1. Emmylou HarrisStumble Into Grace (Nonesuch). Alt-country's matriarch makes unrequited love sound positively radiant.
2. Various artistsAMPLIFY 2002: balance (Erstwhile box set). European and Japanese improvisers intuitively fashion soundscapes of the future.
3. The Mars VoltaDe-Loused in the Comatorium (GSL/Strummer). Former emo-ers go for baroque, to thunderous, hallucinatory effect.
4. Lamb of GodAs the Palaces Burn (Prosthetic). Feral, confrontational metalists slash a topical vein.
5. Erin McKeownGrand (Nettwerk). McKeown's latest is typically literate and eclectic, but also irresistibly tuneful.
6. Dimmu BorgirDeath Cult Armageddon (Nuclear Blast). Norway's Satanic majesties say yes to excess, resulting in glorious, widescreen mayhem.
7. CursiveThe Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek). Tim Kasher spins self-loathing and revenge fucks into a gorgeous, wounded song cycle.
8. Tony MalabyAdobe (Free Lance). New York's fastest-rising tenorman hits his stride with a bluesy, joyously swinging trio.
9. David SylvianBlemish (Samadhi Sound). Assisted by Derek Bailey and Fennesz, Sylvian creates his most intimate, haunted music to date.
10. In da 'Pod Who needs a tenth album when you can download infectious hits like "Crazy in Love" (Beyoncé), "Hey Ya!" (OutKast), "Seven Nation Army" (the White Stripes), "Ignition (Remix)" (R. Kelly), "I Know" (Nas), "Cry Me a River" (Justin Timberlake)—and, yes, "In da Club" (50 Cent)?
2020 postscript: This list ran in the Music section of Time Out New York; a Classical & Opera list ran elsewhere, but I've not located a clipped copy yet. Among my then-teammates, Jay Ruttenberg cited "various demos" by Nellie McKay as his No. 1 pick; Leah Greenblatt favored Give Up by The Postal Service; K. Leander Williams opted for Passing Ships, by Andrew Hill; and music editor Mike Wolf selected Shivering King and Others, by Dead Meadow.
Leah and Mike converged with You Are Free, by Cat Power. Jay and Mike coincided with Haha Sound, by Broadcast. Erin McKeown appeared on Jay's list as well as mine. Those aside, there were no further overlaps among the 50-ish records we cited collectively. Quite a team we had. (Sorry about R. Kelly—even if it's still a slick tune.)
Many words have been used to describe the distinctive oeuvre of downtown guitarist-composer Elliott Sharp. Gentle and soothing, however, aren't among them. That's not to say that there isn't any subtlety in the pummeling calculus-core onslaught of Sharp's late, lamented band, Carbon, on in the vexing ferocity of his concert pieces. But in both of those settings, power and exuberance have played a far greater role than gentility and songfulness.
Admirers of Sharp's amplified din might wonder, upon hearing The Velocity of Hue, if the guitarist forgot to pay his Con Ed bill. Velocity's short, soft improvisations for solo acoustic guitar draw equally upon Blind Willie Johnson, John Fahey, and string-playing traditions from Korea, Africa and India. Sharp employs a gorgeous, warm-toned instrument modified with a dobro bridge, which affords him still more string to bend.
Even stripped down, his music is anything but simple. On tracks such as "The Face of Another" and "Nebel," he combines fingerpicking and delicate rubbing with slide and e-bow; deep, resonant sustained notes sing out elegantly over tactile chirps and pings. "Euwrecka" spins like an incandescent pinwheel, sending tiny harmonic sparks flying into the ether.
While it may seem like a radical departure at first, Velocity ultimately remains true to Sharp's careerlong investigation into the science of sound. If much of his previous work has found beauty in extremes of intensity, he reverses course here, creating a cumulative intensity out of extremes of beauty.—Steve Smith
2020 postscript: The Velocity of Hue remains available on CD direct from Emanem, here. The album can also be purchased in MP3 format on CD Baby, here, and is available for authorized streaming on YouTube, Spotify, and so on.
