Pulse

JHLE from the Inside

So, as requested, I'm posting to share a little of my experience conducting the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble this past weekend at the Kitchen.

Working with John has always been inspiring. I feel I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time to get the gig in the first place. I've learned a lot about music, freedom, rhythm, rehearsing, and really what I'm capable of as a conductor, of which I never really dreamed I'd be doing a significant amount. John's music is incredibly difficult both execution-wise and especially conceptually, but somehow rehearsals (and the recording) never seem to get very tense. He always manages to crack a joke or lighten the mood or change directions at the perfect time to keep things relaxed. This is also made possible by the incredible professionalism, patience, and sense of humor of the band members.

First of all, the Kitchen is a really a great space, if you've never been there. The sound guys did a great job. Everything sounded very acoustic, even though it was coming through the system.

To talk about the concert itself, let me start by saying that the opening lyrical piece, "The Shape of Spirit," actually has sections that both John and I conduct different tempos simultaneously. (It feels pretty cool to have both of us up there at the same time). The piece ends with a beautiful, soaring melody played my several players, but most notably to me one of my favorite musicians in NYC, Dan Willis on an unbelievably sweet and moving soprano sax.

"rain and grace (like Gandhi)" is a perfect example of Hollenbeck's rhythmic mastery and concepts. He transcribed the sound/rhythm of falling rain and gave those extended and overlapping rhythmic patterns to the ensemble to play. These rhythmic sections are interspersed with gradually longer lush "graceful" sections until the end in which a recording of the rhythmic rain is played over the PA and the musicians play along. (For the record, John & I had headphones on during this section, but we only had a louder version of the rain recording, NOT a click track.)

We had an "optional intermission" in which folks were encouraged to treat as a normal intermission (get up, walk around, chat, etc.) even though for most of the time various groups on the ensemble were improvising to a melodic line that John provided. This line foreshadowed and eventually evolved into the Kitchen commission premiere of "Long Swing Dream," a simple walking piece that represented a dream he had about writing a piece.

He surprised me at the rehearsal on Thursday by pulling out one of my favorites pieces of his, "Weiji (Danger & Opportunity)." This is the only piece we performed at the Kitchen that is on his Grammy nominated CD, "A Blessing." It's incredibly exciting, mainly due to the intense rhythmic pattern the piece is based on, but also because of the scintillating improvising of the featured soloists: Dave Ballou, Charlie Pillow, and Ben Kono.

To me, the performance appropriately culminated in Processional/Desiderata which he wrote for a very important person in his life (and mine), Bob Brookmeyer. This is a piece that some have issue with, mainly due to the well known Max Ehrmann text, but this piece has deep meaning to me . . . partially because of that fact alone. One of the great things I so admire about John is his complete disregard for expectation. This text and its connection to how he feels about Brookmeyer overrode any thoughts of listeners thinking that text choice would be cheesy or inappropriate. He sees Bob as the caring provider of wisdom to so many of us evolving musicians (as do I), and to him this text closely represents this role. Since the first time I heard this piece (Brookmeyer proudly played it for me), I have been deeply affected by it, so it's a little tricky for me to not get too emotionally involved while conducting the piece, especially the end where, on the recording, Brookmeyer's booming, fatherly voice (portrayed on the concert by Theo Bleckmann) is heard simultaneously with his majestic trombone sound (Jacob Garchik at the Kitchen).

I heard many great comments from audience members, even from folks I didn't expect would dig it. Of course I also heard someone say that it was the most pretentious thing he'd ever heard. Well, that's Hollenbeck's music. Sometimes he's hard to "get," but when you do, it can be an incredibly moving experience (sorry, just a little subjective opinion).

Thieves in the temple

For some bizarre reason, Theodor Adorno's name seems to be coming up a lot in conversation lately. Stranger still, he seems to have a lot of unlikely defenders, including Robin Varghese of 3 Quarks Daily and saxophonist Josh Rutner.

