Night After Night

Third crusade.

I have a strong memory from years gone by of an episode of The Muppet Show in which Rudolf Nureyev was the featured guest star. Naturally, YouTube has the episode's famous pas de deux. But what I specifically remember is beleaguered company aesthete Sam the Eagle announcing the dancer's presence in reverent tones, anticipating artistic salvation from the show's tawdry norm:

"RU-dolf nu-REY-ev."

It's surely a sign of my inner geekdom that this crossed my mind following a telephone interview I recently conducted. Afterward, I wandered around the office in a state of blissed-out delirium provoked by the subject at the other end of the line: the man who, intentionally or not, basically invented heavy metal. Solemnly, I intoned his name to those within earshot:

"TO-ny i-O-mmi."

The occasion that prompted my interview with Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, for a "Backstage with..." featurette in Time Out New York, was the then-impending concert by Heaven and Hell, which took place at Radio City Music Hall tonight (March 30).

In all but name, this would be a show by Black Sabbath, specifically the lineup that recorded Mob Rules in 1981: guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, both founding members, plus singer Ronnie James Dio (who'd joined the group for the previous year's Heaven and Hell) and drummer Vinny Appice. Those two discs restored luster to a band that had coasted at best through its last two albums with original singer Ozzy Osbourne. This version of Black Sabbath broke up in 1983, reunited in 1992 for the album Dehumanizer and an attendant tour, and hasn't been seen since.

One reason for the name change was an exclusive focus on material created with Dio: the three albums mentioned, plus new tracks recorded for The Dio Years, a single-disc anthology due out next Tuesday. No "Iron Man," no "Paranoid," no "War Pigs." Another reason, Iommi explained, was out of respect for Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. The notion of a new Black Sabbath studio album with Ozzy continues to be floated out there as if it's likely to happen, even though the Heaven and Hell lineup cut three new songs for their anthology, whereas the reconvened original quartet with Osbourne and drummer Bill Ward only managed to wax a pair to tack onto Reunion, a 1998 live set.

The current strategy prompted me to ask Iommi, in an unpublished exchange, whether there might now exist the potential for a future tour fronted by Ian Gillan, the Deep Purple vocalist who briefly fronted a post-Dio Black Sabbath, under the name "Born Again." No, he replied, no such notions were being pondered -- although I wasn't the first to ask. In my opinion, it's not a bad idea at all. I'd also be open to a tour with Glenn Hughes, another former Deep Purple and (ersatz) Black Sabbath frontman, under the name "Seventh Star." This could also include material from Iommi's rock-solid solo and joint projects recorded with Hughes during various Sabbath interstices...

Anyway, I'm meandering. Tonight, Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell arrived at Radio City Music Hall for a show that sold out in less than an hour. The set list, played in during a preliminary Canadian tour, varied little from what the band played in its opening date in Vancouver on March 11; one new song, "Ear in the Wall," was dropped, and one older song, "Lonely Is the Word," was added to the encore.

What was clear from the very beginning was that this particular band's appeal has as much to do with the personal charisma of Dio, arguably America's foremost metal frontman, as with the Black Sabbath legacy -- which is precisely why it succeeded sans Ozzy-era warhorses. The singer worked the front rows relentlessly, shaking hands and touching extended fingertip devil horns tip-to-tip. "I wish I could touch you all," he exclaimed after "The Sign of the Southern Cross," eliciting a theater-shaking chant of "Dio! Dio! Dio!"

Dio is truly a marvel: his voice inviolate despite decades of filling arenas, his spirit generosity personified. He's also perhaps the only man in the world who could pull off a line like "One fine day in hell..." (at the beginning of "The Devil Cried") without embalming it in winking irony.

Butler provided his customarily fleet-fingered bass lines; the hulking Appice laid down appropriately huge beats, occasionally pummelling enormous tom-toms at either end of his kit mounted on stands that wobbled precariously by design. Iommi, the picture of stoic elegance, alternated between crunching riffs and languid, bluesy solos. Continuing the Sabbath tradition of relegating the necessary keyboardist offstage, Scott Warren, a member of Dio's current band, provided his vital contributions unseen.