Interview: Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree The Volume blog Time Out New York Sept. 20, 2010 (link)
Founded in England at the onset of the 1990s, Porcupine Tree was originally passed off as a "forgotten" old-school prog-rock band. But yarn-spinning ceded to singer, guitarist and bandleader Steven Wilson's knack for reconciling vintage influences with contemporary sounds, while never forgetting the strength of a solid hook. The band's most recent album, The Incident, showcases a seamless 55-minute epic that combines Wilson's customary sophisticated arrangements and soaring melodies with the heavy crunch of progressive-metal bands like Opeth (led by Wilson's friend and collaborator Mikael Åkerfeldt). This Friday, Sept. 24, Porcupine Tree plays its biggest New York show to date at Radio City Music Hall. Via telephone from his home in England, Wilson spoke to TONY about the current prog-rock groundswell, the stifling qualities of contemporary life and Insurgentes, a gorgeously moody Lasse Hoile film spun off from Wilson's 2008 solo album of the same title. (The film screens at the IFC Center on Tuesday, September 21, followed by a Q&A with Wilson and Hoile.)
Time Out New York: Every now and then you hear about a progressive-rock resurgence, most recently when Emerson, Lake and Palmer headlined England's High Voltage Festival. Is this convenient media jargon, or is there truth to the notion?
Steven Wilson: I don't think it's ever really gone away, but there certainly is now a reembracing of ambitious, album-orientated rock music. That, for me, ultimately is what progressive music is. Into that, you can throw anything: Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Muse, Massive Attack. For me, these are all artists very much in the tradition of the original wave of so-called progressive bands. Let's not forget that none of those bands ever referred to themselves as progressive bands at the time; they were simply bands that had come out of the climate that the Beatles and the Beach Boys created with albums like Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, for ambitious music not necessarily conforming to the three-minute pop-song format. Bands like Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, ELP, Genesis, they had very little in common with each other except for that. They were trying to do something more conceptual, more ambitious with the album, and perhaps putting more focus—not all of them, I don't think Pink Floyd were, but some of them putting more focus on musicianship, perhaps, than '60s pop bands had. But even that, I think, is a moot point, because a band like Floyd weren't great musicians, and yet arguably were the most progressive of all of those bands.
You used to read stories about Roger Waters supposedly thanking David Gilmour for recording the bass parts that won Waters some big poll as "best bass player."
They weren't great musicians, but many people think of them as the kind of quintessential progressive rock band, in the sense that their music has proved to be much more timeless than most of the other progressive bands, mainly because there wasn't that emphasis on musicianship. It was purely an allegiance to doing something more creative with the album, the idea of the album as a musical continuum, a musical journey. Has that ever gone away completely? Certainly it had some dark ages in grunge and all those things. But I think that idea of the album as a musical journey as always been around, and it's probably more popular than ever before now—or not ever before, but since that original wave—because music has been liberated from commercial radio and MTV.
Liberated is an interesting choice of words.
What is most responsible for confining popular music to the three-minute pop song over the last 25 years is those two things. If you take those two things out of the loop, there's no need anymore to conform to the three-minute pop-song format, and I think that's one of the reasons why you've had a resurgence in music that doesn't necessarily think about commercial popular-music formats. The other reason is it's now possible to make music for a much smaller market and still survive on that by selling directly to fans through the Internet. So people don't have to think so much in commercial-radio terms in the way that perhaps they did in the '80s, certainly, which is when I started. You had to focus on getting things on the radio, because you weren't going to make a career otherwise. That's not true anymore. I think in that sense, a band like Rush from the '70s is the great model, a band that have just toured and made consistently quality albums, never really had big hit singles, never been fashionable, never been on MTV, and yet are bigger than ever. So I think they're really the model for what's going on right now.
