Blythe Gaissert Tackles the Concept of Home in an Era of Refugees and Homelessness
What’s become more and more apparent as the lockdowers’ schemes continue to unravel is that a significant portion of the global population managed to keep the lockdown at bay. Yes, entire segments of the economy, most tragically the performing arts, were largely destroyed. But freedom proved too strong to die. We found places to shop and eat where nobody was traced or tracked or expected to be muzzled. When our favorite bars and restaurants were padlocked, we started speakeasies and threw potlucks. A lot of us entertained audiences in our newfound clandestine spaces. And some of us even made albums. One particularly noteworthy and fiercely relevant new release is mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert‘s album Home, streaming at Bandcamp.
Its central theme relates powerfully to the global refugee crisis, although it’s taken on frightening new levels of meaning since the lockdown. Joined by a dynamic, impassioned chamber ensemble, Gaissert has engaged an eclectic cast of composers and lyricists who range beyond the indie classical demimonde with which she is most closely associated.
She opens the album with David T. Little and Royce Vavrek’s bracing Archaeology. Over a somber, steadily shifting backdrop from violinists Miho Saegusa and Katie Hyun, violist Jessica Meyer, cellist Andrew Yee and bassist Louis Levitt, Gaissert reaches for the rafters in this allusively ominous tableau: houses keep more secrets than anyone knows.
Gaissert sings in Chinese in Songs From Exile, a leaping yet pulsingly elegant diptych by Rene Orth utilizing an ancient Li Qing Zhao text, an expat’s view of absence and longing. The acidic glissandos from the strings in the second part are particularly disquieting.
Gaissert shifts to French for Nous Deux, Martin Hennessy‘s starkly string-fueled setting of a Paul Eluard text: “We ourselves are the evidence that love is at home with us,” is the crux of it. Laura Kaminsky and Kimberly Reed‘s Carne Barata (Chopped Meat) witheringly quotes immigrant Linda Morales’ cynical account of undocumented employees in the meatpacking industry. Colleen Bernstein’s vibraphone lingers beneath the opacity of the string section and Gaissert’s impassioned duet with baritone Michael Kelly.
She soars over Bradley Moore’s colorfully crescendoing piano in John Glover and Kelley Rourke‘s Home Is Where I Take My Shoes Off. a welcome moment of comic relief. The music calms with Kamala Sankaram‘s gorgeously ambered, wistfully imagistic Ramonanewyorkamsterdam.
The lush sway of Jerry Hammer, by Ricky Ian Gordon, belies the song’s creepy childhood reminiscence of the death of an outcast. Gaissert reaches to the depths of her register in the final composition, Bungalow, a diptych by Mikael Karlsson and Rob Stephenson. Its alternately blustery and seemingly Indian-influenced, nebulously swirling textures build levels of suspense that the lyrics never match. Otherwise, throughout this album, Gaissert has really nailed the angst of an era.
An Intimate, Pensive, Guardedly Hopeful Solo Album From Singer and Pianist Lauren Lee
The lockdown derailed Lauren Lee‘s plan to put out a full-band album. So she made a great solo record, The Queen of Cups, streaming at Bandcamp. This intimate, thoughtful album is no less colorful than her work with other musicians. Among jazz pianists who also sing (or jazz singers who also play), she’s at the top of the list, underscored by the fact that she writes her own material. She’s a strong lyricist and has an irrepressible, literary sense of humor. As far as the title is concerned, in the tarot deck the Queen of Cups symbolizes a mother archetype, associated with compassion but also clairvoyance, and the ability to mirror others or oneself.
Lee plays steady, stern, resonant piano chords behind her contrastingly more lively vocalese in the opening number, Cogitation, subtly shifting the ambience toward optimism. She builds a soaring kaleidoscope of vocal harmonies over a minimalist electronic bassline in the anthemic second track, Up in the Air. “Keeping good thoughts and good intentions won’t stop the existential dread,” she demurs, but refuses to cave in to despair.
Lee goes back to piano, flitting and scatting in tandem with the leaping, hypnotically insistent riffs in Mad House. She switches back to electric piano for If I Should Lose You, a lingering, pensively spare tableau which she turns almost imperceptibly into more tropical territory. Lee assesses the process of stepping into a braver alter ego in Another Reality, via a playfully illustrative, decisively successful level of meta.
She goes back to piano for the steady but animated rhythms of Unity Village, descending into lowlit, considerably darker ambience and then a triumphant return. Her take of I Should Care has a low-key bounce and a subtle, souful bittersweetness over tersely bubbling electric piano, with a tinge of distortion on the amp.
