New in The New York Times today: my feature about Frank London, a trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader who has played a major role in downtown jazz, the klezmer and Balkan music revivals of the ’80s, and a whole lot more. Today is his 66th birthday—which unfortunately he is spending in the hospital, where he was admitted late last week for treatment of a rare cancer he was diagnosed with four years ago.
London spoke about his situation with candor and good humor. It was also a pleasure to interview his close associates Hankus Netsky and Steven Bernstein, and to exchange emails with Matt Darriau and Marcus Rojas.
A concert spanning the breadth of London’s career – focusing on two new albums and a third recent release, but also covering a variety of ambitious large-scale works – will be held at Roulette on Monday, June 3. “What, Carnegie Hall wasn’t available?” I asked him, anticipating obvious demand—and indeed, the show is sold out already. But a standby line will be available for any unclaimed tickets, and the concert will stream live on the Roulette website and YouTube.
Since London can’t be there now, he’s deputized comrades like Bernstein and Darriau to lead bands in his absence. Expect to hear from him, anyway.
As ever, there were far too many strong stories and anecdotes to share. For one, London told me how much it means to him that one of his new albums, Spirit Stronger Than Blood, is coming out on ESP-Disk’ since recordings on that label had exerted such a huge influence on his development. (The other new album, Brass Conspiracy, has an official street date of August 16, but Tzadik hopes to have copies on hand at Roulette.)
And another: Netsky recalled that many times after the Klezmer Conservatory Band played concerts during London’s tenure, when the time came to play an encore, the trumpeter was nowhere to be found—because he’d already sprinted off to some late-night Latin gig elsewhere. “It got to be a joke in our band: Where’s Frank?” Netsky said, laughing.
Here’s wishing Frank London happiness, comfort, and a swift, full recovery.
"The Man Who Made Roulette Into New York’s Music Lab" The New York Times Sunday, May 19, 2024 Gift link
New in The New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section: my exit interview with the great trombonist and composer Jim Staley, who co-founded the essential new-music institution Roulette in 1978, and replanted it in his NYC loft in 1980, as he prepares to step away from leadership in June after 45 years.
From my first visit to Roulette in 1993 – the first time I saw Derek Bailey perform in person, a literally life-changing experience – to my latest encounters there with Du Yun’s OK Miss and Robert Ashley’s opera Foreign Experiences, this has been a venue special and dear to me. When I interviewed Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori about their new Phantom Orchard project in 2004 for my sole cover story for The Wire, the interview took place at the original loft.
I know that I’m far from alone in feeling this way.
I’m very grateful to Jim for sharing his thoughts about what’s happened and what’s to come—obviously what’s in the Q&A is only the tip of the iceberg. My thanks, too, to Zeena, Matt Mehlan, Jamie Burns, Joanna Mattrey, and the incredibly generous David Weinstein for crucial insights, and to Rachel Saltz and Emily Brennan at The New York Times for a smooth and illuminating edit.
You can help to send Jim off in style at this year’s Roulette Gala on Thursday, June 6, featuring a suitably dazzling constellation of artists: Zeena and Ikue, Henry Threadgill, Yuka Honda and Nels Cline, Immanuel Wilkins and Joel Ross, Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon, and John Zorn with Staley himself. You’ll find all the details here.
Until then, since I couldn’t use a lot of what I was provided in interviews, I plan to share exclusive outtakes in my Night After Night newsletter during the weeks to come.
"We prefer pieces that play with the style and format of traditional profiles," the kind folks at National Sawdust told me when I agreed to write a preview story ahead of Love Songs, the new off-Broadway music-styled show by John Zorn and Jesse Harris that has its premiere performances at the Brooklyn venue on Saturday, Sept. 16, and Sunday, Sept. 17.
Challenge accepted.
Love Songs is a delicious piece, with gorgeous music by Zorn and stylish lyrics and book by Harris, and it'll be deliciously performed by singer Petra Haden with pianist Brian Marsella, bassist Jorge Roeder, and percussionist Ches Smith. I look forward to seeing the fully cast and staged version due for production at The New School sometime in 2024.
