“The Met made the evening news.” Indeed it did, in the only way anything in the high arts could make the evening news, by becoming juicy gossip. The story is that the audience booed the opening night production of “Tosca.” Please note, they booed the production, not the singers or musicians.
The new Met director, Peter Gelb, is on the record as wanting to bring in new audiences to the opera house, and his means for doing so seem to be a combination of creating new productions of standard works and commissioning new operas. I am in complete sympathy with his means and goals, but fundamentally the results, as Alex Ross points out, need to be good. The boos had nothing to do with the quality of the performance, however, and so I’m actually glad they came.
I have not seen the production yet, but reliablecritics have weighed in on the musical shortcomings, as well as those of the stage sets and direction. The tell is that the singers got the usual ovation, and that’s the problem Gelb, hopefully, is working to solve. He will ideally save opera from its fans.
Opera is sung drama, with music which tells us about the characters and the overall story. The characters sing because they can find no other way to express themselves, and the singing and music tell us about what is going on inside them, especially the things they themselves are unaware. The use of music gives opera a dimension no other medium has, not even film, in that the drama can run on separate, parallel tracks and still be together and mutually supportive in real time. The great example of this is the quartet from “Fidelio,” Mir ist so wunderbar, where the four characters privately sing about each other, and do so in simultaneous consort. Nothing else in human culture can express something so indescribably complex in a way that is immediately transparent and apprehensible.
Too many opera fans miss this drama, though, and think of opera as a collection of arias to be followed immediately by applause, not for the character or the music, but for the star diva/divo, “Brava Angela,” rather than “Brava Violetta.” Verdi, however, did not write arias to display a star, but to allow Violetta to reveal herself to us. When the experience of this dramatic characterization is so overwhelming that the audience must respond, then by all means, allow me to join in (there is a live recording of “Fidelio” which is so overpowering that the audience overwhelms the finale with deserved, passionate shouts and applause), but attending opera just to gush over a particular star does not indicate an actual appreciation of the form or the work. Same for accepting the most literal production and nothing else. By all means, again, boo a lousy production – I have – but also boo a lousy performance – I have – even if it’s by a star whose name is up there in lights.
I’m encouraged by the booing in this sense, that if Gelb manages to drive away the type of audience that sleeps or chats through most of the production, only to perk up for the obligatory applause after Vissi d’arte, then he will have made the Met culturally relevant by replacing them with audiences interested in the drama, and in what the production says about the drama. The idea that the drama is important should be implicit, but that’s rarely the case in the greatest hits parade of decrepit warhorses like “Tosca” which burdens most opera houses. I think the future is exciting for the Met, and they have already brought in new audiences with “Satyagraha” and “Doctor Atomic.” They should be able to keep that new audience, and gain more, by making the standard repertory something that matters, and the fact that it still exists means it does indeed matter. Treating it as such means that some productions will fail, but nothing ventured nothing gain. Bring us more things to boo, please, Mr. Gelb.
Sorry, Louie, but it must be asked; if it ain’t got that swing, is it still jazz? Yes, indeed it is. And it does mean a thing.
Think of jazz, the complete body of history and knowledge, as a set of quanta; styles, musicians, concerts, albums and writings, then find a way to plot those quanta in a chart. For example, plot an X-axis of the evolution of jazz styles through time, and then place the number of albums issued in each style on the Y-axis, and you’ll get a distribution something like this:
It’s rough, it’s generalized, but it illustrates the point I want to make, which is that jazz styles are distributed along a bell curve, with the styles that have had the longest history of propagation enjoying the greatest general success and thereby moving the bulk of the curve in one direction or another. This is an important way to look at jazz, because it’s a unique musical concept; it’s a social music which seeks a popular and (originally) dance-based audience, it’s a music which develops knowledge about what it can possibly do and keeps expanding and moving that forward through time, and it is a music the relies on improvisation for its existence and continued development. There are other musics around the world that have these characteristics, but no other which combines all three.
There’s a feedback loop built into that curve as well. Styles that musicians find the most attractive and fruitful will be played and produced more commonly (jazz is unpopular enough that musicians are still relatively unfettered to make music in the style they desire). Hard-Bop, arguably, is the most frequently produced style in jazz since it’s the most appealing to other musicians, and it certainly is the lingua franca, idiomatically, of the music since the mid-1950s. But jazz-rock and free styles have been hanging in there gamely over the last forty years, and enough musicians respond with their own variations of those styles to move the distribution along the curve forward through time. Of course, if a massive revival of Dixieland and Traditional styles happened and lasted for a century, the distribution would be moved back towards the left. It’s the styles at the edges that make the mainstream body of the music, and the mainstream idea of what that music is, move through tastes and concepts.
So, if it doesn’t swing, is it still jazz? Yes, indeed it is, it’s jazz to the right on the chart. But if it doesn’t swing, what elements does it have which identify it as jazz? This is an important and arguable question, and for the sake of this particular essay I define jazz in two inseparable ways; as a music with particular qualities and as a cultural concept. Jazz is a music which expresses an idea of rhythmic freedom within the limits of the rhythmic quality it presents, and which, through improvisation, allows for the possible expression of anything. Culturally, jazz is music created by racial and ethnic minorities as a way to place a sincere claim on American ideals and nationality and through which generations of new ethnic and racial minorities have assimilated into American culture and added their own voices to it (that is, until this past generation or so, which has used Hip-Hop as such a vehicle, an interesting story of Modernism vis-a-vis Post-Modernism which will need to be saved for the future).
Culturally, this story is pretty clear. Jazz began as a mixture of African-American work and worship songs, Spanish and French popular and dance music, and white marches, and was developed as an enduring music mainly by Blacks, Italians and Jews through the first half of the twentieth century. Musically, this definition requires refinement. “Swing” was created in jazz, but jazz itself didn’t swing for a decade at least. The earliest recordings of the music, from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to King Oliver and even to Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton and Fletcher Henderson have tremendous rhythmic drive and life, and are certainly not stiff, but the beat is not yet what we think of as a jazz beat, that’s not there yet. What is there is the clear desire to lay down a tempo and a beat and then see how far it could be pushed and pulled away from the center while sill being coherent. It was a process of experimentation which arrived at “Swing,” like science develops theories from evidence. But once swing as a rhythm appeared, it was subject to the further experimentation of Be-Bop, which itself doesn’t swing in the classic sense (it’s almost too fast to swing) but still seeks rhythmic freedom (and led inevitably to free jazz). Hard-Bop swings fiercely, it reclaims that idea, but by mixing in flavors of funk and R&B it points the way towards jazz-rock, which doesn’t swing either.
