Night After Night

The godfather.

Earle Brown Retrospective at the Chelsea Art Museum
The New York Times, April 19, 2007

Big bang.

Charles Wuorinen's Percussion Symphony at Alice Tully Hall
The New York Times, April 18, 2007

Going through the motions.

La Traviata at New York City Opera
The New York Times, April 13, 2007

The hits keep coming.

On Wednesday afternoon, I interviewed guitarist Kevin Gallagher for an upcoming TONY article about an exciting three-concert series devoted to the music of Jacob ter Veldhuis (a.k.a. Jacob TV), which will be presented at the Whitney Museum on May 2, 3 and 4. After we'd wrapped up that business, we talked a bit longer about his own activities: Gallagher is a highly regarded classical guitarist who also leads the band Electric Kompany, a group at the forefront of a current wave of rock-oriented combos playing formally scored pieces by contemporary composers. (A few folks over at Sequenza 21 might drub me for that bit of shorthand, but you get the basic gist.) Under John Zorn's aegis, Gallagher also coordinated two lively mini-festivals, Full Force: The New Rock Complexity, last July and October at the soon-to-be-late, already lamented Tonic. I blogged about one of those shows here.

Not long ago, Gallagher sent me a terrific demo CD his band had made, so I asked if he was shopping it around to labels. He is, he said, but he's also considering alternate routes to reach an audience. Specifically, Gallagher was intrigued by the potential of YouTube. As an example, he cited the current success of another local guitarist, Dominic Frasca, best known for playing technically daunting solo-guitar pieces -- transcriptions of Glass and Reich, new works by Marc Mellits, and his own attractive compositions, which he charmingly referred to as "New Age music for people who grew up listening to Black Sabbath" in a TONY feature that ran in August 2002.

A Frasca video titled "Impossible Guitar" was posted on YouTube in July 2006. The music in the clip, mostly Frasca's own (save for the first piece, correctly identified by commenter Gerald Blackhammer as Marc Mellits's Dometude -- thanks, Gerald!), demonstrates his dextrous style in music that draws equally upon classical technique, the mellifluous complexity of the late New Age guitar phenomenon Michael Hedges and the rock-gamelan style of '80s-era King Crimson. Since it was posted, Gallagher noted, the video had racked up "a million views," helping Frasca sell CDs and, maybe even more importantly, secure bookings. As far as Gallagher was concerned, Frasca had thrown open the doors to an entirely new means by which to circulate and promote new music.

I didn't doubt Gallagher's logic for a moment, but assumed that his claim of "a million views" was hyperbolic shorthand, and couldn't possibly be accurate. Turns out it wasn't, not exactly: As I type this on Thursday night, Frasca's video has been viewed 1,793,238 times. But don't take my word for it. See for yourself...

Playlist:

Black Sabbath - Headless Cross, Tyr, Cross Purposes and Forbidden (IRS)

Jacob ter Veldhuis - Rainbow, Shining City and Suites of Lux (Basta)

Giuseppe Verdi - La Traviata - Anna Moffo, Richard Tucker, Robert Merrill, Rome Opera Orchestra and Chorus/Fernando Previtali (RCA Red Seal)

Napalm Death - Utopia Banished (Earache)

Amiina - Kurr (Bláskjár)

The Bad Plus - Prog (Do the Math/Heads Up, due May 8)

Rob Brown Trio - Sounds (Clean Feed)

Maria McKee - Late December (Cooking Vinyl, due April 24)

Amy Cervini Quartet - Famous Blue (Orange Grove Jazz)

Genesis - Duke and A Trick of the Tail (Atlantic/Rhino, due May 15)

Matched set.

Sarah Chang and Ashley Wass at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, April 12, 2007

Family ties and fast company.

Fresh off his latest celebratory run at Iridium last week, Anthony Braxton was spotted by Hank Shteamer last night at a Bowery Ballroom show by Battles, in which Braxton's son Tyondai plays with former Helmet drummer John Stanier among others. According to Hank's brief eyewitness account on the TONY Blog, the elder Braxton appeared to be heartily enjoying his son's efforts.

