Iconic, Haunting Jazz Guitarist Bill Frisell Plays a Rare Duo Show in Brooklyn
Bill Frisell’s first album as a bandleader was just guitar and bass (and lots of overdubs). Who knew that this era’s preeminent jazz guitarist would ever revisit that format? Almost thirty-five years later, the bassist is Thomas Morgan, and the album, Small Town, is a live recording from the Village Vanguard from just a few months ago It’s hard to hear online, but you can catch the two when they make a relatively rare Brooklyn appearance at Roulette on June 30 at 8. Advance tix are just $20, and having seen Frisell in this particular borough, it’s not a safe bet to assume that the show won’t sell out.
The first track is an eleven-minute version of Paul Motian’s Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago. Resonant, starry, minimalist motives give way to a distantly ominous big-sky theme spiced with wispy harmonics and Morgan’s lurking presence. A wistful waltz develops and is then subsumed by brooding pedalpoint with stark gospel allusions as Frisell builds a hypnotic web of contrapuntal loops. If this doesn’t end up in a Twin Peaks episode, that would be criminal.
The two make a briskly caravanning stroll out of Lee Konitz’s Subconscious Lee, threatening to take it down into the depths but never completely submerging. Morgan hangs back and punches in gingerly throughout most of the spacious, uneasy ballad Song for Andrew No. 1 (an Andrew Cyrille shout-out). Referneces to a famously infirm New Orleans funeral tune flicker amidst Frisell’s lingering single-note lines as he waits til the very end to go for the macabre.
He does Wildwood Flower a lot – this one offers genially blithe, bluegrassy contrast and some neatly understated counterpoint between the two musicians.
The title track expands on the old Scottish folk tune Wild Mountain Thyme, Frisell finally flinging some noir and some wryly muted surf riffs into the purposeful, steady walk as Morgan straddles the same thin grey line. After that, the two pulse their way mutedly through Fats Domino’s What a Party; which sounds a lot more like the old folk song Shortnin’ Bread. Ironically, it’s the most pastoral track here – hearing Morgan toss off a handful of C&W guitar licks on his bass is a trip.
Poet – Pearl is a diptych. Morgan shifts around with a pensive incisiveness in the upper midrange, as he usually does throughout the set while Frisell plays a gently tremoloing lullaby of sorts. then the two follow the night’s most divergent courses, segueing into the lone Morgan composition here, a bittersweetly catchy jazz waltz where the bassist finally gets to carry the melody. The last song of the set is a spare, lowlit, increasingly desolate take of the Goldfinger theme that leaves no doubt that it’s about a spy. At the end, Frisell turns it into the old blues lament Baby Please Don’t Go.
Where does this rank in the Frisell pantheon? Maybe not on the towering, harrowing noir pinnacle with, say, 2007’s History, Mystery but it’s close. You’ll see this on a whole lot of best-of-2017 lists, not just here, at the end of the year.
The World’s Funniest Jazz Band Return to Their Favorite Brooklyn Spot
What makes Mostly Other People Do the Killing so damn funny? They do their homework, they really know their source material and they can spot a cliche a mile away. Over the course of their dozen-album career, the world’s most consistently amusing jazz band have pilloried styles from hot 20s swing to post-Ornette obsessiveness. They also did a pretty much note-for-note recreation of Kind of Blue (that was their “serious” album). Their latest release, Loafer’s Hollow – streaming at Spotify – lampoons 1930s swing, Count Basie in particular. There’s an additional layer of satire here: ostensibly each track salutes a novelist, among them Vonnegut, Pynchon, Joyce, Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace. The band return to their favorite Brooklyn haunt, Shapeshifter Lab on June 29 at around 8:15, with an opening duo set at 7 from their pianist Ron Stabinsky with adventurous baritone saxophonist Charles Evans. Cover is $10.
The band keeps growing. This time out the three remaining original members – bassist Moppa Elliott, multi-saxophonist Jon Irabagon and drummer Kevin Shea – join forces with Stabinsky, banjo player Brandon Seabrook, trombonist Dave Taylor and Sexmob trumpeter/bandeader Steven Bernstein, an obvious choice for these merry pranksters.
