Night After Night

Defying gravity.

Leonidas Kavakos and Enrico Pace at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 11, 2011

Legacy tour.

Varispeed performing in the Essex Street Market. Photograph: Michael Nagle/The New York Times

"A Fresh Stamp on a Veteran Composer's Work"
The New York Times, November 9, 2011

Originally this was going to be two separate, straightforward reviews of concerts in which new performers, mostly young, took up works by the veteran composer Robert Ashley. Instead, it turned into a single notebook that performed essentially the same function, but gave me the opportunity to really think about the two events in context and to really get at the fundamental difference between the two events.

The first, presented by the Incubator Arts Project, was a concert of chamber music badly in desperate need of champions and new performances. To say that I was shaken was an understatement; I literally could not comprehend how it was possible that I'd never previously encountered a performance of a work as refined and beautiful as Ashley's string quartet in memoriam … Esteban Gomez, nor could I imagine anyone using the idiosyncratic and touching specifics of Thomas Buckner's voice more effectively than Ashley did in Tract. After the latter work, I made a beeline over to Tom Hamilton, Ashley's longtime sound-design partner and a fine composer-performer in his own right, to find out just how the piece was made.

Tom Hamilton and your intrepid reporter. Photograph by Bonnie Wright.

In the other event, members of the collective Varispeed honored Ashley, while also expressing plenty about their own musical personalities and showing an exuberant camaraderie, by staging scenes from his video opera Perfect Lives at two-hour intervals in locations around the East Village and SoHo. This event, presented under the auspices of Performa 11, was a gas to follow from start to finish; look for your diligent reporter in two of the images in the slideshow of Michael Nagle's photos included as a sidebar to the main article.

The next event of Ashley's extraordinary month arrives this Saturday, November 19, when The Kitchen hosts another Performa 11 presentation: the New York premiere of That Morning Thing, Ashley's first opera and the source of two of his most famous pieces, She Was a Visitor and Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon. Directed by the steel-pan player, composer and multimedia artist Fast Forward, who studied with Ashley at Ann Arbor during the ’70s, the cast includes longtime Ashley cohorts like Hamilton and "Blue" Gene Tyranny alongside younger performers, including all five members of Varispeed.

And thus are legacies maintained and extended. Hallelujah.

Alive at 25.

Bang on a Can All-Stars at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 7, 2011

I'm happy with the shape and pace of this piece of writing, but wish I'd have finessed the details a bit more elegantly. For example, I'm very pleased with the sense of David Lang's character that comes through in the opening paragraphs. But on the other hand, I didn't find space to name the players — happily, several are IDed in the photo — nor did I mention that the guitarist, Derek Johnson, is a recurring substitute for Mark Stewart, who's still an All-Star but currently touring with Paul Simon. With a little more space I'd have tried to describe the Andriessen piece a bit more precisely, although I did in fact think the wonderful video work overpowered what was, for Andriessen, unsually understated writing.

What I'm saying, I suppose, is that there's not much I'd change here, but several things on which I'd have elaborated a bit more, space allowing.

Airs de cour.

Jean-Paul Fouchécourt and Gaële Le Roi at Weill Recital Hall
The New York Times, November 3, 2011

This thoroughly charming recital of French and Italian opera selections and songs was presented by the commendable Opera Lafayette, a Washington, D.C. company that specializes primarily in French opera of the Baroque and early Classical periods. Led by Ryan Brown, who played violin in a chamber consort here, the company usually presents one complete opera in New York each year; the next offering, Monsigny's Le Roi et le fermier, comes to the Rose Theater at Columbus Circle on January 26, shortly after a presentation at the Kennedy Center (January 21) and right before two performances in Versailles (February 4 & 5).

Music on demand.

The American Contemporary Music Ensemble at Joe's Pub
The New York Times, October 28, 2011

This review covers a unique concert in which members of ACME played works by composers selected through a call for scores presented by the ensemble, the excellent new-music blog Sequenza21 and the Manhattan New Music Project, a non-profit music-advocacy organization. You'll find extensive individual blog posts from nearly all of the composers involved in the concert on the Sequenza21 site.

The wayward wind.

Photograph: Richard Termine for The New York Times

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall
The New York Times, October 20, 2011

My back pages: Tri-Centric Modelling: Past, Present and Future.

