002. And Remando, Hernández's recently released (and Latin Grammy-nominated) solo debut, is streaming on the singer's website and well worth checking out.

Here's a good clip of Caifanes playing "No dejes que…" ("Let It Be…") at Vive Latino.

New frontier.

"In Brooklyn, a New Leader Who Knows No Boundaries"
The New York Times, October 2, 2011

An article about the arrival of Alan Pierson as the new artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, an esteemed ensemble that has known tremendous highs and disheartening lows over the years. At a time when the orchestra is not only starting over more or less from scratch but also critically redefining what an orchestra can be, and what the Brooklyn Philharmonic should mean within the context of its home borough, Pierson's reputation as a gifted musician, an unconventional thinker and a diligent collaborator should help him fit right in.

Pierson's not the only new kid in town: the orchestra also has an unorthodox new CEO, Richard Dare, an international investment strategist with no prior experience running a nonprofit, but one who has deep connections with and commitment to the arts. Hard to predict what's to come in the seasons ahead, but one thing is certain: it's going to be interesting.

The season starts this Saturday afternoon, October 8, at 12:30pm in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, when Pierson will conduct members of the orchestra as they accompany rapper Mos Def in songs arranged by Derek Bermel as part of Restoration Rocks, a hip-hop festival. Pierson & posse then come to the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center on Wednesday, October 12, for an eclectic New Sounds Live concert featuring Mos Def, Corey Dargel, Mellissa Hughes and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, in a program ranging from shape-note singing to new pieces by Dargel, David T. Little and Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin.

Update, Oct. 3: Another article covering Pierson's arrival, by my friend and colleague Amanda MacBlane, appears in the new issue of Time Out New York.

Legacy tour.

"Avant-Garde Dancing Feet, Tickling Composers' Minds"
The New York Times, March 18, 2011

An article about the making of Music for Merce, a newish 10-CD box set issued by the invaluable New World record label. The box is devoted to a well-chosen cross-section of the myriad musical scores that came into being through the auspices of choreographer Merce Cunningham and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which is currently bidding farewell with its Legacy Tour.

Speaking with Christian Wolff and John King about their memories of working with Merce, and about the process by which they selected the contents of the box with David Behrman and Takehisa Kosugi, was a genuine treat. I'm only sorry that further hoped-for conversations with Alvin Curran and David Behrman didn't take place.

I also regret that I was unable to write this blog post until now. It's Sunday night, and as I type these words, Behrman, King and Kosugi have just started to perform Annea Lockwood's Jitterbug live at Roulette in SoHo, during the second of two concerts celebrating the release of Music for Merce. I know this because I'm listening to the concert live on my sofa in Queens, via Ustream. King is playing an electronically treated violin; Behrman is drawing a bow and tapping a dangled weight on what might be a tabletop guitar; Kosugi is making a racket with all manner of little noisemakers. It's a stately bit of jitter and rumble, lovely in both its calm volition and its unpredictability.

But there's one more scheduled event that warrants advance mention: The Merce Cunningham Dance Company starts a six-day, seven-performance run at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea on Tuesday. The program includes three dances: CRWDSPCR, scored by King; Quartet, to music by David Tudor; and Antic Meet, a collaboration between Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg (using John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra) that prior to this tour has not been staged since 1969. I can't speak for all of the pieces, but King confirmed he'll be playing live during CRWDSPCR.

Alistair Macaulay, chief dance critic of The New York Times, reviewed Antic Meet during its initial revival in Berkeley a few weeks ago. I confess that I have not read so very much dance criticism, and I was surprised at first by how little mention of the music figures into Macaulay's piece; Brian Eno, who created the music for Pond Way (also performed in Berkeley), is not mentioned at all. But perhaps this is beside the point in evaluating dance performances, and likely even more so when evaluating Cunningham, where a coexistence without co-dependency between music and dance was precisely the point.

I understand that tickets are already scarce for the Joyce performances. New Yorkers who miss it will have three more opportunities to see the company: Merce Fair, a 12-hour multimedia presentation at the Frederick P. Rose Hall on July 16 during the Lincoln Center Festival; a Brooklyn Academy of Music run December 7-10; and something enticingly billed as "Park Avenue Event" at the Park Avenue Armory December 29-31 -- the last night being the company's final bow.

Here comes the flood.

Photograph by Eric Calvi

"Unleashing a Creative Deluge"
The New York Times, December 7, 2010

A preview story regarding the composer, performer and director Mikel Rouse, whose latest stage creation, Gravity Radio, opens tonight at the BAM Harvey Theater with additional performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. For many folks, the Thursday performance will be the must-see show, since it comes with a post-performance artist talk conducted by Evan and Andrew Gregory of the Gregory Brothers, the creative force behind the insanely popular web-video series Auto-Tune the News.

Try to imagine doing an important interview and having your subject start to sing, "Those geese are cooked / those geese are cooked." Yes.

This is, if memory serves, the longest feature I've written to date for The New York Times -- a very generous word count, especially for the daily -- and still there are literally dozens of things I'd like to have included but couldn't. Mostly these are bits of older history, like the fact that nearly all of Rouse's Broken Consort music is available from his label via iTunes, since he had the amazing foresight to structure most of his record deals -- even the major-label releases by his alternative-rock group, Tirez Tirez -- as licensing deals for a finite period, after which all rights reverted to him.

Rouse will surely issue the Tirez Tirez material some day. Meanwhile, go here for an earful of a young Rouse smitten with David Byrne and Philip Glass.

I'd also like to have gone into greater detail about the process by which Rouse's archive was acquired by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which celebrates its arrival with a visual-art exhibit, "Passport: 30 Years Drawn on the Road," on Wednesday. That process, an extension of the library's earlier aquisition of collections from Meredith Monk and Ping Chong, shows the way in which the institution's staff is learning how to categorize collections from artists whose work transcends genres not occasionally but defiantly, and how to preserve and make available the archives of artists whose work is seldom if ever codified into a score or printed instruction manual.

How great is it that you can look at an online gallery as extensive as this one, by the way?

Some day, it seems, I'll need to write a bigger, longer and more comprehensive piece about Rouse, whose work, I think, is both popular and underappreciated, immediately comprehensible yet deeply misunderstood. On a different note, I'd love to see Rouse pull out his old Broken Consort charts for a spin; I bet they'd go over well at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Bang on a Can Marathon or Big Ears. But it might be even cooler to think that some enterprising younger conductor, composer and/or bandleader could go to the library and look them up, too.

Finally, there's one certain word I didn't use at all in my preview. See if you can figure out what it was. Here's a hint:

Sketch of Mikel Rouse, Kyle Gann and Ben Neill by Mikel Rouse, borrowed without permission from Kyle Gann, who tells the story behind it here.

Temporary residence.

Photograph: Tina Tahir/DG

Anne-Sophie Mutter
The illustrious German violin virtuoso is this season's artist-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic.
Time Out New York, November 18-24, 2010