Set to surrealistically textured electric piano, Boxes is an imagistic carpe-diem cautionary tale for anyone who might stash a good idea away, only to unpack it later, “coffee-stained and torn into pieces.” After that, Lee builds cautiously and spaciously to the moodily energetic vocalese and piano of Footprints. She winds up the record with Cocoon, artfully constructing an echoey, anthemic web of refracted vocals and keyboard multitracks.
Saxophonist Ralph Williams: A Familiar, Heartwarming Presence in Central Park
Who would have thought that the biggest memes in live performance in New York in 2021 so far would be chamber music, singer-songwriters and buskers? Almost fifty percent of the United States has been liberated and is back to normal, but some of the biggest names stuck in the other half of the country have been reduced to busking to make ends meet.
Not that there’s any shame in a performer doing that. Robin Aigner‘s hapless Mediocre Busker aside, there’s no better way to sharpen your skills than playing public spaces for hours on end, day after day. Now that spring is here, New Yorkers who’ve been starved for live music since the beginning of the lockdown need only look as far as the nearest park.
One of the most familiar sights in Central Park is saxophonist Ralph Williams, whose favorite spot is the edge of the benches just south of the Naumburg Bandshell. He’s been playing solo there for years. As you would expect from someone who’s put in thousands of hours on his instrument in frequently sub-optimal conditions, his chops are formidable.
But he’s not a showoff: his postbop style is very lyrical. Sonny Rollins seems to be an obvious influence, but where Rollins will self-combust, Williams likes subtle shades and ornamentation, and keeps his tempos, such as they are, on the slow side. He adds some gravel to his tone when he wants to drive a point home. Even though he’s playing solo, his approach is uncluttered, with lots of space. Any note in a particular phrase could be the springboard for a flurry or a melisma or a playful curlicue. While most of what he plays seems completely improvised, he’s anything but self-indulgent. And there’s a warmth and optimism, if not full-blown exuberance, in his music: this isn’t a guy who seems to want to exorcise demons with mournful wails or crazed extended technique.
He’s almost always at his usual spot on Sunday afternoons; he was there early Tuesday evening, after the clouds had passed. Too often we run across buskers when we’re enroute and in a hurry. This guy is a New York institution and will lift your spirits if you’re in the mood to hang, listen and recharge for the rest of the day.
The Dragon Quartet Tackle a Harrowing, Transgressive Masterpiece and Other Russian Works
Today it’s time to salute transgression, and freedom fighters, and one of the most harrowing pieces of music ever written.
Is it transgressive for a Chinese string quartet to play play popular and less popular but underated Russian repertoire? That probably depends on who you ask, and where you ask that question.
The Dragon Quartet – violinists Ning Feng and Wang Xiaomao, violist Zheng Wenxiao and cellist Qin Liwei – released their second album in the spring of last year. It’s streaming at Spotify; the centerpiece is Shostakovich’s chillingly immortal String Quartet No. 8. Having outlived Stalin, who had murdered so many of his friends, the composer wrote this piece in less than a week, fearing that he might not live to finish it since the tyrant’s successor, Krushchev, had gone on the warpath against artists again. If you know classical music, you undoubtedly know this one, where the composer inserts his initials thousands of times into the score (in German). If you don’t, you are in for a treat.
The slow, sheer despondency of the first movement is an especially severe contrast with the haggard chase scene (and sarcastic Wagner quotes) in the second. The dynamics of the marionettish dance of death in the third enhance the relentlessly sinister quality, particularly its ghostly swirls.
The fourth movement is where the gestapo knock on the door, one of the most iconic sequences in all of classical music. The quartet really dig into the lushness and desperation that follows: Ning’s muted lines as hope runs out pack a wallop, quietly, as does the resonance of the conclusion and Qin’s stark, solemn cello.
Mieczyslaw (Moishe) Weinberg was for several years Shostakovich’s neighbor and drinking buddy, and a vastly underrated, wildly prolific composer. He’d escaped the Holocaust only to be jailed by Stalin: although Shostakovich advocated for him, it was Stalin’s death that saved his life. Here the group play his String Quartet No. 2, which he wrote in 1945. It makes a good segue.
Ning soars uneasily over moody, sometimes insistent lows, with the group supplying vividly aching low/high contrasts as the piece gets underway. They give the second movement a fin-de-siecle, Debussy-esque wistfulness but also a marching cynicism and then flurry vigorously yet very warily through the third. The melodies hypnotically circling over the ghostly backdrop of the fourth movement are another higlight of the album. The group find a melancholy song without words and then get their hands dirty with the bracing round-robin counterpoint of the concluding movement.
Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 is an attractive piece of music, played expertly and thoughtfully, but it’s not going to blow you away like Shostakovich. It’s a love song to Borodin’s wife that ends as the happy couple go on a brisk stroll together. Before that there’s clever, Haydn-influenced counterpoint and shadowing, old world pensiveness, some stately waltzing, balletesque grace, and hummingbird-like speed from Feng when the conclusion calls for it.