When "Heaven and Hell" finally arrived at the end of the set, the audience sang the signature theme without prompting -- which only urged Dio to stoke the temperature still hotter. Small wonder: tonight's show was being filmed for future release on DVD.

The "Heaven and Hell" chant continued through the lobby and out onto the street, ringing out toward Times Square. I overheard one fellow traveller waxing enthusiastic to a couple of others about the Dehumanizer tracks that had been included in the set -- only he couldn't remember the name of the first one. I chimed in with the answer. It turned out this guy had flown up from Florida to see the show, even though he faces serious surgery next week.

I dug into my bag and handed him my copy of The Dio Years. "You deserve this more than I do," I told him. In return, I received a grateful hug from a complete stranger. It was that kind of night.

Setlist: E5150 / After All (The Dead) / The Mob Rules / Children of the Sea / Lady Evil / I / Sign of the Southern Cross / Voodoo / The Devil Cried / Vinny Appice drum solo / Computer God / Falling Off the Edge of the World / Shadow of the Wind / Die Young / Heaven and Hell // Encore: Lonely Is the Word / Neon Knights

Playlist:

brakesbrakesbrakes - The Beatific Visions (Rough Trade/World's Fair, due May 8)

Blood Tsunami - Thrash Metal (Candlelight)

Black Sabbath - The Dio Years (Warner Bros./Rhino, due April 3); Los Angeles 1994 (Live Storm bootleg); and Reunion (Epic)

Digital master.

Marc-André Hamelin at the 92nd Street Y
The New York Times, March 30, 2007

Twin peaks.

Back to the Jazz Standard tonight, where Jeff Gauthier's "Cryptonights" series continued with Nels Cline's Andrew Hill project. I caught the second set in the company of TONY colleague (and Dark Forces Swing blogger) Hank Shteamer and our brave, bold editor in chief, Brian Farnham, who has charged himself with the duty of accompanying every writer and editor on his staff to a representative event. (Brian was Hank's guest tonight; I still haven't decided what I'll be taking him to hear. His interest and effort, I must say, are incredibly inspiring.)

Most of the music in Cline's late set tonight was drawn from his recent Cryptogramophone CD, New Monastery. (You can read Hank's brief review of the disc here.) As on the disc, the band included veteran cornetist Bobby Bradford, Bay Area clarinetist Ben Goldberg, New Yorker Andrea Parkins on accordion and electronic effects, bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola. The last two are the guitarist's regular partners in his excellent current trio, the Nels Cline Singers.

The set opened with "Dedication," its stealthy free-time splatter slightly marred by persistent microphone feedback, despite which Goldberg provided some gorgeously tawny work on what I assumed to be a contrabass clarinet. (Although much of his playing was in a range I associate with the bass clarinet, this was a paperclip-configuration metal instrument with an endpin.) A medley of "Yokada Yokada" and "The Rumproller" featured waggishly bluesy playing from Bradford and a barnburning solo from Goldberg, backed by Hoff's rumbling pulse and Amendola's light, lithe swing, then shifted gears into a surf-rock blowout punctuated by sputtering noise interludes and crushing groans from Parkins's squeezebox.

"Yomo," a track from Hill's Mosaic Select anthology of mostly unreleased tracks from his Blue Note tenure, opened with Amendola's electronically tweaked mbira and a high-pitched drone from Hoff, with occasional spoken interjections from Bradford. Early on, the piece rippled and surged like the surface of a lake; later, Cline and the rhythm section surged into something of a bebop apocalypse.

Cline, Hoff and Amendola opened a medley of "Reconciliation" and "New Monastery" with a relaxed, understated swing that proved the guitarist hasn't forgotten a lick or trick during his later alt-rock adventures with the Geraldine Fibbers and Wilco. Is he a jazzer with a ornery maverick streak? A rocker with unusually musicianly tendencies? Both, and more besides. I'd be hard pressed to name a musician more versatile than Cline, or one more capable of playing so naturally and convincingly in any conceivable setting.

