A Fun New Mini-Album and a Couple of Upcoming Shows by the Nouveau Classical Project
The Nouveau Classical Project have a playfully trippy new ep, Currents, streaming at Bandcamp and a couple of shows coming up. They’re at the Arete Gallery in Greenpoint this Friday night, Nov 30 at 8 PM, where they’re playing music by Missy Mazzoli and Leaha Villareal plus two new commissions by Emily Praetorius and William C. Mason. Cover is $20/$15 stud. Then they’re playing a free program TBA at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St. on Dec 6 at 7:30 PM; get there early if you want a seat.
The album has three tracks. The first is David Bird’s Cy Twombly shout-out, simply titled Cy. Deep beneath its squeaks and shivers, it’s spectrai music. Microtonal brushstrokes from the strings over a drone give way to white-noise pulses peppered with muted, acidic, rhythmic motives, then stillness punctuated by more shivery, squeaky-door microtonal figures. Increasing agitation – seals and seabirds competing for the beach? – intrudes into the vastness of the outro.
The second piece is Olga Bell’s sardonic Zero Initiaive. Sugar Vendil’s piano and the strings hammer out a Scottish folk-tinged theme behind what sounds like a pastiche of banal bar conversation, then cellist Thea Mesirow runs a trickily circling bassline opposite Laura Cocks’ flute over an increasingly animated string-and-piano backdrop. The tongue-in-cheek, gracefully orchestrated fugue of sorts at the end mirrors the ridiculousness of the spoken-word track.
The final number, Isaac Shankler’s Artifacts is even loopier and spaciously punctuated, with an increasingly intricate web of counterpoint. Maybe it’s the strong presence of Mara Mayer’s clarinet, but the early section comes across as a more bubbly take on Ken Thomson’s recent work. The broodingly sustained, string-driven passage that follows eventually gives way to a twistedly surreal disco interlude. Catch them in Brooklyn or Manhattan and see how much of this they can replicate live.
A Characteristically Dark, Cinematic New Album and a Smalls Gig from Phillip Johnston
Best known as a co-founder of the irrepressibly cinematic Microscopic Septet, saxophonist Phillip Johnston has also unsurprisingly done a lot of film work in addition to a bunch of smaller-group projects over the years. He’s playing with the celluloid-oriented Silent Six tonight, Nov 27 at 7:30 PM at Smalls, although his latest project is with a smaller group, the darkly picturesque organ quartet the Coolerators.
Their new album, Diggin’ Bones, is streaming at Bandcamp. As the bandname indicates, the Thelonious Monk influence that informs so much of what Johnston has done throughout his career is front and center here. The tunes are a mix of older material rearranged for organ quartet plus some deliciously menacing new material which gives new meaning to the term “gutbucket organ music.”
The opening track, Frankly, sets the stage, a carnivalesque strut juxtaposing Alister Spence’s smoky, menacing organ against Johnston’s more lighthearted riffage, bassist Lloyd Swanton and drummer Nic Cecire light on their feet. Further back in the mirror but just as present is a certain cover of Pictures at an Exhibition.
What Is Real?, a catchy number that dates back to the 80s, expands out of a syncopated Lou Donaldson-tinged soul-jazz tune, the bandleader sailing uneasily overhead. The title track blends elements of Monk, klezmer and latin noir, Spence raising the suspense with his blend of marionettish staccato and funereal swirl that loosens and lightens, Johnston’s biting modalisms bringing it full circle.
Temporary Blindness is a more latin-flavored take on the album’s opening track: the macabre duet between Spence’s stabbing organ and Swanton’s bowed riffage is one of the album’s high points. Later, which dates from Johnston’s days as a busker in San Francisco in the 70s, is an altered waltz with a surreal, enveloping blend of Monk, the Middle East and psychedelic rock. It’s the album’s most epic and strongest track out of many.
The lone cover is The Revenant, by 70s folk noir icon Michael Hurley, reinvented as a wistful, sparsely arranged shuffle groove with an aptly ghostly, tiptoeing Swanton solo. Legs Yet is the group at their slinkiest and most modally improvisational – and the most traditional, funky organ jazz tune here. Trial By Error – which Johnston had originally recorded with accordion wizard Guy Klucevsek – has a brisk, brightly pulsing klezmer influence fueled by Johnston’s acerbic yet balmy soprano sax attack.