Yet working outside of the commercial mainstream, Porcupine Tree is playing Radio City Music Hall this week. How did you achieve that kind of success without much obvious music-industry support?
One thing I realized very early on when I started making music as Porcupine Tree—which was in the early to mid-'90s, and I was just doing it as a solo thing at the time, doing it really for myself because I didn't think anyone else wanted to listen to it—is that there is always an audience out there for music with integrity, music that doesn't necessarily play by the commercial mainstream rules. In fact, some people are put off by what they perceive to be courting the mainstream. I consider myself one of those people. When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me. And if I felt for a moment that one of those artists was beginning to try and court the mainstream, that was the beginning of the end for my relationship with that band. This is where we come back to Rush as being a great example. Floyd is another, Led Zeppelin...both bands that never really released singles throughout their heyday. And I think Porcupine Tree is definitely in that tradition of a band that have kept faith with the fan base by never scaring them off with this idea that we might go for the almighty dollar. So it's been very organic, it's been very slow, but it has been always on an upward trajectory; for 20 years now it's kept going up, and there aren't many artists that can say that. It's been a very slow curve, but nevertheless it's always gone in the right direction.
Steven Wilson; photograph by Diana Nitschke
Your lyrics, especially on your most recent records, seem to express a kind of melancholy, a distrust and unease with the status quo of the modern world. Is that a conscious thing for you?
Well, yes is the simple answer. Like anybody, I look around at the world that we live in, and I find it hard to be completely positive about everything that's going on. One of the things that I think has really hit home for me over the last five years, and over the last couple of records particularly, is how much being young has changed, even since I was young, which wasn't that long ago. I grew up in the '80s, and the example I give most people is the idea that I could go to my parents as a teenager, or even as a 10-year-old, and say I wanted my own TV would have been laughed out of the room. Now look at the situation: Kids not only have their own TVs, they have cell phones, iPods, Sony PlayStations, they have the Internet portal, which of course is a kind of gateway to...well, to everything.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
Yeah. I never heard people talking about kids being on prescription drugs when I was a kid. If your parents were having trouble with you, then that was a problem in the family, it wasn't because you had attention deficit disorder or one of these other catchphrases you hear. It's quite easy now to be—and here's the thing, this is the word that for me sums up everything—it seems very easy now to live your life without, capital letters, curiosity. And curiosity, I think, is the greatest, the most underrated human attribute. Without curiosity, you never look beyond the mainstream. You never look at what isn't being marketed to you, in terms of products, TV, film, music, whatever it is. And you never actually have the ambition to travel outside of your immediate vicinity. And these are all things that, for me, were so important as a kid. I couldn't wait to finish school, I couldn't wait to get out of my home town, I couldn't wait to travel. I couldn't wait to devour everything, all the books, all the music, all the cinema—the more obscure, the better. I wonder now with all of the things we've been talking about, the Internet particularly, whether that same sense of curiosity is already dead by the time kids leave high school. And that's what I write about. I know I'm generalizing; not everyone is like that, and I've met a lot of kids that are very passionate and very curious about life. But I was a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis, and for me he summed up the boredom of modern life better than anyone else.
What about the liberating potential of the Internet for a kid stuck in a dead-end small town in the Midwest, who pokes around and follows links and discovers things like, well, Porcupine Tree?
Well, absolutely, and this is where there's no black and white. In many respects the Internet is the great liberator. Unfortunately, the way I perceive it, and the way I wrote about it in Fear of a Blank Planet particularly, was that you have this incredible tool for knowledge and information, and 99 percent of us use it to download pornography and music. Again, I'm generalizing, but that seems to be the way the human race goes. The other kind of symptom of this for me is I grew up with great music journalism. I was reading music journalists and buying music papers: people who could actually enthuse you about music in the way that they wrote articulately, informatively, with context and all that stuff. Now I can go on the Internet and find a million reviews of my latest record—literally a million reviews of Porcupine Tree! [Laughs]—and it's just noise. It's just, "this album sucks," "this is the best album they've ever done," "this is the worst album they've ever done." It's just people expressing opinions as fact, without any real kind of insight or understanding. And that, also, I find a bit depressing. So I guess I'm old-fashioned in the respect that I find myself feeling slightly alienated from the modern world. Go back 15 years and you had OK Computer, which was about the same thing. Go back another 15 years and you had Dark Side of the Moon, very much about the same thing. So I'm not new in kind of feeling, getting to a certain point in my life and feeling that sense of alienation and confusion of being in this modern world.
