GEORGE GRELLA: CRITIC-IN-RESIDENCE
You may be wondering what this is
all about, what Critic-in-Residence means in general, and what is means
at and for Galapagos Art Space in particular. I’ve been asked this
question already, even by other critics and professionals in music. My
answer to them, and to you, is: we’ll see.
Robert Elmes contacted me with this idea in the fall, completely improvvisamente,
as Italians say so evocatively. We talked abut it, and I was intrigued,
by both his views on the problems of sustaining artists in a city as
expensive and materialistic as New York, and that he didn’t have a
definite idea on what the Critic-in-Residence would be, but wanted to
give it a try and see where it went. Improvising is what I’ve always
been drawn to as a musician, so how could I say now?
Galapagos is many things, depending on
what is filling it at the moment. It hosts art shows, burlesque cabaret,
circus acts, lectures and, of course, music. It also has a unique
model, in that it supports and sustains selected resident artists, and
manages to do so through that same flexible, inventive use of the space.
It’s not easy, in fact it seems a daunting challenge, but every time I
leave an performance and see the line of colorfully dressed people
waiting to get into the ‘nightclub’ portion of the evening, I have the
feeling that something is working.
So what am I going to be doing? I think
I’m going to be evaluating how well this all works, although that will
be subject to change, since this is an ongoing experiment. But first,
Galapagos gets far less press coverage than their programming and
ambitions demand, and their musical programming has become increasingly
expansive. While I’ve been happy to run into Alan Kozinn there, more can
be done. And that will be my first step, to write about recent musical
performances. Let’s see where it takes us.
BIO:
George’s performing experience includes playing jazz, classical and
improvised music at CBGB, the original Knitting Factory and Weill
Recital Hall. As a composer, he has produced chamber music, opera,
electronic music and has created music for dance and cartoons.
He has published music criticism since the mid-1980s, both in print and on the web, and in 2008 founded The Big City,
an omnivorous music and culture blog with a devoted following amongst
musicians, composers and music writers. Since the beginning of 2011, he
has been contributing a weekly column and various features to
ClassicalTV.com, and writes frequently for The Brooklyn Rail, Seen and
Heard International and Time Out New York. His criticism and analysis
includes interviews with Nullsleep, Elliott Carter, New York City
Opera’s Artistic Director George Steel, Brooklyn Philharmonic Artistic
Director Alan Pierson, and the violinist Hilary Hahn. The second edition
of the Grove Dictionary of American Music and Musicians will include
almost two dozen of his articles, on subjects ranging from Bob Ostertag
and David Garland to the conductor William Christie, the Turtle Island
String Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble. In 2011, he
received a grant to cover Petr Kotik’s bi-annual Ostrava Days Festival
of New and Experimental music in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
As far he knows, he is the first Critic-in-Residence at a performing venue, at least in Brooklyn.
Mr. Grella's Reviews:
July
2012 Clogs & Loop 2.4.3
Two bands,
sharing common elements and members, moving in two different directions. Or
rather, one band is moving, the other is standing still. This is actually not
the appropriate moment to quote Woody Allen in Annie Hall, talking about how
relationships are about sharks, that they have to keep moving forward or
they’ll die. Music isn’t like that. It can move forward, but it’s under no
obligation. This is a cultural question and a cultural matter. Non-Western
music is primarily social, not abstract, and so it preserves itself in
something of a gestural and stylistic stasis. The idea of time is different,
it’s cyclical, and the rhythms of the seasons and social rituals are
maintained.
In the West, the sense of time is linear, inherently connected to the idea of
progress as continual material and intellectual advancement. It’s here that
music and the visual arts developed abstraction, the work existing on it’s own
outside of any social/political/ritualistic aspect. Pop music changed that. The
songs are about specific feelings, experiences and moments of time, and since
the beginning pop has been tied to subcultures of fashion. Pop is on a loop,
fairly closed, recycling ideas each generation in slightly new packages,
sometimes skillfully, but without moving the music into much new territory.
Indie-pop was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be about …
something. But the songs weren’t about anything they hadn’t been before: girls,
boys, fun, alienation, political slogans. The difference was economic, the
bands were using digital technology to handle their own distribution and
promotion. Somewhere along the way, a few serious minded musicians snuck in,
making serious minded music with hints of compositional gravity. It was never
real. There were some skillful pastiche’s of rock, hip-hop and afro-beat, some
complex meters and structures adapted from prog-rock, some of the calculated
eccentricities of David Byrne, all of it just ornamentation. Making inferior
versions of O’Delay or Illinoise became a thing, for some reason.
It may strike most, if not all, that it’s premature to write elegiacally about
the movement, such as it was, but I have seen it’s death. It’s not that Clogs
was bad at Galapagos, they were actually quite fine, they were as Clog-gy as
Clogs could be. But the world has turned several times since they first stepped
in front of an audience, and they haven’t turned with it. If Clogs was
something like Molly Hatchett, that would not be a problem: people want the
Hatchett they know from their memories and goddammit that’s what they’re gonna
get. But Clogs was supposed to be crafting pop-styled music with a
compositional sense. In their first moments, when they sounded new against the
backdrop of the world around them, that might have been true, but now, after
years of pop musicians trying to write chamber music and composers trying to
write groove- and song-based pieces, they sound wan, dissipated.