This is a cautionary tale, one negative example after another. Respect for bandmates’ space? Appropriateness of intros, lead-ins, choice of places to solo or finish one? Huh? For anyone who’s ever wanted to take their instrument and smash it over the head of an egocentric bandmate, this is joyous revenge. It also happens to be a long launching pad for every band member’s extended technique: theses guys get sounds that nobody’s supposed to.
It’s not easy to explain these songs without giving away the jokes. Let’s say the satire is somewhat muted on the first track, at least when it comes to what Seabrook is up to, Bernstein on the other hand being his usual self.
Honey Hole – a droll ballad, duh – is where the horns bust out their mutes, along with the first of the chaotic breakdowns the band are known for. Can anybody in this crew croon a little? We could really use a “Oh, dawwwwling” right about here.
A strutting midtempo number, Bloomsburg (For James Joyce) takes the mute buffoonery to Spike Jones levels. Kilgore (For Kurt Vonnegut) its where the band drops all pretense of keeping a straight face, from the cartoonish noir of the intro (Seabrook’s the instigator) to the bridge (not clear who’s who – it’s too much), to Stabinsky’s player piano gone berserk.
Stabinsky’s enigmatic, Messiaenic solo intro for Mason & Dixon (For Thomas Pynchon) is no less gorgeous for being completely un-idiomatic; later on, the band goes into another completely different idiom that’s just plain brutally funny. Likewise, Seabrook’s mosquito picking and Taylor’s long, lyrical solo in Meridian (For Cormac McCarthy) are attractive despite themselves. Maybe that’s the point – Blood Meridian’s a grim story.
The band returns to a more subtle satire – such that it exists here – with Glen Riddle (For David Foster Wallace), in many respects a doppelganger with the album’s opening track. They wind it up with Five (Corners, Points, Forks), which gives the gasface to Louis Armstrong – and reminds how many other genres other than jazz this band loves to spoof. As usual, there are tons of quotes from tunes both iconic and obscure: this is the rare album of funny songs that stands up to repeated listening.
Not to be a bad influence, but these catchy, jaunty tunes reaffirm that if the band really wanted, they could just edit out the jokes and then they’d be able to get a gig at any respectable swing dance hall in the world Another fun fact: this album was originally titled Library (all MOPDtK albums are named after towns in Elliott’s native Pennsylvania). In researching the area, Elliott discovered that before it was Library, it was Loafer’s Hollow. The more things change, right?
A Tantalizingly Dynamic Taste of One of Europe’s Most Enticing Jazz Festivals
The booking agent at New York’s most popular jazz club spent ten days at the Jazztopad Festival in Poland last year. After it was over, he confided to the organizer that he was determined to bring some Polish jazz to New York. Consider: there are a hundred jazz festivals in Poland every year, and this one’s not in one of the major cities, but in the southwest corner of the country. Yet in the course of its fifteen year history, the festival has become a magnet for top-tier talent, and also commissions a lot of adventurous new works – Charles Lloyd will premiere a new orchestral suite there this year.
And for the second year in a row, the Jazztopad Festival has booked a series of shows, including many American premieres, around New York. Last night’s late show at Jazz at Lincoln Center featured tantalizingly brief sets from two intriguing and individualistic Polish groups, improvisational piano trio STRYJO along with the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet.
Playfully and methodically, STRYJO constructed a series of songs without words, part Sam Rivers and part Angelo Badalamenti, maybe. Pianist Nikola Kołodziejczyk, who is very much the leader of the trio, would introduce a minimalistic, cell-like phrase or rhythm, then bassist Maciej Szczyciński and drummer Michał Bryndal would enter the picture. Were they going to take the cheery, practically trip-hop groove they opened with to its bouncy, bright conclusion? NOOOOO. With just the flicker of a couple of subtle tonal shifts, Kołodziejczyk shifted it deeper and deeper into the shadows, matched by Bryndal’s muted palms-on-the-toms shuffle and Szczyciński’s slinky, terse pulse. Then Kołodziejczyk’s chords and ripples grew more expansive, a Twin Peaks title theme in Chopin’s native tongue.