I used to cut out and save old print reviews and articles from Rolling Stone and Musician, about bands like Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division, who weren't covered anywhere else.
Exactly. Let's just say that a kid is going to go out and discover Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica on the Internet today. Now, this was one of my Holy Grails when I was a kid, because I would hear about this album in kind of legendary terms, and it took me months to hunt it down. By the time I found that record—and I actually found it as an expensive American import, and I had to spend a lot of my pocket money to buy it—I had been searching for it for months. And I had such an incredible investment in terms of time, energy and money that even though I hated the record the first time I heard it [Laughs]—and the second time, and the third time, and then the fourth time it began to make some kind of sense—you can bet your bottom dollar I was going to get anything and everything I could out of that record before I gave up on it. If a kid wants to hear Trout Mask Replica now, he can go on the Internet and he can find it effortlessly, and probably download the whole thing in a few moments. Has he got the same investment of time and energy and money in that record? No, he has none of those things. So that likelihood is if it doesn't hit the first time—and as a p.s. here I would say most of the records that I love the most I didn't like the first time—if he doesn't like it the first time, is he going to persevere with it? Probably not. I'm not saying the Internet is a bad thing; it is progress, and it's great that people can go and find Trout Mask Replica easily. But at the same time, also, in the back of my mind I'm thinking it's too easy. It's too easy now to find music, and it's therefore too easy to dismiss music, particularly music that doesn't hit you the first time you hear it.
Let's talk about Insurgentes, because you're participating in a screening while you're here in New York. How did that project get rolling, and how did it become such an elaborate multimedia concept?
I'll try and cut a long story short. It basically came about because I decided I wanted to make a solo record. Now, early Porcupine Tree were de facto solo records anyway, so it's not the first time I've made a record on my own. What made this project different, what made me think this is the first time I want to actually put my own name to an album, is that it was the first time I felt that I wanted to try and incorporate all of my musical interests into one record. I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance—these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. All these things were part of my musical world, which people had never really heard before in my own music. So I wanted to create this record which kind of incorporated for the first time all the aspects of my musical personality. And the other thing I decided to do, because making a record usually just means holing up in a studio and looking at the same four walls for three months, I actually said to myself, I don't want to do that; I want to travel the world and make this record. And as soon as I made that decision I thought, great to take a filmmaker with me and document this process.
We went to Mexico for a few weeks; literally, we made it up as we went along. We went to Israel, to Japan, to America, Scandinavia, meeting musicians, writing on the road while I was traveling, being inspired and making this record. But what was very interesting is how the film went far beyond just being a making-of documentary. It became—partly, I think, because as you can tell I'm quite opinionated about the music industry today and I have a lot to say about it—it partly became a document of what it means to be a working musician in the music industry today. I don't mean like a Michael Jackson or a U2; I mean someone at the kind of grassroots level with a small but dedicated fan base. How do you reconcile download culture? How do you reconcile the death of commercial product and the death of record companies? How do you reconcile that all with being a working musician in the early 21st century? So there's a lot of talking about that in the film, talking about download culture, American Idol, the packaging of records these days, the resurgence in vinyl. And also talking to other musicians, and in one case a record producer: We spoke to Trevor Horn, who was a big influence on me. He's a guy that's always made great-sounding records; how does he feel about his records being compressed to shit, basically? How does he feel about the fact that 90 percent of the people listen to music now as MP3s on iPods, on teeny little iPhone headphones? So we talk about all those things in the movie, with other musicians. And so it took on a life of its own; it became much more than a film about me. It became a film about being a musician in this time.