This current engagement is part of an ongoing year-long global celebration of Zorn's 70th birthday, which also includes further events at Roulette and Miller Theatre, and in Boston and Minneapolis. You'll find links in my preview, in the paragraph that starts "The setting is National Sawdust…"
My final contribution to Gothamist is this extended version of an interview with conductor Jonathon Heyward – the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and the newly announced music director of whatever the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will be called when it returns next summer – which I scripted and Tiffany Hanssen conducted. The slightly shorter version of the interview that aired on WNYC last weekend is embedded in this story, too.
Heyward is conducting the orchestra on Friday and Saturday nights, Aug. 4 and 5, at David Geffen Hall; details here.
My newest for The New York Times is live now, with sustained gratitude to classical-music editor Zachary Woolfe. (I reckon most all of us could use some straightforward good news today.)
Below, photos I snapped at NJPAC during my visit on Oct. 22 for the final rehearsal and filming of the first virtual concert, some of which I posted on Instagram that day.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, April 13, 2018
Drummer Brian Chase is best known as a member of the vital indie-rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but that only reveals the tip of the iceberg where his creative life is concerned. A longtime participant in New York City’s busy underground-music scene, Chase has performed and recorded with a dizzying range of innovators, including Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Tyondai Braxton, Andrea Parkins, Jeremiah Cymerman, and Mary Halvorson, as well as bands such as the Fretless Brothers, Oakley Hall, the Sway Machinery, and Man Forever. Recently, he was among the dozens of artists who joined John Zorn in bidding farewell to The Stone in its original East Village location.
As a solo artist, Chase for more than a decade has pursued an interest in the limitless possibilities of just intonation and drone, inspired by the iconic Dream House operated by the maverick artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2013 he released Drums and Drones, the initial CD + DVD release devoted to his ongoing project of that name, on the esteemed experimental-music label Pogus Productions. The album’s DVD component included videos that New York artists Ursula Scherrer and Erik Z. made to complement Chase’s live performances. About that release, Chase explained at the time:
“Drums and percussion has seen some but not much exploration in Just Intonation, yet they are inherently designed to represent it as such: a drum head is tuned to a single pitch, one frequency, and resonates with rich harmonic detail. From there the overtone series can be uncovered and expressed. The Drums and Drones project deals directly with approaching drums and percussion from the standpoint of Just Intonation.”
Now, Chase will document the evolution and refinement of his pursuit with the forthcoming release of Drums and Drones: Decade, a three-CD package bundled with a 144-page book featuring essays about the project and its components, performance photos, and still images from the videos he's performed with. Encouraged by Zorn, Chase will release the set June 15 on his own newly established label, Chaikin Records. In a telephone interview, he discussed the album and label, and hinted at some of his future plans.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: The press materials announcing Drums and Drones: Decade mention that the project was inspired initially by your interest in the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. How did you become acquainted with their art?
BRIAN CHASE: For about a year and a half, I worked as a volunteer at the Dream House space… this was in 2005 or so. And that just sucked me in – I was hooked on the vibrations. And before that, I had met Jon Catler, who was a guitarist in La Monte's ensembles. So that's how I got introduced to La Monte Young, apart from history books: I met Jon and started playing in some of his groups, and Jon got me into just intonation and that whole scene, and that led me to La Monte. As I was working at the Dream House, I started to see parallels between just intonation and the resonance of a drum head.
I'd wondered how you made that leap. Most people, when they think of drums, think of the qualities of attack and impact, rather than sustain and resonance.
Yeah, but I was thinking about it… the way a drum is set up is that a drum head is tuned to have a pitch, but within that resonance there's a whole complex sound world, a complex array of harmonics. I started to develop my skills in tuning, where I could tune a drum head to a very specific frequency, and then from knowing the frequency, I would be able to know my harmonics, and where they exist on the frequency spectrum. The way the project developed was I would start by tuning the drum to a specific frequency, usually 480Hz, based on how La Monte went about tuning – he would tune to a fundamental of 80Hz, which is the hum of ConEd… or National Grid, whatever it is now – and from there, I would use digital EQ to boost the harmonics of that fundamental.