The night’s most riveting moment was trumpeter Maurycy Wójciński’s long, plaintive, hauntingly allusive solo during the dynamically shapeshifting second number by the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet. Pianist Szymon Wójciński also favored several cell-like themes, building out of them to stark rumbles, flurries of hardbop and neoromatic glimmer in tandem with the muscular drive of bassist Ksawery Wójciński and drummer Krzysztof Szmańda. The robust four-string guy showcased a Henry Grimes-like, glissandoing-and-pirouetting intensity during a long solo of his own later in the set – it would have been a treat to have heard him on a bass with a built-in mic rather than having to lean in to pick up on how much the floor mic was catching. Their elegant, enigmatic, sometimes austere focus made an apt segue with the opening trio, and speaks well to how the Jazztopad folks program a bill.
The Manhattan edition of this year’s Jazztopad Festival continues tonight, June 23 at 7:30 PM at Joe’s Pub with pianist Marcin Masecki and drummer Jerzy Rogiewicz playing stride and ragtime. Then tomorrow night, June 24 at 8 PM the Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet make another appearance, at the Jazz Gallery with cellist Erik Friedlander. The festival concludes at National Sawdust on June 25 at 4 PM with first-class improvisational string ensemble the Lutosławski Quartet joined by the darkly conversational duo of violinist Mark Feldman and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier.
Trouble Kaze Celebrate Deviously Fun Improvisation Tomorrow Night in Gowanus
Japanese-French quintet Trouble Kaze’s new album June is the antithesis of what you’d probably expect from a two-drummer ensemble (i.e. the careening new Brandon Seabrook record). It’s also probably not what most people would think a band with two pianos would sound like. It’s a medieval Shinto temple gone down the rabbit hole, a Calder mobile on steroids, and a very deviously playful excuse for some of the world’s great improvisers to have fun making their instruments sound like something other than what they are. That, or simply coaxing (or scraping, banging, pounding or blowing) sounds out of them that under usual circumstance they either aren’t supposed to produce, or aren’t exactly known to make.
It’s downright impossible to figure out who’s playing what throughout this five-part, completely improvised suite recorded just over a year ago, which explains the album title. Sounds roughly comparable to temple bells mingle with the occasional portentously muted piano chord way down under the lid, produced by either Satoko Fujii or Sophie Agnel. A disgruntled snort from a trumpet (Natsuki Tamura? Christian Pruvost?) interrupts squirrelly textures from somebody (probably Tamura, the shogun of extended technique trumpet) but also maybe either drummer Peter Orins or Didier Lasserre.
A motorik rhythm develops as the group coalesces a little – is that a woodblock? A trumpet valve? White noise and waterfalling percussion build a frantic, horrified web (that has GOT to be Tamura screaming through his horn…or is it Pruvost blowing into his through a plastic tube?). Who’s spinning the vacuum cleaner tubing through the air? Maybe nobody, but that’s what it sounds like in a few places.
What does it sound like otherwise? Looping train-track rhythms, dopplers, whistling sepulchral figures, frantically bustling trumpets, a church belltower gone berserk. a very stealthy helicopter, a kitten stuck in the back of David Gilmour’s amp, and Federico Mompou cleaning out his attic are all part of the sonic picture. The train goes through the tunnel…all of a sudden it’s out of the tunnel! Next stop is 4th Ave., which is where you get off the F or the R to go to I-Beam, where the band are playing the album release show tomorrow night, June 23 at 8:30 PM. Cover is $15.
The album – bits and pieces of which are up at Soundcloud and youtube – is not for everybody, and Fujii’s signature lyricism is largely (and surprisingly) absent from this defiant celebration of joyful noise. For her symphonic take on improvisation, you need to hear her rapturously intricate, conversational Duet album with bassist Joe Fonda.
Svetlana & the Delancey Five: New York’s Most Unpredictably Fun Swing Band
Since swing jazz is dance music, most swing bands have limitations on how far out on limb they can go. After all, you’ve got to keep everybody on their feet, right? Svetlana & the Delancey Five are the rare swing band who don’t recognize any limits: they’re just as fun to siit and listen to as they are for the dancers.
There weren’t a lot of people on their feet at the band’s sold-out show earlier this month at the Blue Note, but the band charmed the crowd for the duration of the set…with new arrangements of material that’s been done to death by a whole lot of other folks. The premise of this gig was to revisit and reinvent the great Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald collaborations, a favorite Svetlana theme.