This history of jazz shows that the rhythmic element of swing is secondary to the articulation of sounds, which is what really makes jazz sound like jazz. It’s the way a player attacks and shapes notes, independently and in relation to the other notes in a melodic phrase, improvised solo, and even walking bass line. While every player has a personal approach to articulation (compare the way Coltrane and Sonny Rollins begin the production of each note on ‘Tenor Madness’ for a good contrast), there is a combination of elements that makes a certain way of playing music into jazz; a vocalized approach to making notes, meaning a variation in the dynamics, inflection and shape of the beginning of each one; a rhythmic articulation that goes hand in hand with the vocalized one in that a line or set of chords has a rhythmic emphasis that the articulation conveys and reinforces; and a consistent placement against the prevailing beat, whether that may be playing in tempo slightly ahead of the beat, like Dizzy Gillespie, or doing the same well behind the beat, a laDexter Gordon. This is a way to make music that is absolutely jazz even as it’s played over a straight eighth note beat – Dave Holland’s contemporary Quintet is strictly jazz over mainly rock and funk grooves – and separates the vocalized, jazz articulation of John Scofield from the more uniform attack and metronomic precision of Al DiMeola, who is playing rock guitar, not jazz, on those Return to Forever records.
Just as swing is actually not an essential feature of jazz, the same is (counterintuitively) true for improvisation; not all jazz is improvised. This is heard across the decades, whether it’s the ODJB or Stan Kenton or Mingus, but many of the non-improvised records were developed through improvising parts before the music was felt ready, and all the music retains the possibility of improvisation as an essential part of its aesthetic. It’s the difference between a rock group improvising riffs and putting together a song, then recreating that finished result again and again, and a jazz group doing the same and then building more improvisation in repeated live performances.
The fundamental idea is that jazz advances. Like a living person, it explores, learns, masters and grows. What is possible now is so because previous generations of musicians accumulated a body of knowledge which supports each new generation. A handful of jazz releases, most new (with one new to me), which swing hardly at all, demonstrate a broad and exciting range of possibilities and are all definitely jazz.
Paul Motian has been one of the great and most unique drummers in jazz for many decades. As he nears 80 years of age he continues to produce records which explore what is possible in the music and what is possible for himself as a musician. His new release on the Winter & Winter label is his fifth CD exploring “standard” American songs, his On Broadway series. The first three in the series were issued on JMT records from the late 1980s to early mid 1990s (now reissued on Winter & Winter) and featured a band based around the drummer’s trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frissell, playing sympathetic, straight-forward readings of songs from Gershwin, Cole Porter and other composers who wrote for the stage. The records swing, but swing is a relative term for Motian, who has developed a singular way of keeping time; he pushes the beat forward with a joyful aggression, and even though he often eschews the back-beat with what would seems a stiff emphasis on the first and third beats of a four beat measure, he does so with such a loose feel that it comes to sound both right and innovative. This new release, and the previous volume, continue to approach the same world of songs but in a very different manner. The core of the group is paired down to Motian and pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, though even he rotates in and out of tunes, along with various horn players and, on Volume 4, the singer Rebecca Martin.
Motian’s playing is also very different on these records, which tend towards slower, even almost still, tempos, with the band playing around a pulse that seems to be produced through moment-to-moment mutual agreement. The drums no longer keep time for the ensemble, instead they color the songs, comment on the solos and provide a bed of sound which stretches the canvas on which the instruments paint. Motian tosses brief rhythmic phrases off to bassist Thomas Morgan, and responds to Kikuchi with witty, quizzical gestures that have the sound and shape of scat-singing. It’s quite remarkable. The pianist is an exceptionally sensitive partner with a beautiful, limpid touch. He is comfortable both in the abstractions of Motian’s ‘Morrock’ and clearly outlining the harmony and structure of ‘Something I Dreamed Last Night.’ His rendition of ‘Midnight Sun,’ starting in dark pedal tones and moving via silent-movie piano type tremolos into the brightness of the major key portion of the melody, with Motian shuffling and Morgan plucking plangently, is a primer in how jazz doesn’t have to swing, or even have a tempo, and be absolutely extraordinary jazz. There are excellent contributions from saxophonists Loren Stillman and Michael Attias, with the latter’s mellifluous baritone especially notable. The horns offer a warm dialogue on the material, and the whole is a record that is quiet, but not reticent, free but judged with understated taste, and one of the most focussed and lovely jazz CDs of recent years.
There is a more familiar sense of time-keeping, but still no old-fashioned swing, on un monton de notas from Argentine pianist and composer Emilio Teubal, a recording with a sense of modern jazz which stands out from the crowd. Teubal, a recipient of a Meet The Composer fellowship, uses simple elements to create ensemble compositions that are more complex and involving than the standard legacy of Hard-Bop. He favors lyrical, lilting lines over a pulsating, sometimes heavy groove – bassist Moto Kukushima solely plays the electric bass – and there are rhythmic ideas and melodies from café music, New Tango and what seems to be folk music folded in seamlessly, which give the music a satisfying international quality, an Argentine returning jazz to America with new ideas. The title track is a multi-varied composition that sounds like a tour of the past and present of Argentine culture, at times rollicking, naive, rocking and mysteriously mournful. There is featured solo from cellist Greg Heffernan who plays with great clarity, strength and rhythmic force. The basic band is a quintet, with Franco Pinna on drums and saxophonist Xavier Perez and Felipe Salles, who are fine players, although Salles is following Chris Potter a little closely on this CD (Teubal features the two horns together on most of the compositions, but the liner notes don’t identify who can be heard in which channel). There is some deference to the standard, mainstream conception of jazz on ‘El amanecido,’ which is the only weak part of an otherwise completely enjoyable and satisfying record – Teubal’s own art and style are strong enough that he needn’t prove that he can fit into a mainstream conception. The opening track, ‘Ping Pong,’ does a lot with repetition over a solid ostinato, while ‘Before the outerspace’ wrings great power out of taking a long line and doubling it’s tempo, going from bluesy and funky to carnivalesque, and ‘Baguala’ is a sonorous ballad. Teubal clearly has a fulfilling idea of what he wants to do, it’s worth doing and he does it so well that he sounds like no one else. This is a CD worth seeking out, and a musician worth watching,
The same is true for Rob Mosher, whose The Tortoise with his large ensemble Storytime is not new but is new to me. Like Darcy James Argue, this is another formidably talented, fascinating Canadian jazz composer. What makes them similar is the quality of their ideas and execution, but they are refreshingly different in the approach to and goals for writing for a large jazz ensemble. His dectet mixes french horn and the leader’s double-reeds with standard jazz instrumentation, and his use of the darker range of the woodwinds, horn and flugelhorn gives the ensemble a rich, mellow quality. Mosher is writing complete pieces for the ensemble, and his voice is an absorbing blend of jazz sensibility, contrapuntal inner voices and a lyrical sonorousness from early twentieth century French music (in the liner notes, Mosher name-checks Debussy, Ravel, Bach, Gyorgy Ligeti and Wayne Shorter; I hear Milhaud in the way he brings lines together into chords, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra in the overall sound and Stan Kenton in the way solos emerge from the ensemble writing). His is an original voice, however, and the influences just give an idea of where he’s coming from. He offers witty, pithy takes on bossa nova and classic dance-band sounds on ‘The Sands of Maundune’ and ‘What Snowflakes Are Plotting,’ but that’s the closest he gets to the standard idea of jazz. This a serious jazz record though, and it wears its compositional methods lightly; it’s more sophisticated, more grooving and more pleasurable than the self-conscious third-stream experiments of the 1950s. The track ‘Sleepless Lullaby’ is an example of how the music works; it begins as a minor key lullaby, develops into contrapuntal chamber music, then a rich textured ensemble piece which channels the strengths of Milhaud’s “Creation du monde,” before transforming into a brief, powerful vocal chorus that has the effect of a protest song. That description may make the piece seem disjointed, but Mosher hangs it all on his melody while changing the setting and it all hangs together and is powerful. His music is attractive, with pithy and effective melodic material set against superb, imaginative, textured accompaniments which make what happens in each subsequent moment more interesting and more emotionally affecting. The centerpiece is the excellent ‘Twilight,’ with Nir Felder’s guitar sliding above and through rising woodwind textures in a dialogue that maintains forward momentum even as if seems to start, fail and start again. This is a strong, supple, beautiful and moving record from a talented composers and band-leader.