The set's finale, "Compulsion," offered a full-blown punk-rock rave-up between its happily loping open and close. Parkins seemed to be exorcising demons -- or perhaps taking revenge on whatever relative consigned her to youthful accordion lessons -- with every furious pump of her bellows. One of New York's most consistently inventive and satisfying players, Parkins doesn't receive nearly as much recognition as she should, mainly because her artistry is so protean that it can be hard to draw a bead on how to define and describe it. Here, for once, I had no such problem: plain and simple -- and not for the first time -- Andrea Parkins was my favorite rock star.

As I mentioned briefly in my first "Cryptonights" post, Andrew Hill himself played with a trio at Trinity Church earlier in the afternoon. Hank actually trekked downtown to catch the performance live, as did New York Times scribe Nate Chinen, whose double review of the Hill matinee and Cline's first set tonight will presumably run on Saturday. I contented myself with the webcast, knowing that Trinity Church does these exceptionally well.

The hourlong performance featured loosely knit, slightly diffuse music with more than a hint of gospel to it. To my ears, there was also something else: a hint of the same air that haunts Duke Ellington's And His Mother Called Him Bill. A feeling of poignance, melancholy, finality. Hill's serious health issues are no secret, and he looked thin and gaunt on camera. It was a testament to the man's spirit that he could still fill a church so large with so much sound and feeling. Drummer Eric McPherson provided tasteful, restrained accompaniment; bassist John Hebert was simply magnificent, alert to every direction and possibility provided by the music. But you don't have to take my word for it -- the entire show is already archived and ready for streaming.

===

A postscript to yesterday's lament for Tonic: Ted Reichman has posted some thoughts about the club's impending demise on his blog, Surviving the Crunch. A clever, compelling musician and composer, Reichman was the original music wrangler at Tonic in its earliest weeks, before John Zorn came a'knocking and the place blew up big time.

Playlist:

Cor Fuhler - Stengam (Potlatch)

Michael Brecker - Pilgrimage (Heads Up, due May 22)

Amanda Monaco 4 - Intention (Innova)

brakesbrakesbrakes - The Beatific Visions (Rough Trade/World's Fair, due May 8)

Black Sabbath - The Dio Years (Warner Bros./Rhino, due April 3)

Terry Riley - Les Yeux Fermés & Lifespan (Elision Fields)

Nels Cline - New Monastery (Cryptogramophone)

Tonic, 1998-2007

Another New York City venue will soon be history, and this one's especially painful to new-music lovers of many persuasions. After surviving near-certain disaster in early 2005 through sheer determination and a series of fund-raisers, the Lower East Side nightclub Tonic will close its doors for good on Friday, April 13. Details are sketchy, but Time Out New York music editor Mike Wolf has the few facts that have been confirmed firsthand over on the TONY Blog.

It's not all bad news: owners John Scott and Melissa Caruso Scott, two of the sweetest, most level-headed people ever to dive into New York City clubland, will continue to book shows elsewhere. And they recently welcomed a new addition to the family, lending more than a bit of silver lining to whatever dark clouds may be floating by.

Amazonas dot com.

Mexican composer Daniel Catán is not yet a household name, but his three operas have garnered widespread admiration. Foremost among these is the second, Florencia en el Amazonas, a lyrical, richly orchestrated gloss on themes from Gabriel García Márquez's ineffably beautiful Love in the Time of Cholera. The libretto, in Spanish, is by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, the novelist's protégé.

Commissioned by Houston Grand Opera (naturally), which presented the world premiere in 1996 and issued a recording on Albany in 2002, Florencia has since been presented in Los Angeles, Seattle and Mexico City. The music breaks little new ground from a compositional perspective; Catán is content to pursue methods proven effective by Debussy and Puccini (and in one brief instance, to my ears, Stravinsky's Petrouchka). But there's no denying that Florencia is an effective, engaging work.