Frontwoman Svetlana Shmulyian and guest Charles Turner took those roles to plenty of new places, neither singer trying to ape any of the original Ella/Satchmo takes. A lot of singers try to replicate horn lines; Shmulyian doesn’t do that, nor does she scat a lot, but she never sings anything remotely the same way twice and this show was no exception. She’s protean to the point that it takes awhile to get to figure her out, to the extent that she can be figured out. That’s part of the fun. There was a show last year where she didn’t break out the vibrato until the last song of the night; this time, she was using every device in her arsenal from the first few notes of Just A-Sitting and A-Rocking.Then later she bubbled and chirped her way through the rapidfire travelogue of her own bittersweetly charming romp, Baby I’m Back.
Turner has a wide-angle vibrato, like a classic old Packard or Mercedes with a loose clutch. How he modulates it sounds easy but is actually the opposite: it takes masterful control and nuance to stay in the game. He played it on the sly side against the bandleaders’ coy ingenue in Cheek to Cheek, then the two playfully flipped the script for a cheerily sardonic take of I Won’t Dance.
The freshness of drummer Rob Garcia’s charts is another drawing card. Much of the time, it seems like the band is jamming away, but they’re actually not: That high-voltage interplay makes even more sense in the context that this is the rare band that’s stayed together more or less for the better part of five years: Garcia knows everybody’s steez and vice versa. Case in point: the band’s take of A Tisket, a Tasket, Ella’s version of a jump-rope rhyme that’s pretty much a throwaway. But this band’s version started out as a cha-cha and took a sudden departure toward a shadowy, almost klezmer groove midway through. His Afrobeat allusions in What a Little Moonlight Can Do were just as unexpectedly kinetic and spot-on.
The high point of the set, at least in terms of getting a roar out of the crowd, was a long duel between Garcia and tap dancer Dewitt Fleming Jr. Rather than taking the easy road, going all cheesy and cliched, Garcia engaged Fleming as a musician…and Fleming pushed back, hard! Was Garcia going to keep up with Fleming’s relentless hailstorm of beats? As it turned out, yes, with every texture and flourish and part of his hardware, but it wasn’t easy. Bassist Endea Owens jumpstarted a more low-key, elegant duel earlier on, which was just about as fun if a lot quieter and slinkier.
Multi-reedman Michael Hashin (also a member of the Microscopic Septet, whose latest blues album is a purist treat) opened jauntily on soprano in an instrumental take of Cottontail (in keeping with the theme of the show) and then switched to tenor for more smoke and congeniality for most of the rest of the set. Trumpeter Charles Caranicas also switched back and forth with his flugelhorn in the set’s more pensive, resonant numbers, while pianist John Chin drove the more upbeat material with an erudite yet almost feral, purist, blue-infused attack.
If your taste in swing runs toward good listening as well as cutting a rug, Svetlana & the Delancey Five are playing a special Make Music NY set outside Joe’s Pub on June 21 at 3 (three) PM. And unlike most Make Music NY slots, where bands snag permits for outdoor performances and then don’t show up til the eleventh hour, if at all, this show is definitely happening as scheduled. Then they’re at the carousel at the south end of Battery Park on June 23 at 7.
A Darkly Majestic, Sweepingly Cinematic, Often Haunting Trio Album from Pianist Guy Mintus
Pianist Guy Mintus’ music has depth, and gravitas, and glimmer, and an often cinematic sweep. Israeli pianists tend to embrace both western classical music as well as the edgy minor keys and chromatics common to Jewish and Middle Eastern music, and Mintus is no exception. His sound is very distinctive: there’s no real comparison, although from time to time he evokes the nocturnal majesty of Shai Maestro, the phantasmagorical side of Frank Kimbrough and the counterintuitively dark explorations of Danny Fox. Mintus’s new album, A Home In Between, with his long-running trio, bassist Tamir Shmerling and drummer Philippe Lemm – bits and pieces of which are online at Mintus’ music page and at Soundcloud – is due out tomorrow. The trio are playing the album release show on June 20 at 7:30 PM at the big room at the Rockwood. Cover is $12.