The final two records under review are related in that the leaders of each explore some similar directions and make up two-thirds of the group Fieldwork. Steve Lehman’sTravail, Transformation and Flow is a recent release, while Vijay Iyer’sHistoricity comes out next month. Lehman and Iyer are on the vanguard of contemporary jazz, of what it is, where it’s going and what it could possibly become. There’s not a hint of swing in their music, but they each use rhythm ferociously. The saxophonist’s recording is his third on the Pi label, and the story they tell when put together through time is a sort of Hegelian dialectic in the development of a brilliant, searching musician. HisDemian As Posthuman is a fascinating collection of truly edgy fragments, setting his keening playing against a variety of complex beats and pulses, themselves variously chopped-up, foreshortened and staggering. There is no concession to any kind of standard form; the short tracks state a focussed, severe idea and have done with it. There is very little development and no resolution. It’s intensely listenable. His following On Meaning adapts his ideas about time to a quintet, playing original material in more familiar forms and was one of the best releases of 2007. Like jazz through history, Lehman’s music shows the influence of pop music. But where before that meant that musicians took pop songs and transformed them through arrangement and improvisation into jazz standards, Lehman is learning from today’s electronically based pop music, especially the way software can produce beats and rhythms that are deliberately inconsistent, which start and stop the pulse, stagger and push forward at the same time. The difference in jazz is that there is a group of young drummers, especially the astonishing Tyshawn Sorey, who can play this type of music live, in the moment. Compositionally, Lehman is adapting ideas about form, structure and development from the exceptional music of Henry Threadgill. This means musical lines made in a tightly compressed range of notes, lines which turn back on themselves to repeat fragments before going on to repeat another group, and another. The emphasis is on rhythm, spare, stabbing harmonies, a bass pulse and improvisations that develop so seamlessly out of an instrument’s line that ideas of melody are secondary to the sheer excitement of the playing.
The new disc looks back a little and moves forward simultaneously. To this mainly horizontal process Lehman has added a harmonic idea from the cutting-edge of contemporary classical music, that of spectralism. Roughly, this is a method of using an analysis of the spectrum of pitches (essentially the overtone series), as a source for musical structures based on timbre. A struck note on a piano will generate a series of tones above that fundamental pitch, and those higher tones are an inherent part of the pitch’s frequency and also sound out of tune, as our ears have been conditioned by centuries of Western tuning which forces the placement of notes into predictable places within the octave. Applying spectral methods to instruments means fitting notes from the spectrum to the proper instrumental timbre, and produces a sound that is both tonal and surprising at the same time (this is a gross simplification, as the idea and technique are sophisticated and complex). Lehman orchestrates this by adding tenor sax, trombone and tuba to his quintet of alto, trumpet, vibes, bass and drums. The sound he gets has an exceptional affect; it’s transparent and full of wide open spaces with a powerfully low bottom which anchors the ear even as the stacked notes threaten to fly away from each other. Inside this open, vertical palette the music follows the approach from the previous record with stabbing, almost obsessive lines over pulsing, jittery beats and tempos. ‘Rudreshm’ alternates a short, intense line with equally short, intense solos, all frequently interrupted by a rhythmic, two-beat phrase by the ensemble. Lehman’s sound combines the beauty of Jackie MacLean with the neurotic energy of Charlie Parker, and there’s a case to be made that this is the contemporary equivalent of Be-Bop; it’s the first radically new experiment with harmony in jazz in decades, it has tremendous tension, energy and velocity, is exceptionally demanding in its virtuosity, is highly urban and is tremendously exciting. Once the ear acclimates to the method, the sound is quiet amazing, with tight voicings familiar from Hard-Bop, cleansing harmonies, hyper-funky rhythms and breathtaking solos from all; the centerpiece track “Alloy” sounds in part like a loving, imaginative and sophisticated updating of the entire legacy of the Jazz Messengers. Mark Shim especially shines on tenor, thinking and articulating at a pace and with a density of ideas which rivals the leaders brilliant musicianship. It’s impossible to predict what kind of influence this spectral approach will have on contemporary jazz, after all Kind Of Blue never sparked a broad modal movement, but like that classic record Travail, Transformation and Flow is a breakthrough of new thinking about the music and is still firmly jazz. It’s Kind of Blue for the twenty-first century.
Pianist Iyer has already produced, in collaboration with Hip-Hop artist Mike Ladd, a thrilling and important mix of the two genres with in what language?, a challenging masterpiece of music and politics. October sees the release of a new recording for him, this one in the classic piano trio format (with Stephen Crump on bass and drummer Marcus Gilmore). Iyer shares with Lehman an emphasis on contemporary ideas of rhythm in jazz. While he can play delicately and wistfully with the best, he generally favors a heavy left-hand ostinato coupled with a propulsive groove in the rhythm section. His series of records with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa are updates on Keith Jarrett’s European quartet, with more rock and blues feel and in-your-face intensity and a similar use of powerful pedal tones as a foundation for some real wailing, like their massive cover of ‘Hey Joe,’ ‘Because of Guns’ on the excellent Blood Sutra. The new record is immediately recognizable as Iyer’s work, but has surprises as well.