The problem is in the composing. Having a bassoon at the front of your band
doesn’t make it classical, just as using a kazoo doesn’t make you Spike Jones
(and too bad, because indie-pop is so generally solipsistically humorless that
it makes me long for Jones). Writing music on paper doesn’t make you classical
either. Thinking in terms of structure beyond song-form, things in terms of
abstraction, complexity, beauty, is a step on the road. Clogs does none of
that. They are pretty, and so are flowers. Beethoven is often rough and ragged,
Mahler is often ugly. Flowers die off in the heat or the cold, Beethoven and
Mahler endure, and the experience of even their harshest moments is beautiful.
It may seem unfair to compare Clogs to those composers, but once you start throwing
the “classical” word around, the company you keep is not just Satie and Mompou.
You’re
in the big leagues, son.
Clogs was four-bar phrases, in four-four time, using maybe four chords. So
polite, no rough edges. The protest music, “Shady Gully,” was wistful. What was
there to be angry about? Was it that a lovely spot on the Australian coast
might be developed? I was unsure, because the music had no capacity to tell me
that anyone was upset about anything. If this is all that there is, then there
never was anything much at all. It’s not solely the musicians fault, it’s also
that of the audiences and the critics. Why does this currently under–40
generation accept so much safe, milquetoast music? Where is the unexpected
roughness, abrasion and surprises of life? Why this fetish for lukewarm
mediocrity? The critics all along have talked about music but really thought
about sales, about who was making money, moving it from one person’s pocket to
another. Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin, the Village Voice, they chase
popularity, on the knife’s-edge of the most worthless kind of cool, the cool of
prematurely jaded, diffident kids who’ve never done anything in their lives.
It’s pathetic for an adult to chase them around, to try and be relevant on
their terms, even worse for adults to look at other adults and measure them on
those terms. Clogs is not bad, but they aren’t good. They were never good. They
were never even interesting.
Loop 2.4.3 is interesting and uneven, but they’re interesting even when they’re
uneven, and they are good at what they do. While the first measure of a Clogs
song tells you everything you need to know, the first measure of anything from
Loop tells you virtually nothing about what the whole piece is going to be
about, much less the next measure. That’s a good thing, as long as you don’t
crave sameness and predictability. They also know how to shape things, so even
if there are problems in the details – the vocals are usually weak – it’s a
pleasure to hear where the music is going. Where Clogs makes denatured folk or
children’s music, Loop makes shambling, hybrid prog-rock, and their quality is
so unique that even songs you’ve heard a dozen times before are full of new
things to hear.
The virtues you can hear on their new American Dreamland CD were on display in
their too-short set: lithe rhythms, a confident sense of form that allows them
to stretch what their doing in probing ways without breaking anything, the
satisfying feeling of a rock band that simply knows how to play. While I wish
they would hire a singer with strong pipes, to really push them to a new level,
that they can improvise and make supple use of prog-rock clichés, that they can
sound so fresh, unique and surprising, makes them welcome. A diet of only
exactly what you know, exactly how you know it will be, rots the brain and the
soul. Loop 2.4.3 revives it.
______________________________________________________________________________
May
2012 Kuniko Plays Reich, Anderson & Roe
Sometimes what
matters most about a musical performance is not the tunes and the playing, but
how things have come about, and how they could have. This must seem vague, so
bear with me a bit.
The two performances I saw at Galapagos this month, percussionist Kuniko Kato
playing her arrangements of pieces by Steve Reich, and the piano duo Anderson
& Roe playing their arrangements of music ranging from “Billie Jean” to
Carmen, and Stravinsky’s own reduction of the score for the Rite of Spring to
piano, four-hands. These were both debuts in a way, not first appearances in
public by these musicians but events meant to celebrate and promote new
recordings.
One evening in between the two, I stood on the observation deck of the Austrian
Cultural Forum, looking over West 52nd Street with the composer Bernhard Lang
who, like me, has a formative background in jazz. If you found yourself on that
street seventy years ago, or Bleeker street twenty years later, you not only
had your choice of what to hear within walking distance but literally within
earshot, but also your choice of what was new, of musicians and styles that you
had never heard before, maybe never heard of, or even dreamed of, before. It
seems exciting, and unimaginable now.
Because it is unimaginable now. Where is there anyplace like that any more?
Small pockets of Williamsburg and Bushwick, perhaps, but a row of nightclubs
and music venues featuring young phenoms and established stars, not only in
popular music but the most cutting edge styles — remember that Be-Bop was once
the avant-garde — that kind of thing has been priced out of Manhattan. Dumbo as
a neighborhood is such a pluperfect example of cutting-edge hipness in
consumerism that I half expect to bump into David Brooks any day, gazing in awe
and wonder at the lengths to which the cultured bourgeoisie seek to enshrine
their own narcissism in real estate. Not that Brooks could offer anything more
than his knee-jerk, condescending tut-tutting. To know Dumbo, read J.G.