Extra: Check out the video for "Harmony Korine" from Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, filmed by director Lasse Hoile.
The very first music-industry professional who ever talked to me about the conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said, "Keep an eye on this guy, he's being groomed as Levine's successor at the Met." That was in early 2009, when he was chiefly known for his work with the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, had just begun his tenure with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, and had yet to be appointed to his position as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I jumped on the opportunity to chat with him for Time Out New York prior to his New York City debut at the Mostly Mozart Festival — for some years now the most reliable place to become acquainted with up-and-coming conductors, incidentally — in August 2009. He would make his Metropolitan Opera debut in Carmen later that same year.
My article somewhat surprisingly remains available on the TONY website, but since every single instance of the letter "é" is omitted there, I'm posting it intact (with an erroneous pronouncer corrected), to mark the occasion of Nézet-Séguin's appointment as the Metropolitan Opera's music director designate, announced today.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin One of classical music's hottest young conductors makes his New York debut at Mostly Mozart. Time Out New York, July 21, 2009
All manner of claims have been made for the salubrious effects of early exposure to classical music: Mozart makes baby smarter and the like. Seldom is it said, though, that taking your child to the symphony can lead to burgeoning superstardom. But for Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a young French-Canadian conductor whose career is taking on a runaway momentum, seeing the Montréal Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Charles Dutoit, splashed all over the local media during the 1980s fired his imagination. “I asked my parents to go to a concert,” he recalls. “I became fascinated by it and began to wave a stick with recordings.” So fascinated was the young piano student that at age ten he informed his parents, both education professors, that he intended to become a conductor.
Nézet-Séguin (pronounced nay-ZAY say-GHEN), 34, lived up to his word: Not only is he now a conductor, but he is also one of the hottest rising stars in the classical-music world. Having established his credentials with a nearly ten-year run as artistic director and principal conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, an ensemble whose international recognition he helped to raise with a series of highly regarded recordings for the Atma label, Nézet-Séguin took on two plum new roles in 2008: He succeeded Valery Gergiev as music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and also became the principal guest-conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
This week Nézet-Séguin makes his New York City debut with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra on Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5. The program includes Stravinsky’s charming neoclassical ballet Pulcinella, a piece seldom played in its entirety; Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony; and Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) with soloist Nicholas Angelich, a young American pianist with whom Nézet-Séguin has often collaborated. “I think he’s one of the very few true poets of the piano around.... He is arguably, to me, like a living Claudio Arrau,” the conductor says of his colleague.
But while Mostly Mozart gets the honor of presenting Nézet-Séguin here first, his concerts this week are just the beginning of a busy season in New York. In December, the conductor will make his Metropolitan Opera debut with a new production of Carmen, starring headline-grabbing married duo Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna. “Apprehensive? No, no, no, no, no, no!” he responds to a question with feigned indignation. Then, seriously: “There’s always reputations of divas and divos — but that’s part of the opera glamour.” Under working conditions, he insists, he’s gotten along wonderfully with all manner of reportedly difficult characters — a knack that should serve him well, since the Met has already tapped him to lead a production in each of the next five seasons.
In February, Nézet-Séguin will bring the Rotterdam Philharmonic to Avery Fisher Hall for two programs emphasizing Romantic heft, glittering virtuosity and a taste for the contemporary, including a new piece by Dutch composer Theo Verbey — an offering the conductor believes ought to be compulsory for any ensemble representing its country on tour. He’s required to be in Rotterdam for nine weeks a season, “but if I count the tours, the opera we do annually in Amsterdam, plus the recordings, et cetera, next season I end up being there 18 weeks or so.” London gets four additional weeks, thanks to his duties at the Philharmonic, an orchestra Nézet-Séguin says he loves. (A magnificent account of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 recently broadcast by the BBC proves the feeling is mutual.) And he intends to maintain his Montréal post “as long as they want to keep me,” he explains with a laugh.