The disc is stylistically expansive, it reveals new ideas in the pianist’s work and new details in his palette. He opens up the left hand more for wider-spaced chords and a greater variety of color, and he accompanies his right hand solos in a sparer, more antiphonal style. It is old-fashioned enough to feature a walking bass line, in the introduction to Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Somewhere,’ but there’s nothing old-fashioned about the results. The bass serves as an anchor for a completely out-of-time rendition of the melody, after which Iyer’s own piano bass line swamps that of Crump’s and the trio settles into an involving and quietly intense deconstruction and exploration of the tune. Iyer tests the song in many ways; he repeats fragments, subverts the melody, tries to break free and settles back into lushly re-harmonized cadences, which smoothly elide into a bass solo, then into a vivid sensation of the trio finding a groove in the moment and riding out the tune on top of it. While Iyer’s previous work has been extroverted up to the point of mildly, bracingly confrontational, the trio format lends itself to more introverted playing, more of a sense of private conversation than public rhetoric. Even the brash and propulsive cover of MIA’s ‘Galang’, with Iyer picking over a musical fragment, has the sensation of witnessing someone in a fascinating but inscrutable private act. Gilmore’s drumming is fabulous, his beat is so uplifting that he sounds like he’s raising up the whole group on his drums, giving the band a funky dance step. There are other covers as well, of Andrew Hill’s ‘Smokestack,’ Stevie Wonder’s ‘Big Brother,’ Ronnie Foster’s ‘Mystic Brew’ and ‘Dogon A.D.’ by Julius Hemphill. The use of such varied material is one of the things which gives the record such an expansive feel; Iyer has chosen music that means something to him in various ways and playing it means offering us his different ideas about these songs and musicians. And a musician with Iyer’s brains and soul is going to have interesting thoughts about each one, look at each tune in a different way, find something unique to explore in each one. Historicity has stunning playing and the electrifying quality of an artist who is both reaching inside himself and expanding his possibilities. It’s a record with power which will endure.
Artist of the past couple generations have terrible taste in music. They apply discernment and passionately debate paintings, literature and movies, but settle for just about any old pop musical crap as long as it has enough shiny newness or hipness. It didn’t use to be the case. Artist used to be as learned about music as they were about other arts. Whole artistic movements, serious about their ideas and goals, allied themselves socially and aesthetically with music that was serious about its ideas and goals as well, and that represented high emotional and intellectual culture as deeply as the visual arts. One of the last examples of this in history was the “Blue Rider Almanac”, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, a collection of images, essays and printed music by a group of sympathetic contemporaries.
Miller Theater officially inaugurated their 2009-10 season last night with the focussed, understated multi-media presentation “The Blue Rider In Performance.” The event is the concept of pianist Sarah Rothenberg, who performed and accompanied soprano Susan Narucki, and is a collaboration with the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim and is a companion to the current Kandinsky show going on at the museum. The show has just about everything, but stops short of opera in that it has no inherent set, no constructed sense of a place. It does, however, have a narrative and the sense that it is trying to tell us a story. It is didactic but not polemical and gracefully drawn, and makes worthwhile arguments that may or may not be right, but since these are arguments that can never be settled, they are always welcome.
The Almanac is clear and self-conscious on the issues facing the art, which it itself calls “savage,” and that is the major quality of Kandinsky’s work at this time. This is the art of new ideas, ideas which are fighting to break free of and supersede the old guard. Applying this same concept to the music of this period, and especially the pieces presented in the concert, yields mixed results. They share important concerns and cultural ideas, they are part of the look and sound of the thoughts of a particular place and era. Where they differ, however, is in their answers, specifically the answer to the question, where do we go next? This is music and art produced in and reflecting a period of madness, so how do these artist find their way to sanity? For Kandinsky, it was to go forward, while for his friend Arnold Schoenberg it was to step back into the past.
The first half of the concert made a subtle and fascinating conjunction of parallel movements meeting at a sympathetic point. Rothenberg and Narucki told a musical tale while a back projection did the same with the art; both offered samples of the details of each movement, while gradually drawing backwards and outwards, connecting on the one hand sounds, musical styles and gestures, and on the visual side, fragments of line, curve and color, which cohered into a history of Kandinsky’s images. They met in a thrilling performance of Scriabin’sVers la flamme. This was a moment when the idea of the event came into complete focus with complete success and was superbly judged. The music that had come before, including Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11 and songs from Berg, Webern and Russian composers Thomas De Hartmann and Arthur Lourié, presented music that was groping its way out of one period and into the next. The Russian songs gave us the flavor of Kandinsky’s old and new worlds; De Hartmann uses a foundation of Russian folk music to make lovely, straight-forward songs, while Lourié’s Spleen and Autoportrait a more perfumed and impressionistic and far more cosmopolitan. The samples of Berg and Webern were of very early songs, adolescently Romantic; the composers were not yet at the point of questioning the same set of ideas that gave them a foundation. The key connection appeared between the Op. 11 pieces and Scriabin. As of 1909, Schoenberg was finding himself gradually and disturbingly untethered from Brahms, the music which he valued most, and drifting into an almost free-associated world of musical gestures that occasionally coalesce into a clear sense of what the music wants to be, but more often the phrases, chords and rhythms search for meaning, fail, and try again. There is fear and puzzlement in this music. It offers a powerful impression that Schoenberg feared the legacy of Late Romantic music, the artificiality and self-obsession, that it would permanently lose touch with ideas of harmony and form that had been the basis of German music since Bach. There was already madness in the streets; Kaiser Wilhelm enjoyed the sight of one of his generals dancing in a woman’s dress, syphilis ravaged the upper classes, Freud appeared and war was seen as a necessary cleansing of civilization. Schoenberg’s fears were not unreasonable. On the other hand, Scriabin embraced the madness (he seems to have been a bit mad himself) and found a way to wrap its qualities into a coherent musical package. Kandinsky’s visual madness is appealing in that his embrace of the wildness of colors and shapes is immediately attractive to the eye as shapes and colors are already coherent and in front of us every day. Also, the frame of a painting itself places coherence on the work, nothing is going to spill over, out of control, or break free. Sound is a different matter, and it can aggravate and drive one made, and it easily and powerfully expresses incoherence, a riot of ideas and feelings, madness. While Kandinsky pushed his ideas into the realm of pure shapes and colors, Schoenberg’s answer was . . . to step back from the edge and firmly grasp the support of the past.