During that Iridium run, the generous Braxton took the time to have lunch at the BenAsh Deli with members of the Braxton discussion group on Yahoo Groups. Among the revelations provided in a lively, extensive report posted by Don Phipps is a series of upcoming European collaborations with Cecil Taylor:

He responded to a question about his upcoming concerts with Cecil Taylor by saying he is playing three concerts (these have still NOT been confirmed) with Cecil, two in Bologna, Italy (October 11 and 13) – a duo and a quartet (Tony Oxley will be the drummer but he could not say with certainty who the bass player would be), and a single concert in London on July 8 – a quartet (Tony Oxley again the drummer, bass player yet to be determined). He also said that he and Cecil had never played together, even though they hung out together at Antioch College during the 70s.

A subsequent post by Jan Carlsson made this news even juicier: The Southbank Centre in London has announced that the bassist for the Royal Festival Hall date of July 8 is to be none other than William Parker -- thus reuniting Taylor's epic Feel Trio of the '90s, with Braxton added. The only member of the band which whom Braxton has previously played is Oxley, documented on a superb, long out-of-print and highly desirable disc on the Hat Art label, Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989.

[EDIT: Braxton has also played with Parker on a few occasions, as well -- which I should have suspected, given how much that bassist gets around. See the appended comments for details.]

Please, please, someone book this quartet in New York.

Taylor will be involved in an even more unlikely collaboration here in town next month. On Sunday, May 6, Taylor's excellent current group, the New AHA 3 (with bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Pheeroan akLaff), will play two sets at the Blue Note with the mellifluous vocalist Andy Bey. This is not a double bill: Bey is actually singing with Taylor's group, a club representative has assured me.

Much as I adore Bey's work, I literally cannot begin to imagine what this collaboration will be like. And as it happens, I'll be driving a big truck full of furniture from Richmond, VA, to New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens that day. But if there's any way I can make it to the Blue Note that night, I definitely plan to do so.

Glass, breaking.

Like Alex, I seem unable to observe a self-imposed hiatus. I've shared a fair amount of news about Philip Glass performances and recordings over the last few months, but I'm happy to say that my services are no longer required: Among the helpful features of the newly redesigned PhilipGlass.com is a news blog, Glass Notes.

Operated by the folks at Glass's record label, Orange Mountain Music, the blog will keep the composer's admirers up to date with regard to both label offerings -- an archival series launches next month with a disc called Theater Music, Vol. 1 -- and impending performances. Among the latter is a newly announced Michael Riesman solo concert at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center in New York City on April 27. Riesman will accompany a screening of Dracula, playing his arrangement of the score Glass wrote for Kronos.

Playlist:

Brakes - Give Blood (Rough Trade)

Amiina - Kuur (Bláskjár)

David Torn - Prezens (ECM, due Apr. 17)

Peter Maxwell Davies - Naxos Quartets Nos. 7 and 8 - Maggini Quartet (Naxos)

Johann Sebastian Bach - Mass in B minor - Netherlands Bach Society/Jos van Veldhoven (Channel Classics)

Eluvium - Talk Amongst the Trees (Temporary Residence)

Black Sabbath - Technical Ecstasy (Warner Bros./Rhino)

Brief hiatus.

I'd planned to write about the terrific triple bill of Amiina, Eluvium and Gilles Vonsattel presented last night at Good Shepherd Church on West 66th Street, part of the fascinating -- and apparently wildly popular -- Wordless Music Series. But some pressing business is calling me down to Houston this weekend, so I've cleared the decks for the next few nights in order to get all the necessary work done. I should be back in action here on Monday.

Bell curve.

Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields at Carnegie Hall
The New York Times, April 3, 2007

Epiphany.

Wrapping up a weekend of voracious indulgence, I spent much of Sunday (April 1) in residence at Carnegie Hall. In the afternoon, I caught Joshua Bell with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields playing Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky. You'll have to wait for Tuesday's New York Times to read the full report, but what I can say right now is that this encounter exceeded expectation.

In the evening, I returned to Carnegie -- Zankel Hall this time -- for "A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years," the latest performance by French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The premise was as simple as it was daring: Aimard proposed to explore the entire history of solo keyboard music through 34 short selections, ranging from Scarlatti to George Benjamin.