The album opens with an ambitious diptych of sorts, Our Journey Together, a bittersweet, neoomantic waltz spiced with the occasional striking, menacing chromatic. As the theme diverges, Mintus takes a couple of breathtakingly precise cascades, then everything falls apart. The band pulls it together again slowly, up to a long, broodingly triumphant coda lit up with uneasy Lennie Tristano close harmonies and a big drum hailstorm.
Lemm anchors Mibifnim, a disquietingly altered bolero, as a shuffle drag while Shmerling adds elegantly fugal counterpoint, Mintus quoting Rachmaninoff and spinning wryly leapfrogging flourishes around the moody melody. Background shifts dissociatively between stride, Chopin and hard bop before Lemm cracks the whip and takes everybody swinging up to a big, rumbling drum solo.
Shmerling plays the role of percussionist, then takes a morosely microtonal solo to open the Levantine dirge Zeybekiko for the Brave, echoing both the Golan Heights and the Greek isles, Mintus’ incisive passing tones reaching a red-sunset crescendo over the walls of Jerusalem.
A spare trouble-in-deep-space conversation between bass and piano opens In the Moment, which goes in a more playful, funky direction reminiscent of Fox. Smile is a journey rather than a destination, opening with a very artfully implied, latin-tinged menace, then slowly brightens, up to a cheerily circling piano riff and neoromantic variations, wryly interpolating the old standard.
Desert Song begins as a hushed, plaintive, slow ballad against Lemm’s shadowy cymbals, glittering with chromatics, Mintus then building a distantly troubled anthem in the same vein as the album’s opening track. A dip where the band pulls apart gingerly contrasts with Mintus’ big, spiraling crescendo: sounds like they finally made it to the oasis.
Mintus’ allusively Middle Eastern solo improvisation introduces Coban Sirto, a whirlingly carnivalesque Balkan dance fueled by Lemm’s rat-a-tat on the toms, Mintus’ twistedly swaying circus riffs and Shmerling’s leaping, bounding insistence. The final cut is My Ideal, Mintus solo, slicing and dicing with Errol Garner-ish flair and a playful spaciousness. The best piano trio album of 2017 by a mile, so far.
A Chance to Discover Some Rare Jazz Seldom Heard on This Continent
Even in this youtube-enabled era where a kid from Reykjavik or Rhode Island can develop jazz chops to rival anyone from Harlem, it takes a special kind of passion to play music that’s not native to your home turf. That’s why so many of the European jazz acts with the ambition to cross the pond can be fantastically good. And while most American fans probably don’t think of Poland as a jazz hotspot, this upcoming week’s annual Jazztopad Festival has a lineup that could open a lot of eyes and ears.
The good news is that the dreaded f-word (fusion, for folks who might have forgotten) isn’t part of the deal. There are lots of flavors. Some of the bands on the five-night bill draw on ancient, rustic Polish folk themes, others move in more of a improvisational direction. The first two nights, June 21 and 22 are at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where darkly enigmatic improvisers Stryjo and the similar Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet play at 7:30 and 9:30 PM. The Wójciński/Szmańda Quartet make another appearance on June 24 at 8 PM with eclectically brilliant cellist Erik Friedlander at the Jazz Gallery. Strings work especially well with this kind of music.
The June 23 show is at Joe’s Pub at 7:30 PM, featuring pianist Marcin Masecki and rummer Jerzy Rogiewicz playing stride and ragtime classics. Then the festival winds up at National Sawdust on June 25 at 4 PM featuring mesmerizingly improvisational string ensemble the Lutosławski Quartet with violinist Mark Feldman and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. This blog was in the house for the quartet’s playfully fun show there last year with pianist Uri Caine, details here.
Another uncategorizably brilliant Polish band, the trio Lautari – who are not on this bill – wound up their US tour with an often riveting set last fall at Subrosa. While their current raison d’etre is to jam out rare, obscure and often otherworldly Polish folk themes, some of their their tropes are common in Polish jazz.
The big takeaway was how diverse Polish music has always been, and still remains. Several strikingly catchy, whirling dance numbers began with biting harmonies between Maciej Filipczuk’s violin and Michał Żak’s clarinet. Then Jacek Hałas’ piano would icepick and ripple, and sometimes he’d slow the tunes down and take them in a considerably more shadowy, Lynchian direction. Or they’d make a crazy quilt of counterpoint and then reconverge. Throughout their roughly ninety minutes onstage, there were recurrent echoes of Balkan music, including one particularly incisive dance number that drew a line south, straight to Macedonia.