Regrets #17, another number that dates from the 80s, works tight variations on a bluesy chromatic swing theme: here and throughout the album, Spence’s smoky ripples bring to mind the great expat New York organist Jordan Shapiro. The final cut, Ducket Got a Whole In It brings the album full circle with a creepy circus flair. This is arguably the best band Johnston has worked with outside of the Micros, and this album is one of the best and most tuneful of 2018.
Another Relentlessly Haunting Album and an Alphabet City Gig by Guitarist Gordon Grdina
Even by his own high-voltage standards, fiery jazz oudist/guitarist Gordon Grdina has really been on a roll making albums lately. Edjeha, with his Middle Eastern jazz quartet Marrow might well be one of the half-dozen best albums released this year. His other new one, Inroads, with his quartet of reedman Oscar Noriega, pianist Russ Lossing and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi blends haunting Middle Eastern chromatics with savage improvisation and even detours into snarling doom metal and Lynchian cinematics. This is deep, dark music. Their next gig is Nov 26 at 9 PM at the old Nublu on Ave. C; cover is $10.
The album – streaming at Bandcamp – kicks off with a haunting, spaciously Satie-esque rainy-day piano tableau cruelly titled Giggles. The band follow with the album’s most epic track, Not Sure, opening with frenetic, polyrhythmic variations on a Balkan-tinged theme, disintegrating for a bit and then regrouping with a savage late 70s King Crimson focus and more of a Middle Eastern attack. Lingering psychedelic pulses give way to a brisk, twisted stroll that isn’t Britfolk or Egyptian but alludes to each of those worlds. From there the band scamper and then memorably blast their way out.
P.B.S., another epic, beginns with interchanges of creepy Rhodes and more stern acoustic piano, Grdina and Noriega – on alto sax – playing the morose central theme in tandem. A marionettish theme develops; Noriega’s microtonal, allusive circling beyond an increasingly tense center is pure genius. Deep-space oxygen bubbles escape the Sun Ra craft as solar flares loom ever closer, then sear the scenery:.Grdina’s merciless, resonant attack is breathtakingly evil.
Semantics is a brooding, morosely wafting duet for echoey, spare guitar and ghostly sax. The next epic, clocking in at practically ten minutes, is Fragments, the bandleader’s spare, spacious oud intro echoed by Lossing’s inside-the-piano flickers and muted rustles. The two develop a phantasmagorical catacomb stroll; then each band member takes a separate elegaic tour, only to reconvene with a frenetic hope against hope. Noriega’s looming foghorn solo at the end is another gloomy highlight.
The desolately crescendoing guitar/sax tableau Casper brings to mind Bill Frisell at his most disconsolate, or Todd Neufeld’s whispery work with trombonist Samuel Blaser. Kite Fight, a squirrelly and then assaultive Grdina/Noiriega duet introduces the album’s final epic, Apokalympic, Noriega eventually wafting in to join Grdina’s expansive postbop chordal guitar phrasing. Lossing’s arrival signals a turn toward franticness and terror, fueled by a scorching guitar/sax duel. The marionettish Macedonian psychedelic outro is irresistibly twisted.
The group close with a Lynchian reprise of Giggles, Grdina’s angst-fixated, starry reverb guitar paired with Lossing’s close-to-the-vest, wounded neoromanticisms. Looks like Grdina has not one but two albums on the best of 2018 list here.
A Playful, Picturesque New Album and a Fort Greene Show by the World’s Most Mysterious Drummer
Why on earth would anyone be interested in an album of solo percussion? Because the world’s most mysterious drummer, Carlo Costa, is playing it. While he’s best known for his sepulchral, otherworldly sound, his new solo album, Oblio – streaming at Bandcamp – is the funnest, funniest and by far the most colorful project he’s ever been involved with. He’s playing the release show this Nov 29 at around 9 at Jack in Fort Greene. The intense improvisational trio of cellist Leila Bordreuil, bassist Sean Ali and violist Joanna Mattrey open the night at 8; cover isn’t listed on the club’s calendar or any of the musicians’ gig pages, but it’s usually $10 for shows here.
Costa’s new album has two tracks. The first clocks in at a bit more than twenty minutes, the second at about seventeen. It’s likely that most if not all of it is completely improvised. Here’s what happens: entertainment coming at you right down the pike.
A gentle drone punctuated by wavelike gong pulses, then a mysterious flicker or two! Somethihng is afoot! The crank of an antique car engine, a jaunty whistle or two, a perplexed persistence…the motor sputters but never quite starts.
The way Costa mimics a cello or violin simply by rubbing his drumheads is astonishing. Persistent squeaks over calm ambience, agitated chirps alternating with playful rattles…then a jungle begins to come to life! That, or a bagpipe gone off the rails while a thunderstorm looms in the distance. The clouds burst, and suddenly it’s a hailstorm!