So that's the technical aspect. But I was also very much into the meditative aspect of listening that came with the Dream House: the idea of not being able to hear all of the sound all at once, and understanding listening as a process. The compositions developed with that in mind; they were structured to allow listening to unfold, and to be experienced as a subjective process for the listener.
Did you ever have any kind of personal interaction with La Monte and Marian?
I've had some over the years, yeah, little bits here and there. Social encounters, as opposed to artistic collaborations? Yeah. One memory I have is when I was working at the Dream House around holiday time, New Year's. I was finishing my shift, and La Monte stopped me and had gifts for me: "a gift for your body, a gift for your mind, and a gift for your soul." The gift for my body was homegrown chili peppers [laughs], and they were the hottest chili peppers I've ever had. The gift for my mind was some incense, and the gift for my soul was the Midnight ragas CD with Pandit Pran Nath.
You've been developing this body of work for more than a decade now, a process illustrated by your new album. How has your approach evolved over the years?
It's been a continual trial and error experience. [Laughs] The first album is very much about me finding the methods for the first time – which is really exciting. I love the spontaneity of that.
The second album [Drums and Drones II: Ataraxia] definitely shows a more refined approach to my methods. And then the third album [Drums and Drones III: Acoustic] is a purely acoustic album, because in the process of developing the electroacoustic material, I would discover new techniques of getting harmonics in an acoustic way. It took about eight or nine years before I had a full repertoire of developing methods to bring out the harmonics in a purely acoustic way from drums.
You've played these kinds of pieces everywhere from The Stone to Basilica Hudson. Is there an ideal space or an ideal acoustic for getting the results you're after? Can you do it literally anywhere, with the judicious use of electronics?
It can be dome anywhere, but the environment changes what is done. I have to learn how to adapt to the scenario.
Each performance is in a sense site-specific.
Definitely.
So you've got this massive project you want to put out into the worlds. What made you take the leap of starting your own label?
The label came about as an idea from Zorn. He knew I was developing some releases, but I didn't have the output for them. I told him of one label that was interested, but wanted me to pay for the manufacturing. Zorn said for that same money, I could start my own label.
And he would know.
Exactly. So I took his advice. It was kind of the next step for me, because I do have a lot of projects, and I'm very deeply involved with many different aspects of the New York City music community. I was starting to feel a little inhibited by not having a label. So while I wouldn't necessarily have envisioned it for myself, now that I'm in it and starting to do it, I see all the possibilities.
You've announced two more projects for future release already. One is untitled: after, your collaboration with Catherine Sikora. Can you talk a little bit about that?
That music is more on the avant-jazz side. Catherine is a brilliant improviser, and we've had a project for a number of years now.
It's fully improvised, rather than assembled with some compositional strategy?
Yeah. And the way we developed our pieces was we used pieces of text from a Beowulf translation.
Seamus Heaney?
Exactly. Catherine is a big fan of Beowulf and Seamus. She typed out some excerpts on an old typewriter that she had, and brought them into a rehearsal one day. We went through and developed some themes and motifs that provided a springboard for improvisation.
Is that basically a loose template, where every time you revisit that project it comes out differently?
Definitely. The pieces tend to have the same character, which is kind of cool, considering that they're all based on specific passages from the book. But yeah, the music is different.
I gather from the press-release statement about your third release, 13 Million Year Old Ghost, that you're not allowed to reveal the performer's true identity. But can you point toward the sound world the music occupies?
It does hint at the drone side of things, but it does kind of have more of a typical song aspect to it.
You can't divulge who it is for contractual reasons?
Well, it's a friend of mine from the rock world. We're doing the mastering next week, so I think after that we'll start to feel more confident about revealing more information.