Schoenberg’s search for a structural way to give coherence of the past to the inevitable harmonic complexity of the future led him to codify his 12-tone system. The program’s second half was a performance of a work just at the cusp of this systemization, his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10. This is one of the composer’s highest achievements, a transparent construction of music that floats between dissonance and atonality, one where every phrase conveys a sureness of meaning and place; the piece understands itself and has no doubts about its meaning. The work has an important vocal part for soprano, with text by the symbolist poet Stefan George. There is a personal story embedded in the music, with Schoenberg as the cuckold in a love triangle involving his wife and his art teacher (the composer was an accomplished amateur painter), which was represented in a fairly literal fashion by dancers choreographed by Karol Armitage, who only appeared during the first movement. The conflict rendered by the two dancing couples was strikingly reminiscent of Balanchine’s work for Agon. The Brentano Quartet and Narucki played this music wonderfully well, there was a lively, intense and thoughtful sense of conversation between the string players, and they were extremely sensitive to the shape and clarity of phrases. The music can’t quite resolve itself into a cadenza, rejecting the same thing that it appears to long for, and eloquently communicates the feeling of turning away from emotional and intellectual losses and accepting that the future may yet bring something fruitful in its newness.
Kandinsky "Blue Mountain"
The program claims that this specific piece corresponds to Kandinsky’s Blue Mountain, but this does not seem or feel right. The painting has a vivid tension between yellows, reds and blues, but is clearly representational; it’s language, although almost decadently extended, is still recognizable. Schoenberg’s Quartet is in a not quite established new language; it is not Brahms, it is not truly atonal, but it is a masterpiece of transition, but one in reverse of that of the painter. The composer is defining the edge of where he can coherently exist and is marking the spot at which he will turn back. His 12-tone system is not Modern in the sense of making something old into something new, it is rather a new technique for carrying the past means of making music into a new era, yet preserving them. Kandinsky is a savage, but Schoenberg wants to refine and preserve civilization, not demolish and rebuild it. What is a better fit for Kandinsky’s Blue Mountain? Stravinsky, who, by the time the second anthology was published had already premiered the Firebird, Petrushka and Le Sacre du Printemps, the paragon of savagery in music. And the spectacular, brilliant colors of Stravinsky’s orchestrations and sound-world are the aural cognate of the painter’s visual brilliance.
This is a complex and wonderful subject, and arguing it produces a vast series of “yeses,” of agreements and ideas of what was, and is, possible. “The Blue Rider In Performance” can only practically offer a specific view of this subject, and does so with an admirable combination of artistry, erudition and imagination. What is most admirable about it, above the performances themselves, is it’s eagerness to make and argument, to tell us what something means. The event is repeated tonight at 8:00PM at Miller Theater.
To quote the great David St. Hubbins, “it’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.” It’s also, in American culture, a fine line between the established and the avant-garde. The paragon of this are Sun Ra’s singles, which combine a sincere, straight-faced take on pop music with the deep, but lightly held, eccentricities and naive weirdness of Sunny at his best. And how else to describe Sunn O))), makers of music that is simultaneously heavy metal – mainstream – and deeply experimental, who headed the bill of the Blackened Music Series at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple Tuesday night.
At the end of a long evening, Sunn O))) was alternately amazing and tiresome, with the amazement ultimately winning the balance and producing a rare experience. Part of the amazement is that Sunn O))) is actually doing what they do – they are essentially some of the foremost avant-garde musicians currently in America. They get there by being truly experimental, trying things and judging the results then exploring what they like. Where institutionalized avant-garde too often means drawing a limited and artificial boundary line and then ‘transgressing’ it with self-conscious dramatization, this intuitive and fruitful method requires patience, work and dedication to hone the ear and taste; it requires craft and artistry.
How they do it is clear, as their prepared material is formed through dedicated improvisation, but how they get away with it in front of an audience is a bit of a mystery, and fascinating. By this I mean how they gather a relatively mainstream audience, not the tiny segment of the population that seeks out and listens to avant-garde music in a more self-conscious and self-isolating way. The band is in the tradition of anti-Establishment American culture, where people go their own way and come up with their own, often extremely odd, autodidactic solutions. They are, thankfully, ignorant of or uninterested in the limited and circumscribed possibilities offered by the overly-professionalized conventional wisdom found in politics, business and the institutionalized arts. What university or granting organization would even imagine that music could be made that had no melody, harmony, tempo, beat, rhythm or even pulse? That is Sunn O))) at their best, which is at their most extreme, making music with pure sound.
They are not, however, always at their best. I would say that their not-best work is what helps them gain a relatively large audience (an enormous one vis-a-vis the avant-garde in music); you can listen to tracks that have a drum beat, that have a bit of a riff, and certainly that have lyrical content. The band, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, make use of the heavy metal performance cliches of hooded robes and smoke machines, all elements common enough to give a listener some familiar place to start. But while these elements are familiar, the application can be unique. They are ritualistic in fundamental and simple ways – at the Temple, they filled the entire auditorium with smoke and then waited an extra, wearying, twenty minutes, playing the multi-phonic chanting of monks over the PA before taking the stage. Once they did, however, they produced their massive slabs of sound completely shrouded in obscurity for most of the performance. This was amazing. The smoke had the effect of eliminating any distractions from pure listening, and with Sunn O))) one listens with the body. My iPhone decibel meter was pinned at 110, the level of a chain saw at close quarters, and the actual volume was appreciably higher (a momentary ear plug gap during Eagle Twin’s opening set revealed that they were casually exceeding the pain threshold 125 dbB).
It was a long set, divided roughly into two unequal parts. The first and longest part was exemplary; deeply pitched, enormous and enormously long chords and tones coming at intervals which, compared to common metal music, could be charted only on a geologic time scale. The sound, through amplification, has astonishing physical presence and fullness without being thick, it’s actual quite transparent and full of pleasantly gritty, crackling details. When it is complex enough to define a chord, it is mainly minor key and never dissonant, although Anderson and O’Malley push the sounds against each other and bend the tunings enough so that the gradual speeding and slowing of wave interference beats spin around the space. Sunn O))) understands how fascinating and beautiful the qualities of sound can be and they have the craft to convey that to the audience, placing musical events with confidence and care through passing time. Their ability to listen and wait patiently for the next musical moment is uncommon. The long, slow first part was so powerful and transformative, with a built-in natural ending, that it would have been completely satisfying all by itself. The second part was solid but inevitably less majestic and surprising and the slightly faster musical activity was unable to carry the same amount of sonic and expressive weight.
And there was heavy-duty expression happening. With each attack, the sound was immediately there, filling the entire auditorium and filling the body as well, and this is the key. As an email from the organizer warned “you will feel this show with you entire body. Please fortify yourselves accordingly.” Sound is a physical phenomenon, waves that reach out and touch the listener, connection the source and object across distance. Sunn O))) literally touches the audience, this is a goal, and they touch with profound power in that what they play doesn’t only reach the skin and the ear, it enters the body and vibrates it from the inside out. When they hit certain frequencies this vibration can produce a reactive sound that is heard from inside the body – there were moments when a distinct, buzzing hum was clearly audible to my inner ear and clearly coming from inside my body, with a quality not far from the sensation of chanting “om” during yoga practice. This was like magic in the sense of the primitive mind experiencing awe. Certainly, one must be sympathetic to the actual sounds Sunn O))) produces, and that response is going to be positive or negative in a fundamentally intuitive way, but for the sympathetic listener the experience of the band at their best, i.e. their most extreme, is like encountering two gods placing mountains on the earth, shaping the land across horizons we cannot perceive. After all, before the first light there was first the sound.