My position on Adorno is pretty simple -- I think he's an insufferable wanker whose toxic influence on music and music cricitism lingers still. I highly recommend this very sharp, entertaining piece by Alex Ross (originally published 2003). Ross harbors considerably more sympathy for the guy than I do, but nevertheless cuts to to the heart of the matter.

[xposted at Secret Society]

More Tunes the Young People Will Enjoy

Jerry Bowles of Sequenza21 has a great writeup of the Thursday night Alarm Will Sound gig. His focus is on how their presentation of the music makes what they play more comprehensible for a younger audience, one that is often turned off by the ritualistic Temple of Art pretentions of classical concertgoing:

We have had lengthy discussions in the Composers Forum about the importance of venue in attracting audiences for postclassic music, especially the relative merits of clubs versus concert halls, but neither is exactly perfect. Most young people find the notion of going to sit quietly for two hours in a darkened room with a bunch of strangers staring at people in black outfits blowing into horns and hacking away at fiddles to be not only some kind of archaic ritual, but downright punitive. This is SERIOUS MUSIC, children. Pay attention.

[...]

What Alan Pierson and his talented Alarm Will Sound crew proved on Friday was that it is possible to reach a concert hall audience on both a visceral as well as intellectual level and to tap into some of the strengths of both worlds. In the process, they offered some valuable insights into how to stage a compelling new music concert.

[Jerry also very kindly links to my own review of the AWS gig.]

This also reminds me of some of Greg Sandow's excellent posts on the Youth Problem in classical music:

Younger people are critical, and prone to irony. They see through hype and bullshit. Which, I'm afraid, in classical music means that they'll have no patience with pious talk about great masterpieces. They want to know what's really going on.

They may not respond to romantic music. Though of course some of them will. But the sweep and passion of 19th century classical music, which some people might assume to be a selling point, will make many younger people think they're hearing a cheesy movie score. The movie score, of course, is very likely a knockoff of romantic classical works, but this new, younger audience doesn't know that, and "cheesy movie score" may well be their first association when they hear Tchaikovsky.

They don't plan their lives around what I might call "appointment events," adapting that term from a marvelous expression I ran across in discussions of new trends in television: "appointment TV." Appointment TV is the old watch-it-when-they-broadcast it paradigm, according to which you're stuck watching shows when the networks put them on. Thanks to TIVO, and now video downloads from iTunes and other sites, you can watch many shows whenever you like. The parallel development for the performing arts is that people don't leave work at 5 PM, go home, have dinner, and then head out the door for an 8 PM concert. They leave work at 3 PM or 8:30, make time for the gym or rides on their mountain bikes, and may well head out of the house at 9. Then they might well look for something going on in a neighborhood full of clubs and other street-level places that you can walk in and out of ad lib. The classical concert hall, most obviously, doesn't work like that at all, which from a younger person's point of view might well make it too rigid to be an attractive night-life option.

Greg also posts some on-point criticism from a young music student in Missouri:

May I just add to the list that a lot of younger people find the whole classical music scene hugely pretentious, in ways that those of us inside the circle may not even think about? I took my sister, who is really just a huge music fan and goes to a TON of non-classical concerts, to a SLSO [St. Louis Symphony] concert not too long ago. At the end of the concert, the conductor and soloists came took their bows, left, and came back to take another bow. She leaned over to me and said, "Cool -- are they going to play some more?" I told her no, orchestras being practically forbidden to do encores by union rules. And she said, "Oh, so they're just coming back out because they're full of themselves." And, honestly, I was a little shocked by the comment, because, of course, in Classical Music World, we see the bow in a completely different light -- a gesture of appreciation to the audience, respect for the music we've played, etc. I hadn't even considered how pretentious it might look!