Going forward, do you have a sense of what kinds of projects and artists you're interested in pursuing?
I've started thinking about another round – I like the idea of doing three releases at a time. We'll see how this goes, and if I break even or it's sustainable, then I'll look toward another batch. One idea I had was to feature some great Brooklyn music… there was a lot of great stuff happening on the Brooklyn rock scene that I don't think made it past its history, unfortunately. A lot of bands that were pivotal at the time, like from 2000 to 2006, that get overlooked when people talk about the Brooklyn scene. So I was thinking about doing a compilation in a similar format to No New York that features four bands. And maybe it would be a two-LP thing; maybe it would be four bands over two LPs, possibly. So that's something I was thinking of for next time.
Your use of the term LP just then begs the question of whether you'll be issuing Chaikin releases on formats other than CD. Any plans for vinyl or cassette?
Yeah, definitely, 13 Million Year Old Ghost will be an LP. I thought about doing the album with Catherine on cassette, also, but I think that'll just stay on CD. Doing a label, the economics of all of this is… very apparent. [laughs]
Drums and Drones: Decade is due June 15, 2018, on Chaikin Records.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, Nov. 29, 2017
Even for an artist as versatile and unpredictable as Sarah Hennies—a percussionist, improviser, and composer originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and now based in Ithaca, New York—her newest work represents a substantial achievement. Contralto, an hour-long work for vocalists on video with strings and percussion (either live or recorded), is named for the musical term that denotes the lowest female voice type. The principal source material is provided by a cast of trans women, filmed by first-time director Hennies as they speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises designed to help trans women develop a more conventionally female vocal sound.
Hennies is best known to new-music cognoscenti as a solo artist and for her work alongside fellow percussionists Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart in the protean percussion trio Meridian. In indie-rock circles, she's the former drummer for Austin combo The Weird Weeds, and the current time keeper for Philadelphia slowcore outfit Obody. For Contralto, which will be presented its world premiere on Nov. 30 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Hennies has assembled a stellar band of old friends and regular collaborators: Meridian bandmates Feeney and Stuart, violinist Erik Carlson, violist Wendy Richman, cellist T.J. Borden, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and percussionist Ashley Tini.
Speaking by telephone from her home in Ithaca, Hennies talked about the personal and stylistic discoveries that led her to imagine and assemble Contralto, as well as the circuitous creative path that gave her the tools and determination to get it done.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: To judge by the evidence I've seen thus far—a video trailer, a descriptive essay, and some sections of the score—Contralto is unlike anything you created before it. So let's get rolling with the most basic question: How did you come to conceive this piece?
SARAH HENNIES: It started a few different ways. Around three or four years ago, when I was first dealing with any kind of trans stuff and I didn’t know anything, this friend of mine had this really squeaky voice: super, super high. The first time we hung out, I don’t even remember how it came up, but she was like, “Oh, I can still do my old voice.” She started talking in this really profoundly deep, low voice, and I thought it was so startling. So when I started to think about making a piece that was about voices, at first I wanted to try to get a bunch of trans women to expose their quote-unquote “natural” voices. And the more I thought about that, the more wrong it felt for a lot of reasons… not that interesting, and not something that I wanted to do, because I felt like it would sensationalize physical things and focus on body stuff instead of actual identity.
And then, there’s a course that is offered at Ithaca College for free that is basically like trans voice training. They say it’s for trans people, but really only women take it, because what I learned years ago was that when a trans man transitions, his voice changes, because when you take testosterone, it causes your vocal chords to thicken, and your voice drops and gets more profound. And that does not go the other way. So I started to think of this as: when you think about trans women’s place in the world, you can change all of these things and go to all of this effort to do what’s called “passing,” and kind of assimilate into society, but there’s this one thing that you just can’t fix… or I wouldn’t use the word “fix”…
Alter?