The group was joined on stage by singer Atilla Csihar, with mixed results. With him they were both at their best and at their most ordinary, which is not their strength. Csihar is an astonishing singer and a charismatic performer, appearing first in a scalloped, metallic robe with laser pointers on his fingers, and then in a primitive costume of burlap and wood, he seemed to be a visitor from an alien planet and then a creature from mythology. He has tremendous command of multi-phonic singing and produced impossibly long, sustained tones that were as mesmerizing as the two guitars. He also sang lyrics, some in English and some in Hungarian, and this dispelled the magic. When Sunn O))) is free from the common and confining elements of beats and words, they are marvelous. When they use these elements they are only a little interesting; they circumscribed by a genre they inherently surpass. The lyrics, a rambling mishmash of vaguely pagan incantation seem meant to be unsettling in a standard way, vis-a-vis contemporary Western religion and society, and they are unsettling but in that sense that one is unsettled by an adolescent boy’s misanthropic, anti-social proselytizing and looks forward to the day when he grows out of it. This is an aspect of normal metal music, infantilism, that is a feature, not a bug, and sorely limits its possibilities.
The other aspect is the beat, and Sunn O))) performed without percussion which, considering their basic heaviness, has the paradoxical effect of maintaining a certain lightness in their sound. The other bands, Eagle Twin, Pelican and Earth, all had drummers, and this put a limit on their own qualities. Metal drumming is the weakest musical part of the genre, a stiff, un-syncopated bashing which adds weight and force but also tends to hold the music making in place in the vertical sense, when it could be flowing along. John Bonham wasn’t the greatest drummer, but he could still convey a sense of rhythm and funkiness in a heavy music, and it’s odd that there is so little of his legacy extant. Eagle Twin’s Gentry Densley is a powerful, fluid guitarist, able to solo forcefully while accompanying himself and they are at their best when he’s ripping through the music, but the singing and drum bashing are again ordinary. Pelican and Earth are purely instrumental. The former is a powerhouse group, playing songs that combine familiar seeming riffs with interesting orchestrations and excellent ensemble playing, their set offered the suggestion that they could be truly astonishing if they could only free their beat a little. Earth is a veteran band playing a spellbinding, lyrical and truly minimal metal; sparse, slow, graceful lines placed amidst a great deal of silence. Again, their beat is stolid rather than propulsive, but they have the unique ability to create the sensation that time is standing still, followed by the feeling that only a few minutes have flown by once their set ends. They left the crowd wanting much more, and set the stage for Sunn O))).
I’m enjoying the accumulating comments and blog dialogue at A Blog Supreme, to which I’ve already contributed. It’s especially interesting to see which records show up on multiple lists, and there are some consistent choices so far; The Bad Plus (a variety of records), Vijay Iyer’s “in what language?” and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. There’s nothing to dispute, it’s a great sample of records all around.
One thing I do disagree with is Patrick’s contention that jazz, especially modern jazz, just needs more exposure and it will be more popular. Art Blakey made the case best when he said that jazz is an intelligent person’s music. You don’t need a music education, but jazz is for people who take pleasure in thinking, as well as grooving, and jazz is for people who listen actively, who reach out to the music in attention and anticipation. That is not the mass of Americans, and it never will be.
Is it too much to ask for, to have professional critics (i.e. they get a paycheck) who are actually knowledgeable about they things they write about? Apparently, it is.
Yes, everyone’s a critic, and everyone has an opinion. But if you want to separate yourself as a Critic from the Fools, informed opinion and critical thinking are what matters. And here is some criticism printed in today’s New York Times which is crippled by complete, uninformed foolishness. Alessandra Stanley begins her discussion of “Bored To Death,” which I’m looking forward (along with the return of “Curb Your Enthusiasm“), by writing about Raymond Chandler. The substance of the article is write-by-numbers anodyne dullness, but the Chandler premise is not only conveyed with profound ignorance of the man’s work, but it also turns out to have nothing to do with her own evaluations.
“It takes gall to riff on Raymond Chandler, which doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” Maybe it does take gall, but I agree it can be done; it can be done well like Ross MacDonald did or badly, like Robert P. Parker. For Stanley, though, the riff is all about Robert Altman’s version of “The Long Goodbye.” She thinks the movie is brilliant and then furthers her own riff by writing about . . . Bogart. This is a tell that she hasn’t read Chandler, or remembered what she has, but only seen movies based on Chandler books. “Altman shocked Bogart purists by casting Elliott Gould,” well, maybe he did. But that doesn’t have anything to do with Chandler, who wrote about Philip Marlowe, not Humphrey Bogart. Of the numerous films from Chandler, Bogart only played Marlowe once, in “The Big Sleep.” But, if you’ve only seen the movies, it’s easy to mistake the players for the play, I suppose, but it doesn’t mean you have any knowledge.
Another tell is her use of the word “purist” to implicitly dismiss her take that Altman’s movie is “brilliant.” I’m not a purist, and Altaman’s movie is a failure. That’s my opinion, but it is informed by the actual story and by knowledge Chandler’s work. Most of the movie is a genial variation on Chandler, perfectly acceptable but also rambling and a little dull. At the finale, however, Marlowe kills his friend Terry Lennox, which makes the movie a failure in two ways; it’s an action so unsupported by what Altman has spent time showing us that it makes no sense in terms of the movie, and it is a complete rejection of Chandler’s fundamental idea of Marlowe as a figure of moral action. The director is absolutely allowed to make his own riffs, but a bad riff is a bad riff, and his makes the movie a failure that he owns completely and which has nothing to do with Chandler, at all.
So, Alessandra, you’re no Raymond Chandler, nor even a qualified critic of Chandler. But you do seem to play one on TV. The review goes on to discuss “Bored To Death” in terms that have nothing at all to do with Chandler, which would earn this a failing grade in college; an ignorant premise which is then ignored in the rest of the article. Perhaps the Williamsburg millieu of the show has Stanley seeking some hipster credentials. Well, riffing may a hipster make, but Chandler is far too cool for hipster taste. Hopefully, the show will be more enjoyable then her imprimatur would indicate. And then a return of my beloved Man-Trash in another week. Who will she trot out for that review, Bukoswki?
[Updated with cool media content!] The Jazz blog at NPR, A Blog Supreme, is starting a little project based on the idea of introducing new listeners to jazz, i.e. what handful of records should someone who wants to take the step into jazz start with.