This weekend, the opera receives its university premiere when the MSU College of Music Opera Theatre at Michigan State University mounts a new production on Friday, March 30 and Saturday, March 31 at 8pm, and Sunday, April 1 at 3pm. While this is unlikely to draw massive hordes to East Lansing, the fact remains that this production could bring Catán's work to its largest audience ever. That's because the Sunday matinee will be webcast -- both audio and video -- via WMSU.org. The webcast begins at 2pm Eastern Standard Time, with interviews with Catán, director Melanie Helton and conductor Raphael Jimenez.

Neither the libretto nor a translation is available online. But publisher G. Schirmer, Inc. provides a concise synopsis, and Macondo, a comprehensive García Márquez website, offers an excellent summary of the opera's connection to its source, as well as other salient details.

What's more, the MSU cast and crew are blogging about the experience of putting this production together. Don't miss the plainspoken yet vivid March 26 contribution from Iris Fogderud, alterations supervisor at Macy's in Fargo, North Dakota, and costumer for the Fargo-Moorhead Opera, who is dressing these brave kids -- including her daughter Marla, who will sing the title role.

Playlist:

Vital Remains - Icons of Evil (Century Media, due Apr. 3)

King Crimson - Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, Aug. 13, 1982 and Shepherd's Bush Empire, London, England, July 1, 1996 (DGMlive.com downloads)

Daniel Catán - Florencia en el Amazonas - Patricia Schuman, Ana Maria Martinez, Suzanna Guzmán, Chad Shelton, Mark S. Doss, Oren Gradus, Houston Grand Opera/Patrick Summers (Albany)

Cryptology.

A little more than ten years ago, during a period of semi-self-(un)employment between P.R. gigs, I found myself spending a beautiful late-summer (or early autumn) afternoon at The Grey Dog's Coffee on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village with Jeff Gauthier and G.E. Stinson, two Los Angeles-based musicians. I can't recall the specifics of what we discussed that day, although I'm sure it had to do with strategizing ways in which these grossly overlooked west coast players might attract more attention here in New York City.

What I do remember, vividly, is the sound of a gunning engine and screeching brakes -- over and over. Finally, we got up and peeked outside, where we saw Danny Aiello racing a sexy little convertible up the tiny length of Carmine, then skidding around the corner onto Bleecker, repeatedly. Then we saw the cameras. At the time, Aiello was starring in Dellaventura, a short-lived television detective series on CBS, and apparently, it was shooting on Carmine Street that day. Somehow, it seemed an altogether appropriate accompaniment to a meeting with two musicians from L.A.

That I was sitting there with Gauthier and Stinson had everything to do with Vinny Golia. Back in college, the radio station I worked at received a handful of LPs issued by maverick reedist Golia's label, 9 Winds. That seminal left-coast imprint documented California's unsung creative-music underground, issuing records by countless artists whose work hardly subscribed to the presumed west-coast ethic of cool, easy-listening jazz.

I latched onto a number of these players and followed them elsewhere. Eventually, from my office at Koch International circa 1993, I struck up a correspondence with guitarist Nels Cline, whose first few albums as a bandleader appeared on the Koch-distributed Enja label. Contact with Nels eventually led to my being in touch with his twin brother, drummer Alex Cline, who'd played on Tim Berne's Fulton Street Maul and made a gorgeous record of his own for ECM. Later came contact with Gauthier, who played in a group called Quartet Music with the Clines and bassist-pianist Eric von Essen, and Stinson, a renegade from the pioneering Windham Hill world-fusion band Shadowfax.

It was a heady time, to say the least. Whether Gauthier was already laying plans for a label of his own at the time of that meeting, I can't say for certain. He probably was: less than two years later came the first two releases on Cryptogramophone, by Alex Cline and Jeanette Wrate.