A squeaky if steady crank slowly loses its grooves. More of that distant boom alternating with sand in somebody’s hourglass…or shoes. A shinto temple in the rain before 3/11 ruined everything…is that mosquitoes, a cash register about to self-combust, or the most brilliant approximation of a rainstorm ever recorded by a multi-percussionist?
Scurrying insectile phrases against lingering, high washes conclude album side one. Side two opens with a kitchen-sink feel that grows to a LOL-funny series of Rube Goldberg machine polyrhythms, once again over that ominous series of cumulo-nimbus gong hits in the background. Tree frogs! A woodpecker! A dude with a bandsaw trying to cut down the tree with the woodpecker in it?
Rain on the music box…hacksaws on a particularly stubborn pipe…Dr. Seuss clockwork…a squeaky wheel that gets no grease…and there you have it, the most psychedelically entertaining percussion album of the century!
Leila Bordreuil Cooks Up Murk and Mysticism at the Kitchen
That Leila Bordreuil could sell out the Kitchen on Thanksgiving eve testifies to the impact the French-born cellist has had on the New York experimental music scene. After a long residency at Issue Project Room, she keeps raising the bar for herself and everybody else. This past evening she led a six-bass septet through her latest and arguably greatest creation, the Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble II. To call it a feast of low tonalities would be only half the story.
At the concert’s stygian, rumbling, enveloping peak, it was impossible to tell who was playing what because the lights had been turned out. In the flicker of phones, backlit by the soundboard’s glow and the deep blue shade from the skylight, six bassists – Zach Rowdens, Sean Ali, Britton Powell, Greg Chudzik, Nick Dunston and Vinicius Ciccone Cajado – churned out a relentless low E drone. As they bowed steadily, keening flickers of overtones began to waft over a rumble that grew grittier and grittier, eventually shaking the woofers of the amps. Yet only Bordreuil seemed to be using a pedalboard, first for crackling cello-metal distortion, then grey noise, then flitting accents akin to a swarm of wasps circling a potential prey. Still, the overall ambience was comforting to the extreme, a womblike berth deep in a truly unsinkable Titanic, diesels at full power behind a bulkhead.
The rest of the show was more dynamic,and counterintuitive. Bordreuil didn’t begin to play until the bassists had gradually worked their way up from a stark drone, Ali and Dunston introducing fleeting high harmonics for contrast. Beyond that, the six guys didn’t move around much individually. The second movement began with the composer leading a pitch-and-follow sequence of slow midrange glissandos, then she deviated to enigmatic microtonal phrases over the somber washes behind her. The final movements were surprisingly rapt and quiet – and much further up the scale, a whispery, ghostly series of variations on high harmonic pitches.
Methodically working a series of mixers and a small keyboard, opening act Dylan Scheer turned in an entertaining, texturally diverse, industrially icy set of kinetic stoner soundscapes. Flying without a net is hard work, and Scheer made it look easy, dexterously shifting from an echoey, metallic drainpipe vortex, to gamelanesque rings and pings, starrily oscillating comet trails and hints of distant fireworks followed by allusions to a thumping dancefloor anthem that never materialized. That the set went on as long as it did – seemingly twice as long as the headliners – could have been intentional. It was also too loud. The Kitchen is a sonically superior space: sounds that get lost in the mix elsewhere remain in the picture here. So there was no need to blast the audience with almost supersonic highs which gained painfully, to the point that the earplugs the ushers were handing out became necessary.
Bordreuil’s next show is at Jack in Fort Greene on Nov 29 at 8 PM with her trio with Ali and violist Joanna Mattrey.
Lucas Pino’s No No Nonet Is a Hit
Alto saxophonist Lucas Pino is a highly sought-after commodity in the New York scene, but he’s also a formidable composer. He and his coyly named No No Nonet have honed their sound with a regular residency at Smalls for more than a couple of years. Their latest album, That’s a Computer is streaming at Spotify – is a classic example of a band with smart charts which make them sound larger than they really are (although nine players are a handful, especially if you have to round them up for gigs}. They’re playing the album release show tomorrow night, Nov 19 at 7:30 PM at Smalls; cover is $20.
The album opens auspiciously with Antiquity, a brooding, rather bitter jazz waltz over edgy changes that remind of Frank Foster or Chris Jentsch at his most intense. Rafal Sarnecki’s guitar lingers; burnished horns rise and fall, Pino pirouetting elegantly rather than going for the jugular, especially after the lithe interlude midway through.