[xposted at Secret Society]

John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble @ The Kitchen

Just back from John Hollenbeck's debut at The Kitchen... I will be brief, as I'm hoping to entice JC to blog a little about his experience conducting this band. But I definintely recommend checking it out tonight if you missed it on Friday (especially since tickets are a mere $10) -- lots of enticing new material, including a (suprisingly) lyrical, chorale-like opening work, and the usual array of superb players, including vibraphonist Matt Moran, pianist Kris Davis, and trumpeter Shane Endsley. (At the post-gig hang, Shane also demonstrated his unstoppable hot-wax fighting style, incurring only minor property damage.)

[xposted at Secret Society]

Alarm Will Sound @ Zankel Hall, 16 Feb

Alarm Will Sound is a 20-piece chamber orchestra new music ensemble band which boasts an enviable critical and popular reputation -- the New York Times called them "the future of classical music," fercrissakes. They are very important to us here at Pulse -- in fact, they were one of the bands Joe had in mind when he first proposed this merry composers' federation.

Last night, they made their (sold-out) debut at Carnegie's Zankel Hall with a program called "Odd Couples," which paired works by composers who share a personal connection but represent very different styles:

Edgar Varèse - Frank Zappa
John Cage - John Cale
Bernard Woma - Derek Bermel
Wolfgang Rihm - John Adams

All of the music was accompanied by projections on the screen behind the band, announcing the pieces and occasionally supplying quotes, photographs, graphics, etc. Purists will no doubt cringe, but I thought these were mostly -- with one notable exception (see below) -- effective and unobtrusive.

The gig kicked off with Zappa's Dog Breath Variations/Uncle Meat, in a similar arrangement to the one used on the Ensemble Moderne's The Yellow Shark. Performers walked on stage only as required, and the brass made their initial entrances from opposite sides of Zankel's two-tiered balcony, giving a very effective antiphonal (3D surround-sound) effect. Dog/Meat features a lot of brief solos and solis, which gave most of the members of ALS a chance to introduce themselves -- in fact, the players were in constant circulation throughout the piece, moving to center stage when needed, and retreating as necessary. Of course, this meant everyone had to play from memory. Definitely a dramatic, engaging set-opener.

Next was Cage's 0'00" -- a followup to the infamous 4'33", written ten years prior. The score for 0'00" (which actually lasts for an undetermined length of time) consists of the following sentence:

"In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action."

As it turned out, the "disciplined action" consisted of the members of AWS reconfiguring the stage for the next piece -- a parodically stylized and choreographed moving of instruments, chairs, music stands, etc, the sounds amplified out of all proportion by the floor mics. The piece's end was signaled by a sudden change in lighting.

Next, Ghanian gyil master Bernard Woma contributed a Brazillian-inflected piece called Gyil Mambo, in a colorful and effective arrangement by one of Woma's students and collaborators, David Rogers. As you might imagine, this piece featured AWS's killing percussion section -- Dennis DeSantis, Payton MacDonald, and Peter Wise -- offering up a credible, hard-grooving Brazillian mambo. I did wish the winds could have played a bit less on top of the beat, but that's a relatively minor quibble -- this was an infectiously joyful rendition of Woma's work, and the composer himself seemed quite pleased with how it turned out.

The one premiere last night came courtesy of German composer Wolfgang Rihm, who was quoted (in the projected slides) as saying "I am very excited to write for your crazy ensemble." Will Sound is an expressionist sound-painting via Jackson Pollack, a showcase for AWS's cohesive ensemble sound and Alan Pierson's amazing conducting chops. (Man, I gotta get a lesson with this guy... )

AWS closed the first set with a piece by another Woma student/collaborator, Derek Bermel. Three Rivers is a metametric-influenced piece which incorporates three distinct rhythmic currents -- sometimes discretely, and sometimes in combination. It's a very attractive composition, beginning with swing brushes on the drum kit and syncopated grungy Mingusian figures in the low winds and strings. I liked this piece a lot, and the performance was impressive.