Ballard.
Galapagos, perched on a windy corner, often seems a lonely outpost at night, surrounded
by indifferent apartment buildings, with indifferent, silent denizens. Who goes
there, who steps out of their building and strolls over to see what’s
happening? The Floating Kabarette is a draw, but I mean music shows, out of the
ordinary things, the kind of thing where, in a densely populated urban
neighborhood, people passing to and fro stop to explore? This is a strange
thing about the area. I live in a decidedly non-hip residential neighborhood in
Brooklyn, and people are out on the streets all the time, into the evening, but
Dumbo in the evening and at night could be a ghost town. But in this eminently
walkable city, there is little time and space to wander and be curious, people
just can’t afford it, lest the engine of the economy roll them over. Perhaps,
too, people are shut in against the incessant, crushing noise of the D train
rolling over the Manhattan Bridge, but if so, why are they living there?
It seems the Art Space struggles against this obstacle. Reich is titan of
contemporary music and, in a country where composers don’t register on the
public consciousness, he is generally popular with sophisticated fans of all
sorts of music. Yet Kuniko’s concert was lightly attended, and much of the
audience seemed connected to the music through the Consulate General of Japan.
This was an excellent concert. The music, “Electric Counterpoint,” “Six
Marimbas,” Vermont Counterpoint” and “New York Counterpoint,” with modest and
lovely arrangements of Bach and Komitas, speaks for itself, and Kuniko’s craft
is superior. Reich’s work lends itself easily to transcription to other
instruments, and the pitfall is that it is so easy that the results can be lazy
and dull. She has a subtle and imaginative ear for color, and moving the lead
voice of the opening movement of “Electric” to steel drums was a gorgeous
touch, adding a shimmering, sustained richness as well as a delayed attack that
made for a new, ambient quality.
Percussion instruments call for a great apparent physicality in playing than
guitars or violins or flutes, and that was visually important in the concert,
not only the effort of Kuniko in striking metal and wood with beaters, but her
dancing movements. She was filled up with the physicality of Reich’s beat, even
as the sonic edge of the musical was gentler, as in the transfer of “New York”
from piping clarinets to mellow marimbas. The music is very well known by now,
but she made it refreshing. With her own ear and taste she responded to pieces
that she clearly feels are beautiful and gave us music-making that took for
granted the intellectual success of the composer’s process and craft and gave
us the sheer beauty of it, and that’s a considerable thing.
Anderson & Roe do the same thing, responding to music that appeals to them
and sharing it with the audience. What makes them special is the expressive
verve and personal appeal in their playing. They play classical music, the real
stuff, nothing is dumbed down for the audience. Arrangements of “Paranoid
Android” are commonplace these days, and that’s because the origina material is
so strong. Christopher O’Riley has revealed a lot of the sophisticated harmonic
and structural qualities in Radiohead in his solo transcriptions, and using two
pianos brings out even more depth in the motion of the harmonies and section to
section juxtapositions. And in case you missed it amidst all the gossip and
soap opera, Michael Jackson also made a lot of good music, and if you think
there’s something wrong with ‘sophisto’ musicians playing “Billie Jean,” then
you’re going to have to take it up with me, because when I was in a working
band we played it as well. And it’s a good song.
Talking to the audience is good thing too, and if the duo are a little too
garrulous at times, it doesn’t detract from their great playing and thinking.
They play Stravinsky with fantastic power, and if the composers’ reduction
takes away the mesmerizing instrumental colors of his orchestration, it
clarifies texture and rhythm, and puts a premium on the pianists’ ability to
carve expression and aesthetic focus through dynamics, and the two did so much
with that. They have the chops to hit all the notes and to say something about
them.
Their unabashed emotional and physical vitality adds a great deal: not only are
they masterful players of Astor Piazzolla, which is expected, but they bring
out the muscle in music that is, personally, far too sentimental for me,
particularly the Rachmaninoff “Vocalese” and the Villa-Lobos “Bachianas
Brasilieras No. 5.” The Rachmaninoff was special, not swooning but with a dry
strength, and the exquisite cadenza brought them deserved “bravos.” Behind
their flair, they are at their best in quieter music, pieces that reveal the
fine quality of their musicianship. The arrangement of Carmen is the
crowd-pleasing closer, it is well made and will please you as much as the opera
does, but the highlights of the evening where the songful, soulful playing of
“The Glitt’ring Sun” by Thomas Arne, and an enthralling performance of
Schumann’s “Mondnacht,” which I wished would never end, and wished more that it
would lay silence over the rattle outside, so that people in windows across the
street might, curious, open them to hear something new, something that might
draw them out into the night, and by chance wander and discover something new.
______________________________________________________________________________
April
20th, 2012 Le Train Bleu Presents: Prison Life
To express my
thoughts and feelings about this
concert, I need to first write about the past, the accumulated history of
ideas and the personal experience of listening, of what sticks in the ears,
and, especially, the soul.