Horse of a Different Color is a big, bustling swing shuffle driven by Glenn Zaleski’s piano over Desmond White’s brisk bass and Jimmy Macbride’s drums. The interweave between reeds and brass – alto saxophonist Alex LoRe and baritone saxophonist Andrew Gutauskas with trumpeter Mat Jodrell and trombonist Nick Finzer – is especially tasty, as is Pino’s wafting runs punctuated by the piano and then the rest of the horns as Macbfride works a wry offbeat shuffle groove.
The lustrous ballad Film at 11 opens with rainy-day splashes of guitar and a slow brushy beat behind the horns’ glistening, sustained harmonies, Zaleski in spacious wee-hours mode. Pino’s mistiness matches the ambience; the slow, minimalist horn harmonies as it winds out add indie classical astringency.
Look Into My Eyes comes across as sort of a mashup of the album’s first and third tracks: darkly catchy hooks within a lush postbop framework, Pino again taking his time reaching takeoff velocity. The circling flock of counterpoint kicking off Finzer’s trombone solo is one of the album’s high points.
The album’s most majestically towering number is Frustrations, guest Camila Meza’s wistfully tender vocalese juxtaposed with bittersweet horns, the rhythm section giving everybody a wide, spacious berth. Gutauskas’ bass clarinet solo methodically parses the enigmatic atmosphere.
A bright, incisive clave tune, Sueno de Gatos has Afro-Cuban flair, and an almost conspiratorial camaraderie between Meza’s voice and the pulsing brass, the bandleader adding bluesy purism up to an unexpected, massed-staccato minimalist interlude. The album’s final cut is a jubilantly strutting vignette, Baseball Simiulator 1.000 (if you follow the sport, you know that a 1.000 average means a hit every time up).
Apropos of that baseball reference – there’s considerable irony that a band named after a certain 1920s Broadway musical would be released in a year when the Boston Red Sox won their fourth world championship in the past fifteen years. The producer of that musical, Harry Frazee also owned the Sox – and sold off all their star players in order to finance it. The Yankees took on almost every single one of those contracts. Babe Ruth and the rest of what was once the Sox put on pinstripes and became baseball’s first and arguably greatest dynasty. The Bostonians, their talent depleted, plummeted to last place: it would take them more than a decade to return to respectability.
Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Harrowing Ogresse Suite – Worth Seeing Twice
Cécile McLorin Salvant is widely acknowledged as this era’s foremost jazz singer. Any way you look at it, she’s the most mutable one. If you’ll indulge a little jazzspeak, she’s on first name terms with Ella and Sarah and Billie and Anita and Dinah…and even Blossom too. Salvant is a woman of a thousand voice, but also none other than her own – she transcends the sum of her influences for a uniquely nuanced yet dramatic style. And as much acclaim as she’s has earned for her voice, her songwriting is just as significant. The world premiere of her new big band suite, Ogresse, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past September was a lush, epic, phantasmagorical thrill ride, a withering parable of racial and gender politics that could not have come at a more appropriate time. How did that compare with the performance this past evening at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center?
This show seemed tighter, and somewhat shorter. There’s no question that solos, whether from Alexa Tarantino’s soprano sax, Warren Wolf’s vibraphone, Brandon Seabrook’s banjo, Tom Christensen’s oboe and tenor sax, and Kirk Knuffke’s cornet, among others, were punchier and more emphatic. Pairings between instruments – one of conductor and arranger Darcy James Argue’s favorite tropes – also seemed to be far more fleeting this time around. More subjectively, this show seemed more intimate: it was possible to make out the ominous lettering on Salvant’s elegant white robe. But the Met premiere was on a high stage under low lights, no doubt enhancing the sense of majesty and overwhelming sweep. NJPAC – which, along with the Met, co-commissioned the piece – is an amphitheatre where every seat seems to be closer to the stage than it really is.
On the surface, Ogresse is about a monster who lives in the woods, where she’s escaped after some early trauma that Salvant addresses with characteristically macabre allusiveness early in the suite. An ingenue from town disappears; one of the people there, not known for his fortitude, decides to seduce the ogresse in order to kill her. Despite all attempts to resist, the would-be assassin’s seemingly selfless overtures start to get under her skin. Meanwhile, the woodland animals do their best to bring the ogresse to her senses. The high point of the show, vocally at least, is when a robin wails over and over, “The man is lying!” That interlude was possibly even more spine-tingling here than it was at the Manhattan show.