Aimard is of course a wizardly interpreter, but equally on display tonight were his keen intellect and droll wit, delivered in a narrative colored by the pianist's idiosyncratic English. In the first half of a nearly three-hour program, he contrasted Scarlatti's gleeful virtuosity and Bach's sober mastery, and demonstrated the vast differences among Classical-era sonata movements with giddy Haydn, chaste Mozart and sturdily constructed Beethoven. Aimard illustrated the profusion of personality-driven expressive devices pioneered by Schubert, Chopin and Schumann, and showed how late Liszt and Brahms paved the way for Janáček, Ravel and Scriabin.

On the second half of his program, Aimard pursued a thread initially spun from the orientalism of Debussy's "Etude pour les quartes," which ended the first half, to illustrate how early 20th-century composers embraced themes from outside the classical canon. He posited Bartók as the piano composer who translated Stravinsky's early barbarism to the keyboard, even as Stravinsky would go on to translate cubism into sound. Schoenberg depicted the turbulent inner conflicts being explored by Freud; Webern fashioned a new music as precise and uncluttered as Mozart's had been.

John Cage's 4' 33" was anachronistically positioned to provide a tabula rasa, in the wake of which Messiaen, Carter, Boulez and Stockhausen could invent new vocabularies. (I can't say that I've ever heard those latter two composers played more poetically.) György Kurtág's journal entries and György Ligeti's magic tricks were followed by Helmut Lachenmann's recasting the piano as a guiro and Marco Stroppa's fidgety explosions. George Benjamin's Relativity Rag, in which a jaunty theme was atomized and reconstructed with genial wit, provided a show-stopping finale.

Oddly enough, given all the complex music Aimard navigated, what most confirmed this musician's particular genius tonight was the Cage piece. Practically everything he played was prefaced by commentary that concisely described the point of its presence on the program. But his introduction to 4' 33" lingered far longer than one might have expected.

Roughly a minute into his chat, which touched on the mandatory themes of Zen, the concept of independent volition and the sound of silence, I started to suspect that Aimard's rambling comments must certainly be playing some part in his actual performance. His narrative touched on the element of misdirection that had been crucial to Cage's original conception. Today, we all know this piece was meant to demonstrate that listening intently to supposed silence can be as eventful and fascinating as attending, say, a David Tudor recital in 1952. But how can 4' 33" possibly surprise us now?

Yadda yadda, the sounds all around us; yadda yadda, unfit for radio broadcast. When is the punchline going to get here? Eventually, Aimard raised the notion of Cage's late-period collage aesthetic, whereby multiple pieces could be played simultaneously to new effect. By that logic, Aimard reasoned, the work's three movements could be juxtaposed, while at the same time overlaid with commentary -- which is what you've just heard. (Rimshot!)

What was amusing in the moment seems far more subtle, calculated and artful upon reflection. At its inception, 4' 33" was about challenging preconcieved ideas of listening as mediated by the concert hall experience. That's a good trick, but it really only works once, after which reported accounts spoil the surprise. It could be assumed that most audience members knew what Cage's piece was about: any number of jokes were circulated preemptively in the lobby during intermission.

Anticipating this, Aimard turned that very knowledge on its head, and in so doing fundamentally reinvented the piece. Where before 4' 33" had been about silence and mediation, tonight it was about anticipation and predisposition. It was the wondering about what Aimard could possibly be planning in order to surprise us that proved so delicious. More than a lark, his account of the piece was every bit as vital as anything else on his wide-ranging menu.

Obviously, there were elements of the keyboard repertoire that Aimard's program didn't touch upon -- the absence of Henry Cowell was curious, and Morton Feldman and minimalism were conspicuously absent. I would have welcomed "Opening" from Philip Glass's Glassworks or a section from John Adams's Phrygian Gates, and I teased a neighbor that the encore would be a brief hourlong snatch of Feldman's Triadic Memories. Still, what Aimard managed to compress into this chatty encounter was as entertaining as it was enlightening... and provided a most unexpected revelation along the way.

Playlist:

Black Sabbath - The Eternal Idol (Castle)

Philip Glass Ensemble - Music in 12 Parts (Town Hall, Feb. 14, 1981; mystery broadcast tape)

Maurice Ravel - Gaspard de la Nuit; Elliott Carter - Night Fantasies; Two Diversions; 90+ - Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Warner Classics)