It may not be
apparent, but the most direct elements of the music from this great evening,
the driving beats, tunefulness and swaggering attitude that would have been
just as at home on a record by Can, the Clash or Radiohead, were created and
exist because of the long past of classical music. The ubiquitous and personal
experience of pop music on the post-WWII generations of composers Connect their
art to the larger public, but there’s a huge difference between enjoying pop
music and making clearly expressive, serious music like Fred Rzewski, Corey Dargel, Jacob TV and Michael Gordon.
The difference
has its roots in philosophy and aesthetics, but it manifests itself in the
concrete materialism of industrialized music, flash-in-the-pan artists and styles
that, no matter how accomplished and enjoyable, can do nothing more than
capture one particular emotional expression and cement it in time and memory,
with little nuance and no ability to hold together the contradictions and
thoughts and feelings that make us human beings. Pop music may be affirming,
but it is exceedingly rare that it is truly humanist, that it is sympathetic
towards the things that it is not, and that the world of pop music — musicians,
critics and fans — is barely aware that any other music exists attests to this.
Embracing
humanist values means embracing humanity, and that, beyond all abstract
technical achievement, is what classical music does, and has done, and what pop
music has yet to develop as a fundamental value. At the core of Prison Life is
that set of values, and the musicians’ taste and intelligence that not only put
together such an extraordinary program of music, but supported it with great
playing, the kind of musicianship that goes beyond hitting the notes and has
the players committed to saying something.
Rzewski’s
“Coming Together” and “Attica,” here presented as a diptych, are an astonishing
prelude to action and a gracefully plangent aftermath. This performance was
different than any others I’ve heard live or on record, and what I heard was an
historically informed classical approach. Dargel was a great narrator,
alternately intense and wistful, while Ransom Wilson gave the playing the kind
of smoothly terraced, dramatic direction that is a legacy of classical music. Instead
of just drive, anger, threat, the adrenalin of righteousness, that was a sense
of beauty and sorrow that was new to my ears. “Attica” is almost invariably
narrated, but Dargel sang the part here, again a first for me, and it entirely
transformed the work. The piece was more beautiful for it, with a lyrical and
pastoral flavor that moved it from the context of post-1960s protest music and
into that of Beethoven and Schubert. It sees farther because it stands on the
shoulders of giants.
“Grab It!” is a
piece for solo tenor saxophone accompanied by an audio track, here on a boom
box, assembled from the old Scared Straight documentary. The
words and phrases are cut up and reassembled from the original, but the feeling
of threat remains. Patrick Posey, dressed as a butch prison guard, strode out
onto stage, arrogantly, and gave the piece of the kind physically rollicking
performance it demands. There were some titters of nervous amusement over his outfit,
but the artful brutality of his playing and the music drove home that this was
something to be excited about, and nothing to laugh at.
Dargel’s new
“More Last Words From Texas,” five short songs from the last words of prisoners
executed in that state, was also brutal. Dargel’s moral aesthetic and his skill
as a composer and performer turns these difficult thoughts and feelings into
something, again, human. Some of the words reveal the fraught and even
repellant hard-edged extremes of behavior, but there is nothing about the worst
of us, and the worst of the worst people amongst us, that is anything less than
human. The only monsters are in the fantasies of children and adults, it’s just
that adults have the unfortunate opportunity to shape societies and governments
around imaginary fears. As difficult as it can be, we need to know that it is
people that do all these things, the good and the bad, and Dargel’s music is an
example of the profound humanization that art can create.
He almost stole
the show. But then Le Train Bleu
closed with Michael Gordon’s Yo
Shakespeare, one of the most important works of music of the last
twenty years, and an extremely difficult one to play. It marks a pivot between
the final reach of Minimalism and what lies beyond, and it’s pretty much all
counterpoint and polyphony, fundamentals of music for six hundred years. The
harmonies are as basic as they come, the piece pushes at the confines of time
and pulse, the stuttering rhythmic lines and ostinatos laying down different
units and different pace, like a three- or four-sided push-me-pull-you. Wilson
and the ensemble played with precision and the right kind of tension, but there
was nothing tight about them, no struggling to count or hit the right notes. It
was, like everything else, played with the power of skill and the accumulated
weight of history.
______________________________________________________________________________
March
18th, 2012 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
The only complaint
I have about the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s second appearance at Galapagos is
pretty much the sames as I had for the first: more music, please!
It’s not much of a complaint, of course, it just means that things went so well
that everyone was left wanting more. As a preview of this Saturday’s Carnegie
Hall concert, they gave a single set of music from John Adams and Aaron
Copland, with Mandolinist Chris Thile improvising along with the band, wetting
the appetite for his Mandolin Concerto which will flesh out the bigger program.
The Adams’ was five excerpts from his “John’s Book of Alleged Dances,” for
string quartet and some pre-recorded audio accompaniment. This is Adams in his
guise of coyness, like “Gnarly Buttons” and his chamber symphonies, and this is
the weakest aspect of his musical personality. It balances what can be his
winningly naive sincerity and simplicity with a jokiness that both shies away
from critical thinking but also flirts with it, as long as it’s complimentary.