The night’s most poignantly surreal moment was when they played a plaintive dirge to a backing track (on Filipczuk’s phone, actually) of an aging Holocaust survivor quaveringly humming an old folk tune. It was disquieting on more than one level to see the band playing along with that long-dead voice, but also redemptive to know that they’d literally resurrected the song.
As the show went on, phantasmagorical interludes reminiscent of Frank Carlberg’s Tivoli Trio were juxtaposed with bustling, Mingus-like passages and a slow, lingering piece midway through where a guest guitarist added brooding, Satie-esque accents. Halas opened the night’s most starkly riveting number solo on accordion, with a frantically trilling, Middle Eastern edge, then the band took it in a slinky direction that sounded like Dolunay on acid. There’s no guarantee that any of this will happen at this year’s festival, but you never know.
Amir ElSaffar’s Rivers of Sound Release the Most Rapturously Epic Album of 2017
Trumpeter/santoorist Amir ElSaffar’s epic, rapturous new double vinyl album Not Two, with his large ensemble Rivers of Sound, is a new kind of music. It sounds more composed than improvisational; the reverse is probably true. While the lp – soon to be streaming at New Amsterdam Records – embodies elements of western classical music, free jazz, Iraqi maqams and other styles from both the Middle East and the American jazz tradition, it’s not meant to be cross-cultural. Pan-global is more like it. Haunting, dark and incessantly turbulent, it reflects our time as much as it rivets the listener. The performances shift tectonically, dynamics slowly surging and then falling away. ElSaffar and the ensemble are playing the album release show outdoors at 28 Liberty St. at William in the financial district (irony probably intended) at 6 PM tomorrow night, June 16 as the highlight of this year’s River to River Festival.
The personnel on the album come out of as many traditions as the music, and more. The core of the band comprises ElSaffar’s sister Dena, a first-rate composer herself, who plays viola and oud, joined by multi-instrumentalists Zafer Tawil and Geroges Ziadeh, tenor saxophonist Ole Mathisen, oboeist/horn player Mohamed Saleh, multi-reedman JD Parran, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, guitarist Miles Okazaki, cellist Kaseem Alatrash, saxophonist Fabrizio Cassol, buzuq player Tareq Abboushi, bassist Carlo DeRosa, percussionist Tim Moore and drummer Nasheet Waits.
That the album was recorded in a single marathon sixteen-hour session, live to analog tape, makes this achievement all the more impressive. The album’s first track, Iftah capsulizes the scope and sweep of ElSaffar’s vision. It slowly coalesces with shivery rhythmic variations on a majestic three-note theme the group slowly expanding on a vast ocean of ripples and rustles both near and distant, drums and cymbals introducing ElSaffar’s towering fanfare. But this is not a celebratory one: it’s a call to beware, or at least to be wary. Ole Mathisen’s meticulously nuanced voice-over-the-prairie sax signals another tectonic shift outward, ripples and rings against brassy echo effects. The result is as psychedelic as any rock music ever written, but deeper. A scampering train interlude with sputtery horns then gives way to the main theme as it slowly winds down.
The second track, Jourjina Over Three follows a lively, spiky groove that rises to an energetic, microtonal Iraqi melody and then takes a sunny drive toward Afrobeat on the wings of a good-natured Abboushi solo, the whole orchestra moving further into the shadows with a shivery intensity as the rhythm falls out.
The groove of Penny Explosion alludes to qawwali, while the melody references India in several places, the stringed instruments taking it more enigmatically into Middle Eastern grandeur that then veers toward what could be a mashup of Afrobeat and the most symphonic, psychedelic side of the Beatles. A Mingus-like urban bustle develops from there, the bandleader leading the charge mutedly from the back.
Saleh’s mournful oboe over a somber dumbek groove opens Ya Ibni, Ya Ibni (My Son, My Son), plaintively echoed by Mathisen and then the bandleader over a stark, stygian backdrop. Adasiewicz then channels a glimmer, like Bryan & the Aardvarks at their most celestial. How the group unravels it into an eerie abyss of belltones is artful to the extreme.