Gauthier's new imprint featured some of the same players previously heard on 9 Winds. But where that label had been run on the proverbial shoestring, Gauthier invested in top-notch sound, beautiful packaging and a serious Internet presence from the start. Impressive records from Gauthier, both Clines, Alan Pasqua, Mark Dresser, Erik Friedlander, Don Preston and others followed, as did a valuable and deeply moving three-disc series in which artists interpreted the compositions of von Essen, who died prematurely in 1997.

This week, Gauthier and a sizeable portion of his Cryptogramophone stable have taken over the Jazz Standard on East 27th Street for "Cryptonights," an eighth-anniversary blowout. Gauthier opened the series tonight (March 26) with his Goatette, augmented by guest cellist Friedlander. Drummer Scott Amendola plays with Nels Cline, violinist Jenny Scheinman and bassist John Shifflett on Tuesday night. The following night, pianist Myra Melford leads her quintet, Be Bread, with trumpeter Cuong Vu, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, bassist Stomu Takeishi and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. On Thursday and Friday nights, Nels Cline presents his Andrew Hill project with a sextet that includes Goldberg, Amendola, cornetist Bobby Bradford, accordionist Andrea Parkins and bassist Devin Hoff. Rounding out the series on Saturday and Sunday nights is reedist Bennie Maupin, who leads a quartet with bassist Darek Oles, drummer Michael Stephans and percussionist Munyungo Jackson.

(Small irony number one: You can actually catch Andrew Hill himself leading a trio at Trinity Church on Thursday afternoon at 1pm Eastern Standard Time for a mere two bucks -- or view a live webcast for free -- then hear Nels Cline play Hill's music the same evening. Small irony number two: The only time I've previously caught Bennie Maupin live was at the Knitting Factory in 1996, when he was a sideman in a quartet led by... Andrew Hill.)

Tonight, Jeff Gauthier and his Goatette (with keyboardist David Witham, bassist Joel Hamilton and Los Bros. Cline) kicked off the first set of "Cryptonights" with "Ahfulat," the breezy opening track from Gauthier's latest CD, One and the Same. Proving, perhaps, that intensity doesn't necessarily depend upon violence, Nels snapped his high E with his opening strums, and played the duration with five strings. He ducked off to change strings during a spacy keyboard solo, which led to a splattered free-time section over which Gauthier pulled broad, patient strokes. Nels returned with a manic solo of bleeps, burps and swirls, controlled as much with his right hand on a small effects box as by anything he did on his instrument.

Nels managed to snap the same string in the opening bars of the following tune, Ornette Coleman's "L'Enfant," which opened with a rollicking head, simmered down to a slow rhapsody and regained steam after a series of slow-motion trades between Hamilton and Alex Cline. As Nels retreated to replace his string yet again, the remaining quartet played an older Gauthier tune, "Astor," which evoked the romantic side of titular tango master Astor Piazzolla's oeuvre without overt mimicry, and included a majestic solo from Hamilton. During Witham's solo, the music combined a cinematic scope with working-band concision. Another Piazzolla tribute, "That Little Tango," was sharper and harder: all elbows and knuckles to the preceding tune's waist and hips. Nels joined midway through, plucking manic 16th-note runs in which his strings somehow miraculously remained intact.

Erik Friedlander joined the group for the set closer, "Olivier's Nightmare," dedicated to Messiaen. The piece opened with the cellist's fleet-fingered runs over Alex Cline's rolling gongs and cymbals; a writhing melody led to a lengthy electric-Miles percolation on a single chord and a cataclysmic, effect-laden solo from Nels that simultaneously evoked Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and Sonny Sharrock before climaxing in a theremin orgasm. On a Sunday night at Tonic, this would have earned intense nods; on a Friday night at the Lion's Den it would have driven the 'heads into a frenzy. Here, the response was reasonably hearty, if perhaps shellshocked. All told, it was an intense, lively introduction to what should prove an enlightening, energizing week.