He uses prepared piano samples to build the kind of machine rhythms that scream
“John Cage!,” and vaguely hoe-downish string writing, with lots of open chords,
the bow before Copland. The problem with this is it’s neither Cage, nor does it
think critically about Copland, who must be dealt with critically (as you’ll
see below).
The Orpheus players were sincere, energetic and polished, they believe in the
music. In between, Thile improvised, and his playing was masterful. He
frequently opened up by playing back some of the core material from the “Dance”
that had just been played, developing his own ideas from there. At times he
stuck closely to the original material and, since that stuff is limited, backed
himself into some corners, a couple of which he couldn’t really get out of
except with the trick, possible in dreams, science fiction and improvisation,
of simply teleporting himself elsewhere. He’s impressive at building harmonic
structures, although he didn’t sell every modulation consistently. Where his
playing and thinking really blossomed was when he moved far afield, especially
in his last improvisation which began in querulous opposition from Adams and
proceeded down a transformative journey from agitation to a very complex and
moving sense of resignation and acceptance. Quite extraordinary.
Orpheus gave us Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” suite for chamber orchestra,
with no brass, the strings dominating in the bright acoustic of the club. It’s
one of the marvels of this country that a gay, Jewish, cosmopolitan composer
could create a sound that people think of as the classic musical definition of
America. Copland is the American composer, especially for people who don’t
listen to music without words and a beat. But does that make him any good? It’s
necessary to ask that question, rather than just accept the answer, and it
really does depend on perspective and mood. His music is sonically lovely and
the superficial affectlessness can at times open up moving emotional responses.
Then, at other times, it just sounds like superficial affectlessness, and a
pandering plunder of folk culture. Copland is important, and as a composer it’s
important for me to engage with his work. But, perhaps because of Thile’s
creative, personal musicianship, I was left with the feeling that Copland is a
fraud. He produced some viscerally strong modern music, like the “Piano
Variations,” then spun away his talent to sell his packaging. I admire the
son-of-a-bitch for his great and difficult rhythms — which Orpheus played with
great skill, as they did in handling the modulations of tempo — but later in
his career, when he delved into structured atonality, he had lost it, and the
music is dull and clumsy. Still, the playing was great, the group sold it, and
the effect on a packed house of hipsters was palpable. They wanted more, and so
did I.
______________________________________________________________________________
March
9th, 2012 - Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society with Anti-Social Music
They hate us
for our freedoms, they always have and they still do. Sure, there was a time
from the fall of 2001, running for perhaps six months, when that hatred was put
aside and replaced with a weird combination of sympathy, respect and the hero
worship of Rudy Giuliani. I give Rudy credit, as loathsome as he generally is:
while Bush the Dauphin was running scared across the country in search of clean
underwear, Rudy was getting in front of the television cameras, telling
everyone what he knew and keeping his shit together.
But Rudy wasn’t going to be around forever, there was an election that fall
that he ultimately couldn’t thwart. And after he left office, New York City
became, gradually, what it had always been to the people we’re supposed to have
contempt for: a place packed with people who aren’t white, aren’t Christian and
aren’t straight. They hate us, those people who came for the 2004 Republican
convention and their likes, just for that. Fundamentally they must hate us
because New York City is more American in theory and practice than anywhere
else in the country, those places where the rubes have the ignorant audacity,
encouraged by vicious narcissists like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and their
courtiers, a place where Mammon, the American god, is worshipped with more
depth, feeling and devotion, a place where the original European languages of
the country, Dutch and Spanish, are part of either the daily record or daily
life, and a place where the concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness are pursued with a vivacious contempt for the authoritarian and
anti-American strain that the Puritans brought over and that the scared and the
egomaniacal still grip tightly, sweaty palms to hyperventilating bosom.
That’s what I thought throughout the March 9 double-bill at Galapagos, the
absolutely apposite pairing of Anti Social Music and Darcy James Argue’s Secret
Society. If one of our current Savonarola’s had wandered in from the chill air,
to see the stage arrayed with a ramshackle collection of instruments, a bearded
and beanied hipster acting as MC, the socially-affirming cacophony of the
group. ASM is a new music ensemble that cultivates  much-needed dissonance,
rough and uneven form, and the simply musical act of playing music together
that is meant to find its way through tribulations, rather than to form itself
out of mechanical and repetitive means and development. Titles come and go, and
not all the composer’s were identified, but the group, which by now must have a
vast repertoire, showed its considerably fluid and jazzy side, the pieces tending
towards  more extended duration for them (meaning somewhere between the
Minutemen and a Schubert song).