Right. There’s this one pesky thing that none of us can really deal with. And what I found from the class… one of the women in the piece—the older woman in the pink sweater, her name is Dreia [Spies]—when we were filming her part, we talked about the class, because I met her there. She was asking me to explain the piece a little bit. I was like, well, I think the class is asking people to do something that is basically impossible. This is someone who’s taken the class repeatedly, and she was like, yeah, I think that’s basically true.
The class is designed to help you essentially pass, vocally?
Right, but what I found is that it does not… you know, it depends on the person. A different person, who I really wanted to be in the film, but she maybe just decided she didn’t want to, has one of the deepest speaking voices I’ve ever heard. I feel for her, because that’s really hard. But also, I started to think that the piece I needed to make was not that we all need to change our voices so that we can fit into society better, but that people need to change their definition of what they think a woman sounds like. This idea that it was trying to do something impossible is something that I was already doing in my music a lot. And from taking this class, there’s all of these exercises that started to remind me of pieces that I had already made before I ever thought about this class. [Laughs]
Oh, now that’s really curious and interesting.
The music in the trailer for the film, the kind of droney humming and sine-wave music, I actually made about six years ago. It was a test for a vocal piece that I never wrote, for a concert that a group I was in was doing in Austin, the Austin New Music Co-Op. We did a concert with a vocal group called Convergence…
A contemporary-classical kind of situation?
Right, right. The thing that ended up in Contralto I ended up releasing on a tape, just as its own piece. It’s a recording of myself multi-tracked four times, where all I’m doing is humming across my vocal range, so that one part is as low as I can possibly hum and one part is as high as I can hum. The highest part is kind of squeaky, it’s the only part that kind of wavers, and you can tell it was a little bit difficult. I wasn’t thinking about this in relation to trans- anything when I made the piece; I just made it. And there’s a lot of stuff like this where I can look back to 10, 20 years ago and be like: oh, that’s why I was thinking about this, and that’s why I was doing this.
Which tape includes the vocal piece?
It was called Casts. It’s on Astral Spirits. That tape ended up being sort of an odds-and-ends collection, just four pieces for something-plus-sine waves. There was one where I’m repeating a word over and over again, one for hi-hat, and one for vibraphone, and then this voice thing.
It’s interesting, [Contralto] is a convergence of all these things that I’ve been interested in, and they’re all just sort of happening at the same time. But it’s not explicit… I didn’t think of it as trying to do that. It just kind of happened on its own. I started to see that this was a link between all of these different things that I was doing. So that’s why I initially wanted to make the piece.
Change is upon us once again, and with it a fresh start for Night After Night—elsewhere. As of Thursday, April 23, the primary focus of my work has shifted over to a newly launched Substack newsletter, also called Night After Night. That title has provided my online identity – my "brand" – for more than two decades; no reason I would change that now.
From the new site, my explanatory preamble:
As in all of my previous ventures – from blogging and freelancing through stints with Time Out New York, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Sawdust Log – I’ll be covering music in its infinite richness and variety, emphasizing what’s happening here and now. I’ll interview composers and performers about their newest projects, as well as bigger, broader ideas. I’ll review current recordings… and concerts, too, when the opportunity returns. I’ll direct your attention toward pertinent news and reviews published elsewhere, too.
I plan to post twice a week, and some posts will be available to everyone. But paying subscribers will have access to premium content now in planning stages… stay tuned.
Following that preamble, the first real entry – a biographical prelude, an extensive interview with Quince Ensemble and composer David Lang, and a postlude to my New York Times obituary of Richard Teitelbaum – was sent out on April 23. You can read it now, for free.
You'll notice that subscriptions are available, and at some point soon I'll start to roll out features meant exclusively for those who subscribe. That said, I completely recognize that this is a difficult time, and I intend to keep a substantial portion of my work freely accessible to all.
As for this long-serving Typepad blog, well, it's staying right where it is, and shifting to serve, even more than it does already, as an archive for past writings—both my original posts and the work I make for others. The playlists will stay here, too, and I'll try to be diligent about them.