But... well, okay, please indluge me in a little digression:

There are actually a lot of classically-trained musicians who have a deep and sincere love of jazz, but nonetheless can't swing from a rope. This is understandable. Swing is hard enough to grok for jazz players of my generation, who didn't grow up with Basie and Lunceford and Henderson on the radio every night, didn't come of age in an era where all popular music was saturated with swing figures, have no intuitive understanding of the hugely significant regional differences in swing feels -- Kansas City swing vs. Detroit swing, and so on.

Now, plenty of professional jazz musicians -- including a number of big names, coming soon to a jazz festival near you -- have no concept of swing to speak of. So it's a bit much to expect most classically-trained musicians to master an elusive time feel that isn't anywhere near as central to their repertoire as it is to ours.

On the other hand, I still have nightmares about some of the nauseatingly misguided performances I've heard of pieces like Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs or (more seriously), Kleiner blauer Teufel from Gunther Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. Now, I certainly don't mean to suggest that the AWS rendition of Three Rivers was anything like the cringe-inducing performances of which I speak. Far from it -- in fact, Dennis DeSantis's drumming and Miles Brown's pizz bass playing are both eminently credible. I would even say that AWS swings harder than any classical ensemble I've heard (and I apologize if that sounds like damning with faint praise).

However... look, I know there's nothing cheaper than free advice, but allow me to tender a suggestion that comes straight from Bob Brookmeyer, who, uh, knows whereof he speaks. The trick to swing phrasing in a large ensemble is to understand the difference between anticipations (i.e., offbeat eighth notes tied over, or followed by a rest) and consecutive eighth notes. Anticipations are always played late, on the back side of the third triplet. AWS are actually pretty good on the anticipations. Where they fall down is on the consecutive eighth notes, which are much straighter than you'd think. In fact, why not try playing them perfectly straight, but with a slight tongue (/bow) accent on the offbeats? There are worse places to start.

[Obviously, this maxim doesn't apply to skip beats on the ride cymbal or in bass lines -- that's an entirely different thing.]

Moving on... the second set opened with Varèse's Intégrales, done in an even more aggressively antiphonal style -- the performers circulated up and down the aisles, took up strategic positions on the balconies, and were constantly reconfiguring themselves even while on stage. By necessity, Alan Pierson conducted from the middle of the audience -- and, like the first-set opener, this work was necessarily done almost entirely from memory.

All of this might have seemed a wee bit mannered and pretentious if the performance fell short in any way... but it didn't. In fact, this was, hands-down, the most astonishing rendition of Varèse I have ever heard.

Integrales was definitely the highlight of the evening -- it was the piece everyone kept gushing about after the gig -- so it seems almost churlish for me to mention the projection of a stupid, casually misogynistic Zappa quote during the piece (something to the effect of "I'd put a piece by Varèse on and it would drive away all the girls and the stupid boys -- the rest, you could have a conversation with").  But sorry, it pissed me off and took me momentarily out of the piece -- especially since there are plenty of non-idiotic Zappa-on-Varèse quotes that could have gone in its place.

The second Cage piece on the program, Variations III, was another furniture-moving piece, this time with more improvisatory choreography. As the program says, "the score consists simply of a series of transparencies with markings on them, which are then dropped onto a blank sheet of paper by potential performers, who interpret the resulting marks whichever way they desire." There was a cute bit with Alan Pierson (still seated in the audience at this point, remember), asking his neighbors if he might borrow their program, using any word order except the normal one -- and then reading every nth word from the program notes. However, the collective stagehands-with-OCD routine evntually wore thin -- and honestly, with all the kabuki-hubub on stage, I found it very difficult to even try to perceive this as a work in and of itself.

Next up was Dennis DeSantis's arrangement of John Cale's 1994 soundtrack for Andy Warhol's 1963 short film Kiss -- which, for those of you who haven't seen it, is exactly what you would expect if someone told you Andy Warhol made a film called Kiss. The music was stripped-down and minimal, with beautiful wordless vocals by Courtney Orlando, and a searing improvised violin solo at the end from Caleb Burhans.