The set opened with cellist Gil Selinger playing Eric Oxhorn’s “Solo for Gil
Selinger,” which explicitly starts out like a jazz solo, tossing out notes and
phrases, searching for the best material to work with. It’s surprisingly
diatonic for an AMS piece, lyrical and a pleasure. The expected raucousness
exploded soon after, in “With Pink Splashy Flowers,” and the group started to
sound like a big band, with hits of color, lyrical interludes and fascinatingly
odd harmonic progressions. There was an interrupted quality to the set at
first, the opening pieces were too pithy to support all the breaks for the MC’s
introductions, but once the band started into longer form works, and opening up
into real grooves and the powerful dark sound that was coming out of so many
low instruments (cello, baritone sax, trombone, tuba), the music was exciting
and mesmerizing. This was New York City music, the New York City of Fear’s “New
York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones,” (I do, Lee, and I like Fear too), the
kind of thing that I wish those who hate and fear us could hear, so they might
not hate and fear us, or at least, once and fucking for all, leave us alone. We
don’t need them.
Because we have Darcy James Argue, who is a New Yorker and not an American
citizen, and that’s what I’m talking about. Guns and religion aside, people
cling to their culture with desperate hands, trying to possess and commodify
something that’s nothing more than an idea. Even with the best intentions,
people try to protect and preserve culture by walling it off with artificial
restrictions. But culture is a living thing because it is ideas that are in the
minds and hearts of people all over the world, and the best way to protect and
preserve culture is to propagate it, spread that DNA promiscuously. Thanks to
this young Canadian, we have a whole new, and growing, conception about the
possibilities of jazz composition and an updating of the stale big-band sound.
Maybe that’s what makes him ‘Steampunk,’ he’s taken something relatively
old-fashioned and sieved it through techniques of structure, harmony and
especially pulse that come from Minimalism, Balkan wedding music, Debussy,
Mingus, Gerry Mulligan and George Russell.
He’s also reminding us about one of the greatest things American has ever
produced, jazz, so good thing he’s not French, or there would be no guarantee
for his safety anywhere outside the metropolitan areas of the ‘liberal enclaves’
more commonly known as cities. Argue has quickly made himself the kind of
artist who is beyond the typical review of quality of performance — you expect
him to be good and he and his band are never less than terrific — and belongs
to the area where the value lies in looking at how he does what he does. He
writes like the knowledgeable and skilled contemporary composer he is, while
producing music that is nothing but idiomatic jazz. It’s a rare combination.
The pleasure of his set, and it was the kind of driving, physical pleasure that
makes you feel like you can sprint out into the street and go running forever,
yelling in freedom and joy, was in hearing familiar music that, for the band,
has become so deeply ingrained in the way they play that the notes and bar
lines have been set aside for the music itself. You can hear their opener,
“Zeno,” on their great CD, but I never thought I would hear it with the pulse
pulling so strongly and smoothly in two different directions, a thrilling feat
of artistry. David T. Little was on hand to hear his piece “Conspiracy Theory,”
which the band debuted as part of last year’s Ecstatic Music Festival along
with Vijay Iyer’s “Three Fragments.” What a difference a year makes. The music
was fresh last year, and now has the power and swagger that comes from knowing
and understanding what the stuff is all about.
It’s the praxis of music-making that made Argue’s suite from his larger
Brooklyn Babylon, which premiered last fall at BAM, so strong. At the time,
Argue asked me if I thought the music would stand on its own, and I thought it
would, and now I’m even more convinced. The abstract narrative holds, and the
sound of the excerpts, divorced from the stimulation of the animated movie,
comes so firmly and creatively out of the engaged tradition of Charlie Haden’s
Liberation Music Orchestra that the exploration of humanity vs. the power of
political structures is, as sound alone, that much more direct, complex and
affecting. There’s something about being a composer, a serious composer, that
demands much more than coming up with a nice tune and a good set of chords: a
composer has to be able to creatively and effectively control their materials
and their ensembles, and Darcy James Argue does this with complete mastery. The
best set I’ve heard from the band live.
______________________________________________________________________________
1/14/12
– We’re Sittin’ In Galapagos
Charles
Ives Marathon Concert, presented by the Brooklyn Art Song Society
On a January
afternoon, the Brooklyn Art Song Society brought a marathon
concert of Charles
Ives‘ 114 Songs book to Galapagos. Concerts like this are almost
beyond criticism. On the one hand, there is Ives, who wrote many more than 114
songs (the number is the ones he collected personally for publication, hoping
the book would be given away free) and is the most important composer in
American music, and who still, still
is rarely heard in concert halls. So how can one find fault with something that
is good by its very existence?
On the other
hand, the marathon aspect itself almost obviates criticism: four plus hours of
music tends to dull the sense, and one is left with the impression of certain
moments in an overall pleasant bed of just hearing songs and singing. The
nature of the event meant that there was a revolving cast of singers, some of
them more aesthetically and technically comfortable with the material than
others — as was the case with the handful of accompanists playing the piano,
which itself inevitably drifted out of town, starting with a low D and heading
off from there.