Tri-Centric Modelling: Past, Present and Future
(Le) Poisson Rouge/Issue Project Room
New York City, USA
The Wire, September 2010

There was surely one burning question on the minds of the audience who packed the chic New York City nightclub (Le) Poisson Rouge to capacity on a Friday night for the first evening of Tri-Centric Modelling: Past, Present and Future, a two-day celebration marking the 65th birthday of Anthony Braxton. The concert, as well as a second event presented the next day at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, were mounted to raise funds for the Tri-Centric Foundation, a non-profit organization meant to help document and promote Braxton's work.

Friday's programme featured an outstanding array of Braxton's peers, acolytes and protégés. But the burning issue at hand had everything to do with just three of the participants — pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and percussionist Gerry Hemingway — and a fourth, Braxton himself. Together, they represented one of the most reliably thrilling ensembles of the late 1980s and early ’90s.

For Braxton, a leader who has marshalled any number of distinguished groups, this was the unit to conjure with: one rightly to be cited alongside Miles Davis's quintets, John Coltrane's quartet and Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity trio. When Crispell, Dresser and Hemingway took the stage midway through the evening, their astonishing cohesion during a seamless sequence of brittle marches, luminous unison melodies and brief, roiling outbursts melted away the years.

Learning to fly.

Photograph: Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

eighth blackbird at the Miller Theatre
The New York Times, October 18, 2011

My back pages: Diamonds in the Dark.

Album review: Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles: Diamonds in the Dark
Sugar Hill Records, 2007
Time Out New York, June 7–13, 2007
Five stars (out of five)

Had Boston-based singer Sarah Borges come along in the mid-1960s, she surely would have been roped into the Capitol stable alongside like-minded mavericks such as Wanda Jackson, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. Ten years later, she might have been part of the Stiff cartel; in the ’80s, Slash and Twin/Tone would have fought over her. That Borges’s second album, Diamonds in the Dark, has just been issued by Sugar Hill only furthers the argument that roots music is the new punk.

Blessed with brassy pipes and charisma aplenty, Borges is irresistible in “The Day We Met,” a jangly ode to new love that could easily be one of the summer’s top singles. But she’s just as capable of selling a line like “I’m always the girl that they dance with / But I’m never the one that they want to take home,” the tear-soaked refrain in “Belle of the Bar.” Borges surrounds her catchy original tunes with shrewdly chosen covers associated with Dolly Parton (“False Eyelashes”), X (“Come Back to Me”) and George Cartwright (“Stop and Think It Over”).

Guitarist Mike Castellana provides spit-shined twang and broken-hearted steel, while bassist Binky and drummer Rob Dulaney lay down whip-crack beats and lazy shuffles. Producer Paul Q. Kolderie, a veteran of sessions with the Pixies, Radiohead and Uncle Tupelo, adds atmospheric touches here and there but mostly adheres to a useful old maxim: Less is more.

=====

When I first announced some months ago—optimistically, go figure—that I intended to start archiving some of my older pieces here with the collective tag My Back Pages, what I had in mind was a specific Anthony Braxton concert review from last year that appeared in The Wire. Obviously that effort got derailed, though the notion is still very much alive. But when I came upon this choice old CD review this evening on the Time Out New York website, where older pieces disappear without a trace all too often, thanks to multiple migrations, I decided to grab it right away and stick it here for safe keeping.

So now, when I least expected it, My Back Pages has become a real thing, which is nice. Also, I reviewed a show by Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles at Joe's Pub shortly after this CD review ran; it appeared both on this blog and on Time Out's defunct music blog, The Volume, where you can still find it here. Borges is currently raising funds to do a solo album, which I did not know until just this very minute, and just a little over a year ago released a live set, Live Singles, on the piquantly named label Suck a Bag of Discs. I just bought it on iTunes, and you can, too. Or, at the very least, you can give it a listen on Spotify.

Geek out.

Hilary Hahn and Cory Smythe at the Stone
The New York Times, October 13, 2011

The video embedded above shows the grand finale of Hilary Hahn's holy-rolling "Ives geek-out party" (her term) at the Stone, John Zorn's East Village new-music space, on Monday night. Hahn's disc of Ives's four sonatas, recorded with Valentina Lisitsa for Deutsche Grammophon, is something you need to have, or at least to hear. For me, the bonus in this event was finally getting a chance to tell Jan Swafford in person how his amazing Brahms biography permanently changed the way I think about Brahms. Swafford's Ives biography, I hasten to add, is equally authoritative and revealing. (He lamented that it doesn't sell well, a condition that deserves remedy.)

Speaking of embedded, have you heard Cory Smythe's terrific recent solo album, Pluripotent? If not, go listen to it here. Now.