That’s not so hard, because the records of Ellington, Django, Mingus, Miles and Dexter Gordon (the first, random five out of my head) are great ways to get into jazz from multiple directions, following musical family trees through those opening and then backwards and forwards through history. What the blog is doing is a little different; inspired by a reader, it is asking for a list of five recent records (from the around the last 10 years) to recommend to people who are interested in getting into jazz. Patrick Jarenwattananon asked several young jazz bloggers this question, and will be posting their answers, and he’s also asked for both reader comments and for blog posts to which he will link. And so, here is my answer:
Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd: “in what language?” Pi recordings 2003 A record that is likely to stun, thrill and overpower listeners into craving more jazz. Lyrically, this is a political work that offers powerful challenges and questions about racial and cultural assimilation and the struggle to find one’s home in a place a country that is economically insecure and in fear of a loss of safety. Musically it’s an exciting, rich mix of the current urban music of cultural assimilation into the original music of that assimilation, jazz. It is ultra-contemporary and also seems timeless, and it’s refusal to come to a neat political or musical resolution draws the listener back again and again, and I expect would draw them elsewhere . . .
Chicago Underground Trio: “Possible Cube,” Delmark 2004 Hard-edged contemporary jazz, with avant-garde structures and a heavy dose of electronics. It’s not electro-acoustic experimentation, it’s music that alternates between extremely deep, funky and aggressive grooves and abstract electronic interludes, soundscape for the contemplation of what has just transpired. Cornetist Rob Mazurek’s long, lyrical lines give the ear something to latch onto while the listeners enjoys the surprising ride.
The Bad Plus: “These Are The Vistas,” Sony 2003 The classic jazz piano trio is composed of piano, bass and drums, and tends to chamber-music ideas: thoughtful, lyrical, introspective conversations between the instruments. The Bad Plus are a piano trio for people who enjoy their punk and even their metal. They play jazz with real skill and also with the powerful sound and stance of a rock band. The thrill of hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ pounded out on the piano FTW.
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, “Infernal Machines,” New Amsterdam 2009 A premier contemporary jazz big band record from a premier young composer. This is jazz for people who are used to music that has been printed on the page and distributed to an ensemble. DJA doesn’t just arrange tune for big band, he composes original music a large ensemble and has a sense of the craft in line with classical musicians and audiences; polyphony, complex structures, a sense of abstract narrative and drama. This is not delicate music, though, it has tremendous rhythmic, lyrical and harmonic power and is terrifically exciting to the mind and heart simultaneously.
Jason Moran, “Artist in Residence,” Blue Note 2006 Moran is a pianist with the history of jazz in his hands, and also a history of America. Stride piano playing is one of the building blocks of jazz, and the style itself goes back to the mid-19th century. When Moran plays, one hears an extremely expressive, imaginative and intelligent young musician’s ongoing internal conversation with Brahms, Gottschalk, Joplin, James P. Johnson, Ellington, Monk, Herbie Nichols, Afrika Bambaataa, technology, spoken language and the place of the African-American artist in both the history of this country and in contemporary culture. Which of course means he’s deeply bluesy and funky, which he has, and he has a phenomenal core band with Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits. Any of his records would do, this is just the most recent, and they are just an introduction to his rollicking, joyful live performances.
The finale of the “Wordless Music meets Miller Theater Festival” was a wildly uneven concert with luscious ambient pop, a stunning new work for string quartet and singers, and a deeply weird, puzzling and nonsensical performance from Dan Bejar. The program open with the JACK Quartet and sopranos Mellissa Hughes and Abigail Nims performing Jacob Cooper’s Stabat Mater Dolorosa. This is a work of recomposition, with Cooper taking the first movement of Pergolesi’s famous baroque Stabat Mater and slowing it down to a radical degree, down to less than a tenth of the original speed by dead ear-reckoning. Stately eighth notes become long tones, trills take on the character of microtonal music. The musicians play without vibrato and at levels consistently in the pianissimo range, and the plain tones, simple harmonies and the concentration of the musicians makes for an intensely powerful listening experience. Cooper has rededicated the work as well, to an Iraqi mother who protested the honor killing of her daughter and was in turn herself murdered. Musically beautiful and emotionally gripping, this is a stunning piece and was played with exceptional focus and control by all the musicians.
The second half brought a trio, featuring a collaboration between the ambient composer Loscil (Scott Morgan) and Bejar, a/k/a Destroyer, accompanied by Josh Lindstrom on the vibes. The music was a mixture of pieces that Loscil has recorded and his own arrangements of Destroyer songs. The blends of electronic sounds, vibes and electric guitar was soothing without being soporific, just lovely to the ear, especially Loscil’s throbbing, pulsing textures and glitchy beats. The vibes made an excellent blend, although Bejar’s guitar seemed only occasionally present in the mix. He also sang some of his woozy lyrics and recited what appeared to be a passage from a journal, an obscure text full of indecipherable private heuristics. It was slightly weird, ambient pop, pleasing and refreshing, but it was only the penultimate event. After Morgan and Lindstrom left the stage, Bejar performed his piece “Bay of Pigs,” singing to an electronic backing track while standing under a screen with project images. The results were a bizarre mess; Bejar’s lyrics are an inscrutable stream-of-consciousness ramble with no opportunity for a possible rhyme left out, no matter how awkward or ridiculous. The backing track was a mix of tacky ambient music and tackier disco, and the images on the screen were all of Bejar himself, in different moods; happy Dan, pensive Dan, stern Dan. Add on top Bejar’s uncanny resemblance to Adam Sandler in his performing style and you have something that was truly bad. The puzzle is whether it was bad by accident, or bad on purpose. As a work of music and a performance, it was thought-through, polished and confident, it’s just that the ideas are so terrible that it’s hard to conceive of something that is sincerely so unselfconscious, so egocentric and so lacking self-awareness. Is it meant to be a parody? If so, it is deeply weird. Is it serious? Then it is embarrassing. It was truly difficult to discern, but the fact that Bejar’s image on-screen lingered for a slow fade long after he had left the stage was a matter for concern.
So, Wordless Music uptown has come to a close for now. I’m not sure what exactly Ronen Givony had as a goal. The audiences were certainly different than I had seen at other series concerts. Turn out was decent but not spectacular, and there was a heavy complement of Columbia students. Interestingly, most of the few older patrons ran out during the dull rock of Do Say Make Think, while the students complained about the lack of action in Saturday’s program. It seems the series has at least expanded their audience, which I imagine was a goal, but these concerts, even at their best, didn’t offer the same constructive challenges that I had gotten used to in previous events. Wordless Music is still a young organization but has already made an impressive mark in music, and certainly seems to have a devoted following among both concert-goers and musicians. Givony is doing something that is necessary, and fundamentally simple, but is also unique; he is neither presenting settled answers about music nor offering safe eclecticism for its own sake, instead he’s asking question about music. The programs themselves are the questions, and the most frequent one is: where is the point where experimental ideas in popular and contemporary classical music meet? The point is there, but where it is and what it is changes depending on who’s on the program, and that’s worth hearing. The best of the Miller Theater festival (and it was mostly very good), offered in the moment depictions of the point. The worst, the concert of “The Happiness Project” and Do Make Say Think, presented music that didn’t even define one path to that point – the former was a high-concept project not truly ready for performance, and the latter was entirely generic. And generic music is the antithesis of what the series is all about.