114 songs
covering even more emotions. The set is a microcosm of Ives complex and
contradictory emotions, yawing from sentimental to irreverent, mystical to
commonplace, capable imitation Brahms to raucous, explosive Americana. His war
songs a typical in this: he hated America’s entry into the First World War, but
once the doughboys reached France, he was patriotic and sentimental about their
presence and lives. Bass-baritone Robert Osborne’s oracular style was excellent
in these, and also Ives’ adaptations of hymn tunes, which were particular humane
and moving. He, and some of the other singers, like Deborah van Renterghem,
Brandon Snook and Emily Riggs, succeeded or failed in this vastly varied music
depending on the style, and perhaps on rehearsal time, as some of the interplay
with accompanists Marc Peloquin, Michael Rose, Miori Sugiyama and Michael
Brofman souded shaky.
The complete,
unadulterated high points of the afternoon were the appearances of a couple of
‘ringers, soprano Mary Nessinger and tenor Paul Sperry.
Nessinger is one of the better singers around in late Romantic and 20th century
repertoire, and her beautiful, powerful voice came out with an ease of sound
and expression that demonstrated her command of both the notes and the meaning
of the music. Her set was on an entirely different level than the rest of the
performances, and she had some of the finest material to work with as well,
including “The Childrens’ Hour,” absolutely superb here, and “The Housatonic at
Stockbridge,” which is the Rosetta Stone into Ives’ aesthetic.
Sperry is one
of the most experienced Ives’ singers alive, and although he is no longer a
young man and has lost a lot of his voice, he is an astonishingly confident,
inventive and expressive performer. That he came stomping out of the bar,
singing and whistling “Memories,” his opener, was the least of his ideas. Not
all these songs call for beauty, and a lot of the harmonies and rhythms work
against traditional art song singing. But in the hands of Sperry, densely
complex and difficult pieces like “The Cage” and “Like a Sick Eagle” sounded
exact, supple, lived-in and true to the composer’s intentions. His performance
of the cowboy song “Charlie Rutlage,” was a tour de force, deliberately
indulging in Ives’ sentimental bullshit in a way that was both sincere and
mocking. Where Thomas Hampson, beautifully, emphasizes the virility of the
music, Sperry seemed to look back at the great man, loving him but shaking his
head ruefully at his faults, the things he should have known better. The few
minutes of “Charlie Rutlage” were a universe of the greatness that music can
achieve.
Discography
For most of
Ives’ music, and all of his songs, start with Naxos
______________________________________________________________________________
11/21/11
– Ancient to the Future
New
Amsterdam double record release event – Gregory Spears and John Spuko
The ancient and
the modern are not so far apart. We don’t get to see the juxtaposition in New
York except in the artificial environment of an art museum, where a
well-dressed patron can just about brush up against an artifact from a
mysterious time and place. But got to a city like Rome, and you see them side
by side and on top of each other.
Where we can
experience this pairing most frequently is in music. Music is always casting
back to the past for renewal and inspiration, especially classical music, which
has done this every generation since Bach. The new music that happens around us
is often hard to separate from the newness of the times and of sensation, but
old ideas have been finding their way into new music more since the end of
World War I than in any other extended period in history. Even Steve Reich
likes to say that he got his harmony from the 12th century composer Perotin,
That points out
a persistent strain that began with Stravinsky, of shading towards a certain
leanness, even austerity, along with a sense of rhythmic precision and
exactitude. It was showcased at a New
Amsterdam release event, on Galapagos’ austere cement
stage, surrounded by water, which added an appropriate sense of remoteness. The
musicians led by composer Gregory Spears in his Requiem, and the duo Due East,
performed music that reaches out to the listener even as it explores internal
depths with a sense of meditative and private austerity that belies its era.
Spears’ piece
is luminous as well as austere, enthralling and lovely in the manner of Arvo
Pärt, but with his own musical language, which features a freer sense of
counterpoint and an interest in more complex harmonies. He hints at ideas of
Renaissance polyphony, especially in the “Agnus Dei,” but keeps the structures
and development effectively succinct, choosing the narrative of sorrow and
redemption over the metaphysical seductions of conversion and faith. It is
a Requiem both in text
and form, working its way from darkness to light, offering respect for the dead
and solace to the living.
John Supko’s
“Littoral,” which Due East played after intermission, takes the old and the
new, stretches them even further away from each other, and then brings them
back together via a long form video from Kristine Marx. The music shimmers,
twitters, chimes, floats along like a bottle tossed on the lapping waves in the
video, before gently bursting into periods of high activity. it’s like
listening to a manifestation of the properties of light, waves of sounding
containing particles of notes, rhythms and color that act against and react to
— and work with — each other. The moments cohere into a rolling, light-footed
groove, adding momentum to the pure sonic pleasure of the piece. Where Requiem is concrete, this piece is
abstract, yet clearly has the form of a journey as well, though this one seems
less from one point or state to another but rather around something,
considering it, curious, pondering, before moving on to the next moment, the
next surprise. A truly timeless evening of music, in the ancient sense before
we became slaves to the clock, and the modern one, where we find our freedom
when we can.