Layl (Night) is just as slow, more majestic, and looks further south toward Cairo, with its slinky, anticipatory electricity, a mighty, darkly suspenseful title theme. The composer’s impassioned, flamenco-inflected vocals and santoor rivulets drive the group to an elegantly stormy peak. Live, this is a real showstopper.
More belltones and a bristling Andalucian-tinged melody mingle over an implied clave as Hijaz 21 gets underway, the strings building acerbically to a stingingly incisive viola solo, trumpet combining with vibraphone for a Gil Evans-like lustre over a clip-clop rhythm.
The next-to-last number is the titanic diptych Shards of Memory/B Half Flat Fantasy, with galloping variations on earlier themes. Its intricately intertwining voices, vertiginous polythythms, conversational pairings and echo effects bring to mind ornately multitracked 70s art-rock bands like Nektar as much as, say, Darcy James Argue or Mohammed Abdel Wahab. The cartoonish pavane that ends it seems very sarcastic.
Bayat Declamation, the album’s most traditional maqam piece and arguably its most austerely beautiful track, makes a richly uneasy coda. Other than saying that this is the most paradigm-shifting album of the year, it’s hard to rate it alongside everything else that’s come over the transom this year because most of that is tame by comparison. There’s no yardstick for measuring this: you need astronomical units. If you’re made it this far you definitely owe it to yourself to immerse yourself in it and make it out to the show tomorrow night.
International Contemporary Ensemble Unveil a Rapturously Low-Key Program at the Miller Theatre
International Contemporary Ensemble probably cover more ground than any other indie classical group, in terms of territory, personnel and repertoire. These days they’re more or less a bicoastal unit, with a revolving door of first-class players. Last week at the Miller Theatre, a characteristically eclectic New York subset of the organization rewarded the big crowd who’d come up to 116th and Broadway with a texturally delicious program of duo and trio works spiced with shimmering microtones, overtones and strange tunings. The ostensible theme was animal behavior; if that was meant to acknowledge how much more animals hear than we do, that made more sense.
The first really interesting piece on the bill was the world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s White Rainbow, which Jacob Greenberg played with a graceful spaciousness on harmonium. Despite the choice of instrument, there wasn’t any distinctive Indian flavor to the composer’s methodically spaced, minimalistic waves, sometimes employing a drone effect from phrase to phrase. This gave a lulling, comforting sense to what otherwise could have been construed as a wry series of trick endings.
Technically speaking, the piece de resistance was Ann Cleare’s Luna (The Eye That Opens the Other Eye), played solo on alto sax by Ryan Muncy. Employing every fragment of bandwidth in his daunting extended technique, Muncy built sepulchral overtones that pulled gently and wafted around a center, a study in mist, stillness and unselfconscious virtuosity.
Suzanne Farrin’s Polvere et Ombra was a playground for lush, lively glissandos by harpist Nuiko Wadden. Joined by acoustic guitarist Dan Lippel, the duo made their way cautiously through the allusively sinister microtones of Drew Baker’s Skulls. Muncy and Greenberg joined forces for the concluding piece, Alex Mincek’s Pendulum III, which when it built enough steam was a striking reminder of how subtle changes in a particular scale can create radical changes in the music’s colors.
These early evening, free “pop-up” concerts at the Miller Theatre can be hit-and-miss, but more often than not they’re a real treat. Originally conceived as an intimate series with free beer and the audience seated onstage, they’ve outgrown the stage (and sometimes the beer too). But this isn’t really a drinking event, it’s about the music. Since their inception in 2012, a steadily growing number of crowds have had the opportunity to hear John Zorn world premieres, Berio Sequenzas, a deliciously creepy performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and even a rare all-Michael Gordon bill of electroacoustic works in addition to scores of pieces by lesser-known but no less intriguing composers. The final one this season is tonight, June 13; doors are at 5:30, music at 6, played by Miller favorites the Mivos Quartet.
And International Contemporary Ensemble perform Pauline Oliveros’ Heart of Tones on the plaza at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival on July 28 at 7:30 PM.
Lucid Culture 