Playlist:

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson - String Quartet No. 1, "Calvary" - New Black Repertory Ensemble String Quartet (Cedille)

Jody Redhage - All Summer in a Day (New Amsterdam)

Missy Mazzoli - Shy Girl Shouting Music; These Worlds in Us; Orizzonte; Lies You Can Believe In; Between Heaven and Headlights; In Spite of All This (MP3 streams)

Bethany & Rufus - 900 Miles (Hyena)

David Toop - Sound Body (Samadhi Sound)

Rush - Hold Your Fire (Mercury)

Yes - Tales from Topographic Oceans (Elektra/Rhino)

Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks, Vol. 3: Pembroke Pines, FL, May 22, 1977 (Grateful Dead)

Electric Light Orchestra - Flashback (Epic/Legacy)

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler - The Stone, Issue Two (Tzadik)

Dept of Good and Evil feat. Rachel Z - Dept of Good and Evil feat. Rachel Z (Savoy Jazz)

Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (Island)

Grateful Dead - Dick's Picks, Vol. 5: Oakland, CA, Dec. 26, 1979 (Grateful Dead) and Live at the Cow Palace - New Year's Eve 1976 (Grateful Dead/Rhino)

Quartet Music - Summer Night (Delos)

Jeff Gauthier Goatette - One and the Same (Cryptogramophone)

Crystal visions.

CD review: Tristan Murail - Winter Fragments
Erin Lesser, flutist; Argento Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Michel Galante
Aeon AECD 0746; CD
The New York Times, March 25, 2007
(Amazon.fr, FNAC.com)

Prior to filing this review, I ascertained from the Aeon label's American distributor that there were no plans to release this disc here, which is why the last line refers interested potential consumers to Amazon.fr and FNAC.com. Such details are always subject to change, however: Winter Fragments will be available through British e-tailers Amazon.co.uk and Crotchet on April 2, and ArkivMusic now lists it as an April 10 release. A subsequent U.S. release through the usual channels may well follow.

Update: Michel Galante has pointed out an advance listing for an April 10 release on Barnes & Noble, as well.

Welcome back.

Good news: As of this morning, Billboard classical-music industry reporter and world-music expert Anastasia Tsioulcas has reopened her always worthwhile blog, Cafe Aman. Today's post reveals what's been keeping her busy in months past, as well as what's on the horizon. (A tip of the hat to Alex, whose new and valuable special report on the not-dead-yet classical recording industry brought Anastasia's resurgence to my attention.)

Small, small world.

Not too long ago, I blogged about my experience of presenting a couple of guest lectures at the University of Richmond, prompted by Dr. LP, my fiancée, who is currently teaching there. (For the record, she detested the title of that post.) One of the things that's been keeping the good doctor busy down south is "Music Scenes," a tech-happy course she's been team-teaching with new-music rock stars eighth blackbird.

I mention this because I've noticed this evening that flutist Tim Munro, the group's gregarious and shockingly talented Aussie newbie, recently posted about that course on thirteen ways, eighth blackbird's group blog.

Tim even mentions my presence during one class meeting, which was actually the session depicted in the first two photos of his post. Happily, I eluded the camera that day. But you can spot Dr. LP in the center of the third shot in Tim's post -- reproduced above without permission. (Tim's the wavy haired fellow behind pianist Lisa Kaplan's shoulder at the left end of the photo.)

Playlist:

Black Sabbath - The Dio Years (Warner Bros./Rhino; due April 3) and Boston 1992 (Live Storm bootleg)

Rush - "Far Cry" (from Snakes & Arrows: Atlantic; due May 1)

George Frideric Handel - Concerti Grossi, Op. 3; Sonata a 5 - Academy of Ancient Music/Richard Eggar (Harmonia Mundi)

Nass el Ghiwane - Sawt el Atlas, Vol. 1 (label unknown)

Mohamed el Guerssifi - title unknown (Raissi Phone)

Lahbitri - title unknown (Manouiphone)

Hadj Mohammed Bajedoub - Tarab Andalousi - Mawaouile (Fassiphone)

Napalm Death - Utopia Banished (Earache)

Borough haul.

The MATA Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum
The New York Times, March 22, 2007