Discography
Gregory
Spears, Requiem
______________________________________________________________________________
11/20/11
– What you get when an orchestra walks into a bar
Orpheus
Chamber Orchestra, featuring Gabriel Kahane
If it seems
almost old-hat now in New York City to head out at night to a place like
Galapagos, sit at a table, order a drink and experience live classical music,
then that’s as it should be. The predominant protocol of classical
concert-going calls for spiffy dress, silence during the performance and
frequent moments of wondering when to applaud, and is it okay to yell and
whistle?
It’s not a bad
thing to look good and pay attention and respect the music, of course, but the
ceremonial and social mysteries are things that keep a lot of people who are
interested in classical music but intimidated by the details of the experience
out of the concert hall. It’s also ahistorical; concerts prior to the rise of
the mass bourgeoisie were long and frequently raucous affairs, with people
coming and going, eating and drinking. The cheap seats were in what is now
usually the orchestra section — premium prices — and the swells sat in the
rising tiers where they could chat, socialize and flirt. So having a drink,
chatting with your friends, these are old-fashioned comforts.
It’s really
old-hat, and it’s a natural. What’s been missing, though, is more old-hat
music. If Matt
Haimovitz could make a name for himself by playing the Bach Cello Suites in bars across the
country, then audiences at Galapagos and Le Poisson Rouge can handle more of
that, the classics on which contemporary music stands. So I was especially
intrigued to hear the great Orpheus Chamber Orchestra playing at
Galapagos, in my first ‘gig’ as the club’s Critic-in-Residence. Orpheus,
working beautifully together without a conductor, is one of the finest
orchestras in New York. With that a sense of excitement, I try not to
expect any quality in particular, so it was a thrill to find that Orpheus fits
Galapagos perfectly, sounding better there than I’ve heard them at Carnegie
Hall or up close in rehearsal. Sharing a bill with the singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane,
they seemed more at home in a venue that pours booze and hosts a burlesque
cabaret.
Blame it on the music, and also their good taste and musical skill.
Orpheus is a small orchestra because they need to work together and hear
each other, which means they can fit on a smaller stage and the music
they play, suitable for a chamber orchestra, fits in a nightclub. The
Hindemith Kammermusk No. 1 was a brilliant choice, and
brilliantly played. Hindemith is a composer I usually admire more than I
enjoy. So much of his work seems to be demonstrating his considerable
craft, knowledge and musicianship, without seeming to be necessary, i.e.
something that had to have been put into music, rather than some other
medium or form. But on the small stage, Orpheus injected the piece with
tremendous life and wit, it sounded like the cabaret piece it is
supposed to be, sophisticated and cheeky at the same time. As I’ve
thought about the performance, it strikes me that the venue had
everything to do with this. I’ve seen the group in Carnegie Hall many
times, and the Hindemith would have been too small a work for that large
a hall, while in Galapagos the scope of the music fit the size of the
stage, and rather than just admire Hindemith, we could really enjoy him,
because the musicians were enjoying him so much, and playing his work
with such skill and verve.
It was such a success that I’d like to hear them do an entire
concert hall program in the space, which could easily handle Haydn,
Mozart and earlier Beethoven, Stravinsky, the music of Les Sixes, Paul Moravec’s
chamber works and more. Instead, Hindemith was followed by Kahane, with
the local premiere of his “Orinoco Sketches” and a showcase for his
recent album, Where are the Arms.
Kahane is one of the more talented members of the current generation of
musicians who are straddling the pop and contemporary classical worlds
and, like the rest, he doesn’t have the balance entirely set. He sings,
plays guitar and piano, and writes songs, and the last is the key. The
“Sketches,” for a singer and chamber group, has strong vocal writing and
is expressive, but the orchestra is under-utilized. The forms,
structures, harmonies and rhythms could be more complex, and the
aesthetic context of classical music means that ideas can be extended,
developed out to durations akin to prog-rock, or beyond. There’s a lot
of good material that could be played with more, worked at and extended.
Instead, the piece comes off as short, enjoyable pop style music with
small orchestra accompaniment.
Meaning it’s a lot like Where are the Arms. For this set,
where he played all the material from the record but in a different
sequence, the stage seemed too small. The disc was one of the best pop
records of 2011 and is great, full of expansive sounds and emotions.
It’s intimate music that could fill an arena, and Galapagos is just too
small for it. Kahane has a lot of charm as a performer, and is a fine
singer. The music songs have a sweet, slightly self-conscious sadness
about them that was belied by Kahane’s banter from the stage and the
general good-natured doings with the orchestra and the audience. Not a
bad thing at all, but it had the unexpected effect of avoiding the heart
of power in the record.
Not every piece and kind of music is mean for all possible places,
and one of the effects of decades of recordings studios as process sites
is that a lot of pop records are made for the disc, for the home
speakers, for the headphones and ear-buds. They have an implicit
intimacy that is tricky to reproduce live. Where are the Arms
seems like it would sound best, live, with just Kahane and piano, even
in a big room, the musician and instrument forcing a quiet and focussed
concentration. Hindemith, on the other hand, who so often seems best for
dry, private study is perfect in a nightclub. As is Orpheus. They are reappearing March 18, with Chris Thile.