Yet given all the high-level attention Nézet-Séguin is attracting, the question of career aspirations is one he prefers to deflect for now. “For me it’s a question of enjoying as much as possible whatever I’m doing, wherever I am,” he says. “I’m privileged that my career is now leading to the main cities and the most wonderful opera houses and orchestras. But I’ve decided not to project myself and say, 'Okay, after this I would like to be there.’ ” Instead, he claims, his ambition is simple: “Just to remain as happy as I am — and for the rest, I’ll trust life.”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall Tue 4 and Wed 5.
Time Out New York, farewell—what an amazing 13 years it was. I'll always be grateful. Please be good to my friends and colleagues, especially Hank and Seth.
Yesterday, I missed my mark for my weekly Wandelwatching series, due to a combination of conflicting chores, duties and circumstances. I'll get to that post a bit later, but first, an acknowledgement of something that happened yesterday in the social-media realm. A Facebook post I wrote in the afternoon – intended to set the record straight about a new development – caused rather more response than I'd anticipated. Here's the post:
Dear everyone: Since an official memo has circulated internally, and since word will now commence to spread outside of these walls, please allow me to officially state that after very nearly 13 years of dedicated service, I will be leaving Time Out New York on Friday, April 11. My departure is bittersweet but completely amicable, a choice that I made in order to devote more life and time to my fabulous wife and daughter, while also creating the brainspace for future developments to become clear.
Let me repeat, to ward off speculation summarily: there is NO foul play involved here. It simply became the right time for me to move on to the next stage, and to clear the way for some new professionals to make the most of an opportunity to shine.
More on that front soon. For now, please join me in congratulating new Music Editor, Craw enthusiast and Facebook refusenik Hank Shteamer. And to my Time Out peeps past and present, it's been an honor and a privilege to work with, laugh with, cry with and learn from all of you.
My closest confidantes have known for some time now that I'd been mulling a change of this nature, meant to clarify and simplify my life. I alluded to change strongly in this February post about my sabbatical surrounding the arrival of my daughter, who came just a few days later.
Annina, not surprisingly, acted as a strong arbiter of, and initiative for, some fairly drastic change, and that's what's finally taken place behind closed doors over the last few weeks. I'd realized even before she came that being able to spend more time with her – and with her mother! – took precedence over an overbooked, overextended schedule that had already begun to wear. Once she came, the choice was clear.
Something had to go, and Time Out – where I've done some work that I'm very proud of during the last nearly 13 years – was the proper choice. I talked about a wide variety of alternative scenarios with supervisors there, but it became apparent fairly quickly that moving on was the thing to do… not least because it will create an opportunity, albeit it a different one than what greeted me on my arrival as a wet behind the ears Classical Music & Opera Editor back in 2001. Whatever the trials and tribulations I may have faced over the years, they were more than matched by camaraderie, compassion and having a place to grow up in public, professsionaly and personally. Whoever takes up that particular torch is going to have a different experience, but a life-changing one nevertheless.
To everyone who responded to my news on Facebook or Twitter: many, many thanks. The kindness and generosity you've showed has been genuinely overwhelming. And for those who've asked: yes, my writing for The New York Times will continue, and almost certainly could even increase. Remember, though, that this is for Annina and Lara, who come first.
Any self-respecting pop star would be delirious to have a hit like “I
Love You Always Forever,” an irresistible bit of romantic treacle that
launched Welsh singer Donna Lewis to global success in 1996. Same goes
for “At the Beginning,” the uplifting duet with Richard Marx from the
animated film Anastasia, which returned Lewis to the top of the charts in 1997.
But if you really listened past the earworm chorus and
bubbly beat of Lewis’s debut hits, you quickly sensed that she was no
flash in the pan. The classically trained daughter of a jazz pianist,
Lewis had a breathy coo that could recall Kate Bush, and used it with a
flexibility that few pop princesses could muster.