Burhans also arranged the last piece on the program, John Adams's "Coast," from the composer's 1993 synth record Hoodoo Zephyr. Despite some sound problems with the electric bass and keyboards, this was a hugely satisfying and energetic finale, a cascade of accumulated polyrhythms and asynchronous bliss.

The crowd insisted on an encore, which turned out to be Cock/Ver10, the first track from AWS's latest record, Acoustica -- a curious collection of Aphex Twin covers. Alarm Will Sound is the rare classical group with the rhythmic authority to credibly tackle the breakbeat canon, and it was immensely satisfying to hear the live version of this track. Acoustica might sound like a bit of a gimmick -- and, to be fair, it is, kinda -- but the inventive arrangements and aggressive recontextualization suggest subtle and musically meaningful parallels between recent trends in Downtown metametricism and the 1990's English ambient scene.

Bottom line: a inspired and inspiring night from a brilliant group. I can't wait for the next one.

UPDATE: Arthur S. Leonard comments as well.

random Saturday am thoughts...

I like sports.

I play Ultimate Frisbee every Saturday in Central Park and I’ve followed the NFL closely since 1971 and MLB (albeit less closely) since then too. When people ask me “what are you listening to?” I can honestly say WFAN - Mike and the Mad Dog.”

I’m tired of it… not the Ultimate part (I’ll be out there tomorrow) but the professional sports league part. Between steroids and the lousy superbowl (does anyone really believe the Pittsburgh Steelers were the best team in the NFL this year?) I think I’m over my youthful nostalgia for all things athletic.

Not to say that I didn’t learn a few musical things along the way – those NFL Films “shorts” of various early superbowl highlights and weekly game re-caps, with amazing music written by someone named Sam Spence, are among my earliest musical influences.

I like to think that, as the “product” of the professional sports leagues gets watered-down, either by labor strife, corruption or just plain incompetence, some of the audience looking for “true human excellence” will turn to the arts. After all, no amount of steroids can make you play “Giant Steps” faster than Coltrane or compose more thoughtfully than Bach.

Just a wish on my part…

So I won a Jazz Grammy?!

An interesting (and a bit depressing) LA TIMES article about the comparative irrelevance of a large ensemble jazz Grammy versus the Pop, Rock, R&B, Country categories. Even for 2006 winner Dave Holland and our friend John Hollenbeck, who was also nominated this year, a Grammy doesn't translate to more money, but perhaps it does help a bit with prestige, whether you win or not. As Hollenbeck says in the article, the Grammy nomination has helped open a few more doors (and ears) for him that otherwise would have been closed. In leading a large jazz ensemble, it is good to just be nominated...a problem, I think, someday would be nice to contend with...

Joe

McNeil NY Times Review

Hey all. This is a little dated, but I wanted to make you aware of this John McNeil review that was recently in the New York Times. It's for his record "East Coast Cool" with another one of my mentors, Allan Chase. John has always described this project (which he's plotted for years now) as "Chet & Gerry on Acid." 

John is also, of course, Pulse's collaborator on the "Eloquent Light" project.  He's an incredibly underappreciated, underrecognized original artist, so It's nice to see him start to get some props!
He'll be performing with the group at Cornelia St. Cafe in late March (with another important guy, John Hollenbeck, on drums), so stay tuned. We'll keep you posted.

New Music, Golijov, and Mellits

Here are a few very interesting discussions on new music: about uptown versus downtown and about attracting a broader audience to new music. Both I think are quite relevant to what Pulse is about. Also last Friday's Soundcheck program on WNYC radio here in NYC (one of my favorite programs) had host John Schaefer interviewing composers Osvaldo Golijov (a good discussion about new music in general as well as Golijov's own approach) and Marc Mellits.

Good listening.

Joe