Salvant’s genius as a tunesmith comes through as she takes venerable themes from torch songs from over the decades and turns them inside out. Being a purist, she has meticulous command of golden-age jazz vernacular and uses that to full effect – but for distant menace rather than seduction. When the allusion to the Twin Peaks main theme finally appeared, foreshadowing a carnivalesque waltz in a graveyard, the impact packed even more of a wallop than the massed glimmer of the full ensemble, which included the strings of the Mivos Quartet.
And the suite isn’t completely grim. Salvant has a coy, puckish and very deviously edgy sense of humor, which came through both via a couple of recipes – each sung in French – as well as the occasional detour into a wafting, boudoir jazz delivery or more playfully chirpy phrasing. There were also many moments where the music reflected a similar sensibility, whether when pianist Helen Sung picked up a melodica for a surreal ska-tinged passage, or when trombonist Josh Roseman delivered squeaky extended-technique drollery when he switched to tuba.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference in this performance was how Seabrook – a guitarist by trade, and an often rivetingly assaultive one – approached the main banjo theme, which Salvant employs as a Greek chorus of sorts. It’s built around a suspenseful, implied minor chord. At the Met, Seabrook approached it with more than a hint of skronk. This time out, he didn’t frail it, country-style, but nonetheless gave it more of a spare, traditional rustic Americana flavor, which raised the southern gothic ambience several notches.
So when the time came for Salvant to flip the script on both protagonist and antagonist, the tension had reached fever pitch – with the help of literally conflagrational orchestration behind her. It was here where she turned her back on the audience and faced the band, motionless, for what seemed minutes on end – and set up the crushing irony of the coda.
NJPAC is not only home to a lot of jazz but also classical music. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra have a stand here Nov 29-Dec 2, with music by Stravinsky and Milhaud with pianist Aaron Diehl as soloist in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. You can get in for $20.
Somber Arvo Part Choral and Orchestral Music for Somber Times
Whether Russian orchestras actually play Shostakovich better, or French organists are best suited to perform the work of Louis Vierne, are debatable questions. What was indisputable last night was how vastly attuned the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallinn Chamber Orchestra were to their countryman Arvo Part’s somber, rapturous mysticism. It’s impossible to think of a more apt program for a New York series called Sacred Music in a Sacred Space.
The concert was a confluence of unlikely serendipities. Beyond the rare opportunity to witness these two legendary ensembles together on American soil, the material on the bill was what many consider to be peak-era Part. Everything dated from1990 and later, with one of the arrangements a 2018 North American premiere. Better yet, the composer himself had suggested the inclusion of his soberly crescendoing, cell-like 2006 string orchestra piece, Fur Lennart in Memoria.
On a macro level, the performance was as meticulously serious as its overall gloom was pervasive and relentless. In particular, conductor Tonu Kaljuste made masterful use of the innumerable spaces that punctuated these works, leting the natural reverb of the high-ceilinged Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola resonate as profoundly as the music itself.
The ensembles only missed the big American costume-party holiday by a couple of weeks. To be fair, the only point where the sound reached fullscale horror was in the stalking pulse, gothic chromatics and brief series of muted, shrieking motives in the concluding suite, Adam’s Lament. The message, here as elsewhere, seemed to be that no human alone should have to bear the burden of being cast out of paradise, all alone in a hostile world.
The rest of the program was every bit as troubled and serious. Even celeste player Marrit Gerretz-Traksmann’s graceful comet-trail phrases and bittersweet starriness tended to simply mingle with the otherwise rather stygian, even creepy tones of Salve Regina. Mysterious bass drones anchored alternately moody and robust accents and call-and-response from the choir throughout an understatedly dynamic take of Part’s Berliner Messe, the oldest piece they performed. The string orchestra brought a gorgeous, Gorecki-like, hypnotically circling ambience to Silouan’s Song, rising to a windswept ethereality. And the Prayer, from Part’s Kanon Pokajanen suite, perfectly synopsized the concert’s slow, steady, spacious majesty, artfully developed variations on simple, emphatic phrases and lustrous contrast between highs and lows from both the singers and the strings.
The two ensembles are currently on US tour; the next stop is Nov 14 at 7:30 PM at Bing Concert Hall, 327 Lasuen St. in Stanford, California; you can get in for $32, less if you’re a student. After more lighthearted holiday fare next month, Sacred Music in a Sacred Space’s programming keeps the intensity high with a performance by longtime St. Ignatius organist Renee-Anne Louprette with uilleann piper Ivan Goff on Jan 20 at 3 PM; tix are $25.
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