Still does, to judge by Brand New Day, a striking demo Lewis
has just recorded with prog-jazz trio the Bad Plus. Produced by
avant-guitarist David Torn, the collection addresses a personalized
pantheon: Songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Burt Bacharach, Chocolate
Genius and Gnarls Barkley mesh cozily and radiate congeniality. “I Love
You Always Forever” merits its inclusion. At Drom, pianist Aaron Parks
sits in with Bad Plus bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King for
what’s certain to be an illuminating reintroduction.—Steve Smith
=====
Presumably the reason why the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson isn't on this gig is because he's opening a run with veteran drummer Billy Hart's superb quartet at Birdland the same night. That band, with saxophonist Mark Turner and bassist Ben Street, is also strongly recommended; read Hank Shteamer's 2012 Time Out feature on the band for more details. All of which said, Aaron Parks is an excellent choice for a sub with Lewis et al at Drom.
Live preview: Jordan Klassen Time Out New York Aug 1–7, 2013
“Let me give, let me talk, let me live in your pillow / Kill your
fear, whisper words in your ear,” Jordan Klassen intones reassuringly on
“Go to Me.” Slipping easily between intimacy and grandiosity, the track
is the first single from Repentance, the British Columbian
singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album on Toronto label Nevado. That “Go
to Me” was also the initial cut on Klassen’s 2012 EP, Kindness, and LP, Monastery, shouldn’t bother you—it’s that solid, elliptical lyrics and all.
Interviewed by a Vancouver newspaper in June, Klassen listed as his
chief influences Belle and Sebastian, Paul Simon, Joanna Newsom, Nick
Drake, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens. You’d have guessed as much from
spinning Repentance, a clutch of memorable tunes gently intoned
by the singer, and whimsically adorned by producer Jonathan Anderson
with ukulele, glockenspiel, toy piano, parade drums and whistling.
Klassen’s writing earned him early cred, but comparing his fledgling
self-releases with the imaginative refinement of Repentance, you hear the distance from aspiration to inspiration.—Steve Smith
This event took place at Issue Project Room on May 25, 2013. Since previews on the Time Out New York website now disappear from view once an event is passed, I'm preserving it here for personal posterity. Sadly, I was unable to attend, but warmly recommend the three CDs mentioned in the text.
Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman, by Billy Gomberg
ErstAEU Showcase Issue Project Room; Sat 25
For some time now it’s been possible to labor under the impression
that electroacoustic improvisation (or EAI) is exclusively available on
import, primarily the domain of Japanese, German and English performers.
Actually, that’s never been the case; Americans have contributed to
this outlier scene and its constantly morphing aesthetic from the start.
But the arrival of ErstAEU—a new imprint of genre-defining mainstay
label Erstwhile Records, operated by Jersey City tastemaker Jon
Abbey—brings a fresh focus on a groundbreaking wave of homegrown talent.
Like AMM, the intentionally vague name used by a seminal British forebear to the current scene, AEU is meant to be amorphous. A clearly stands for American, Abbey readily admits. But E could be Electroacoustic or Erstwhile, and U
might represent Union, Underground, Umbrella, Unlimited…U name it.
Conjoined under the mysterious moniker is a growing band of
outward-bound composers, improvisers and collaborators—“who may or may
not yet know of their involvement,” according to the shadowy
collective’s sole public statement.
Performing in this inaugural splash at Issue are the three duos who
recorded ErstAEU’s initial trio of releases. Joe Panzer and Greg Stuart
connect Gerhard Richter’s slathered, scraped canvases to Merzbow’s
assaultive sonic discharge on Dystonia Duos. Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman palpably convey sensations of space, dimension and unrest on their rich, enveloping Sinter. Graham Stephenson and Aaron Zarzutzki hew closest to recognizable shades of EAI interplay on Touching, while neatly avoiding predictability. Don’t expect anyone to “play a song from our latest album” here.—Steve Smith
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.