The organization has presented enough concerts to have a good idea what to expect from their events, and that’s the proverbial two-edged sword. The good edge is the questions about the music, the problematic edge is the expected juxtaposition of contemporary classical and pop music known expected ways, i.e. Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, electronic music, literate pop. The audience is likely to be familiar with at least one half of those equations. I think there’s space, if Givony seeks it, to offer even greater surprise, with a bigger aesthetic payoff. For example, after seeing Tim Hecker twice under the Wordless Music banner, once with music from Arvo Part and another time with two other electronic musicians, I would like to see him on a program which also features the music of radical composer Giacinto Scelsi. Hecker pushes sounds against each other, while Scelsi pushes sound itself from the inside-out. It seems an ideal pair, and if Michael Tilson Thomas can sell Scelsi to an audience waiting to hear the Mozart Requiem, surely this would be child’s play at Le Poisson Rouge. It’s a way of taking the question a little farther, not where the musics meet but do they meet? It’s an exciting idea, but then again I’m just a critic.
One of the emblematic objects of the last century is the AK-47. Mass produced, reliable and easy to use, it toppled governments in the cause of utopian and dystopian ideals. It was a true weapon of mass destruction.
Another emblematic object is the personal computer. It’s generally been used for more peaceful, constructive purposes than an assault rifle, but not everyone would agree, especially executives in the offices of EMI, Sony and UMG. For those companies, the computer has destroyed a lot of their artificially created and jealously guarded value, while becoming especially over the last ten years, a mass produced, reliable and easy to use means for creating music. There’s an entire generation of musicians using laptops and other electronic boxes (it’s easy and not misleading to refer to them generally as “laptop musicians”), to produce sound and bring it to their audiences’ ears and laptops.
The third night of the Wordless Music at Miller Theater Festival was a triple-bill of laptop musicians, Juliana Barwick, Grouper (Liz Harris) and Tim Hecker. They produced an evening of mesmerizing, satisfying music. Although the concert lasted two and a half hours, the performances were so involving that they seemed to stop the sensation of the passing of time.
All three musicians work with pure sound along the generously lengthy spectrum of what could be called ambient music, and all get to the sound they seek through electronic means. Barwick starts with her pure-toned soprano voice, singing and recording short improvised phrases which she then loops into choirs that have an ethereal quality to their sonic sheen. The sound is also harmonically rich and full, and Barwick uses the choral sound as accompaniment to her more melodic improvisations or for the singing of epigrammatic songs. She does this with great skill, singing while seamlessly looping her wordless phrases. The results are lovely and entrancing and as simple as can be – she’s only working with one instrument and using technology to perform one of its most basic tasks, copying information. She found her way to her art by working in her bedroom, and her appealingly modest, gawky stage manner bespeaks a private, individual musician for whom music making is some sort of ritual, and indeed her method of building through repetition is a ritual, and her use of multiples of her own voice and the sheer beauty made her performance a kind of ecstatic, secular liturgy.
Grouper also sings and accompanies herself on guitar and with a solid wash of white noise and reverb. A lot of records have been made using reverb as a kind of pancake makeup, but Grouper uses it to place her voice in a very stimulating ambient environment. It makes the juxtaposition of the immediacy of the voice and the almost over-stimulating bed of noise work. Her use of reverb and other processing creates a sound with space that extends through all three dimensions, and the sensation of width and depth focus the attention on her calm, gentle voice which seems placed at the eye of a hurricane of chaotic sound. It’s a striking effect, and adds a sense of powerful meaning to the simplest phrase. Hearing her live is very different than listening to her recordings, like last year’s breakthrough “Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill.” Recordings flatten out the music and bring the songs and the singing into focus, while the live performance opens up the sound and makes everything abstract, purely musical; she is still singing, but the diction and articulation are lost in the mix. This is not a complaint, as her sound is spellbinding and mysterious. Her set of old and new material seemed to take place out of time, in the space between breaths and the audience was in no rush to take the next one.
To close the program, Tim Hecker came down from Montreal with a laptop – the only one of the evening – a mixer and a keyboard. He also brought his familiar stunning, massive slabs of sound. Hecker is one of the most unique electronic musicians in a scene where commercial music and the avant-garde collide. He played a mix of music from his tremendous “Harmony in Ultraviolet” record as well as this year’s “An Imaginary Country.” The songs’ titles don’t matter, as there is no important differentiation between his pieces. His body of work is really about pure sound, and the sounds he makes are almost geologic in nature; huge, shifting expanses of crunching, crackling, rich noise, noise made up of pitches but so full of so many pitches that the output is a kind of comforting, enveloping, warm chaos, full of fascinating interference patterns and sonic phantoms. His new music displays elements of an expanded pallet, including some chiming tones and an actual minor key chord cadence. An accordion seems to appear, perhaps a broadcast caught between notches on the radio dial and heard from another room, then it disappears. But he eschews a beat, rhythm, harmony and melody, adjusts the mix on the fly – that’s his performance – and dazzles with a physical sensation of sound that is simultaneously atavistic and profoundly, abstractly advanced. You can’t sing to it, you can’t dance to it, but you do surrender to its power.
There is something oddly consistent about how these three laptop musicians perform, and it seems to be a generational marker. Technology allows so many people to make complex music both on the cheap and literally in the privacy of their own homes. This is a mixed blessing, but on the good side a lot of good, unexpected music is being made. The process of working so privately and mastering a tool that is essentially a means to take sound directly out of the imagination and put it through speakers, with no mediation of notation, interpretation of even idiomatic convention, means that at its best what we are hearing is the unadulterated inner life of these musicians. There is artifice in finding the means to make that electronic sound, but once made there is no artificial process by which the concrete idea is transformed into a subtle gesture. This is a profound possibility. These three performers all appear as deeply private people standing on stage. While Barwick offered thanks at the end of her set and took a bow, the others simply turned off the juice and walked off into the darkness, while each on began their set by simply walking on-stage and starting, without any fuss or affect. The stage manner is that of someone deeply shy who is embarrassed to be there when they are not making sounds, yet willing to offer their most personal sounds to us. This is digital technology put towards an achingly human purpose and makes concerts like this one quietly yet intensely human.
Wordless Music at Miller Theater concludes Saturday night, with the JACK Quartet and others, and tickets are still available.