I'll continue to add more past content when I find time (ha!). But for now, the Substack newsletter is where I'll be moving forward.
Dr. Ramsey, a composer, conductor, and teacher based in Kansas City (you know, the one in Missouri), received dozens of enthusiastic responses. I won't lie, I definitely jumped in. But I also trawled the replies, looking for pointers toward unfamiliar composers. This one caught my eye, not least because when folks are tossing around names like Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel and Ruth Crawford-Seeger and Gloria Coates and Julia Wolfe and Caroline Shaw, it takes some actual courage to flag a piece of your own… and I mean that as genuine praise.
Cassandra Venaglia is a name I'd not encountered previously, but a recording by the JACK Quartet is incentive enough to investigate. And "neat" is an accurate term, if more than a little bit of an understatement, for Dark and Light, the brief string-quartet work in question. It's deceptively simple and seemingly straightforward, a patient stroll from point A to point B. But I've listened to it at least half a dozen times this evening, and I've found fresh details and nuances to appreciate with each pass.
Venaglia, a composer and soprano, is based presently in Los Angeles, but she pursued at least some of her studies at New York University, where she trained with the aforementioned Julia Wolfe, as well as Joan La Barbara and Robert Honstein. She's got an artist page on Facebook, and maintains a presence on Instagram and Twitter. And happily, she provides several means by which to find at least some of her music online. You can watch her perform Ebb, an enchanting piece for voice and electronics, on her YouTube channel, which also includes a pair of intriguing clips from a one-character opera, Advice to a Girl.
There's more to hear on Venaglia's SoundCloud page, including a MIDI realization of a vocal ensemble piece, Continuum, and a hazy, evocative piece called In the Desert, for chamber orchestra with electronics. There are two accounts of Dark and Light (one is the JACK recording), and two versions of another striking piece, Experiment with Haikus, which evidently started as a duo for flute and piano, and then became an even more ambitious piece for violin and piano. (I could be wrong.)
Also on the SoundCloud page – and on commercial streaming platforms like Spotify, and available for purchase on Bandcamp – is La Figlia che Piange (The Girl Who Cries), a dreamy piece for voices, percussion, and electronics, jointly created by Venaglia and Dante Luna. Whichever site you choose, make a point of hearing it.
Word has come that Lyle Mays – an extraordinary pianist, composer, bandleader, and a longtime member of the Pat Metheny Group – has died after a recurring illness. Nate Chinen, in an obituary written for WBGO, gets to the heart of Mays's creative persona:
Mays was a musician of clear, analytical temperament, but within the dimensions of his style — a personal amalgam of post-bop pianism, classical impressionism, Brazilian music, electronic music, rock ‘n’ roll and much else besides — there was always a core of emotional expression. The radiant, affirmative character of The Pat Metheny Group can only be understood as a byproduct of Mays’ distinctive chemistry with Metheny, his fellow Midwesterner, musical omnivore and tireless technophile.
Metheny, too, had words to share:
R.I.P. Lyle Mays (1953-2020) It is with great sadness that we have to report the passing of our friend and brother, Lyle Mays (1953-2020). He passed today in Los Angeles after a long battle with a recurring illness, surrounded by loved ones.https://t.co/goeTusSnpCpic.twitter.com/2SOYIXUw84
I consider myself fortunate to have seen Mays play a few times with Metheny: both in a "classic" PMG lineup with Steve Rodby, Paul Wertico, Pedro Aznar, and Armando Marcal, and later in the context of the large ensemble that toured Metheny's Secret Story album. By some strange fluke, I sat in the front row at both of those concerts, a proximity that offered unusual insight into the intensity, sympathy, and joy that went into these performances, and the deep, deep connection Metheny and Mays shared.
I've thought about Mays many times over the years, as Metheny has carried on with a wide variety of projects without Mays since their final collaboration in 2005. I hadn't heard about his illness, but am glad to hear that his suffering has ended. His music, without question, will live on.