A Sizzling Live Set of Free Jazz in Williamsburg Before the Lockdown
The glut of live albums recorded before the lockdown doesn’t seem like it’s going to abate anytime soon. And that’s just as well: this blog has been agitating for years for more artists to get wise to the value of live recordings. For one, they’re infinitely more economical than studio projects. And for musicians who aren’t located in free parts of the world, what better way to energize the fan base than a sizzling live record? Guitarist Jonathan Goldberger, bassist Simon Jermyn, violist Mat Maneri and drummer Gerald Cleaver had the presence of mind to record their February 24, 2019 Williamsburg show and release it as at Untamed: Live at Scholes, which hasn’t hit the web yet.
This is free jazz for people who like thoughtful interplay, edge and groove. Throughout the set, the acidic interweave between Goldberger and Maneri is such that it’s often hard to tell who’s playing what. Case in point: the hammering, hypnotic interlude about midway through their first number, presented here as an uninterrupted thirty-six minute track.
After the quartet coalesce gingerly to introduce it with spare bits of allusive Middle Eastern melody, then a hint of qawwali emerging, Jermyn hits a steady swing pulse and the race is on. Maneri takes centerstage to fire off a deliciously enigmatic, tersely microtonal solo. Goldberger throws shards and knotty postbop runs into the fray, Jermyn clustering and Maneri returning with an anxious intensity. Cleaver, running a colorful floating swing on his hardware, is back in the mix as you might expect at Scholes Street Studios, where everybody else in the band is using an amp.
There’s hazy volume-knob resonance from Goldberger in tandem with the viola as Jermyn runs a loopy riff. Cleaver gets some welcome time to himself, getting the boom or an approximation thereof going with his toms, the rest of the band building a devious swordfight with their swipes and slashes. Jermyn subtly hints at stoner boogie; winding tensile lines from guitar and viola over a cleverly altered Diddleybeat from Jermyn and Cleaver grow more aggressively skronky.
Everybody diverges down to echoes and more menacingly sustained wafts. Cleaver’s refusal to lose the groove, no matter how quiet he gets, is the key to the record. The rainy-day soundscape when he finally drops to a cymbal mist, Jermyn playing voice of reason to Goldberger’s knotty, restless lines while Maneri adds psychedelic harmonics, is just as much fun as when the band is really cooking. Likewise, the brooding viola solo, hypnotically pulsing drive and devious echo effects on the way out.
They fade up a much shorter number, presumably an encore, on the brink of a bracingly assertive Maneri solo as Jermyn shifts between a folksy dance and a gallop, Goldberger in jaggedly lingering mode. The Grateful Dead during their late 60s fascination with Indian music come to mind. Won’t it be even more fun when these guys can make another live album like this – or maybe they have, and they’re just not telling us yet. In the meantime, Cleaver is scheduled to play a series of live concert recording dates with saxophonist Darius Jones‘ trio on June 6 through 8 at 1 PM in Central Park, as part of Giant Step Arts’ incredible lineup of free jazz shows. Take the 81st St. entrance on the west side, go north and up the hill about a block, follow the sound and you’re there.
A Vibrant, Evocative, Summery Album From the Dennis Kwok Jazz Orchestra
The Dennis Kwok Jazz Orchestra’s album Windward Bound – streaming at Bandcamp – opens with a mist of wave splashes and sounds of shorebirds. But those aren’t samples. That’s the band conjuring up remarkable facsimiles of both. It’s a characteristically playful touch for multi-reeedman Kwok’s six-part suite, inspired by sailing on Lake Ontario and the lore of the sea.
The opening theme, The Calling begins as a calm, baroque-influenced prelude for winds, the rest of the nineteeen-piece ensemble sweeping up and in with hints of a sea chantey. It has the same lush, bucolic familiarity as Maria Schneider‘s lake-themed compositions.
Pianist Augustine Yates’ expectant pedalpoint anchors Kwok’s balmy alto sax intro, singer Caity Gyorgy adding lustrous vocalese as Ready, Aye, Ready gets underway. Bassist Jonathan Wielebnowski and drummer Jacob Wutzke drive the orchestra to a triumphant series of peaks, then shift from a funky sway to suspense as the piece ebbs and rises again. There’s a moment where guitarist Aidan Funston takes over the pedalpoint that could be Darcy James Argue in a foreboding moment…except that this album is generally upbeat and optimistic.
A Flat Boat Is a Fast Boat has driving latin flair, horns bursting above a rapid swing that threatens to get frantic, then the saxes – who include Naomi McCarroll-Butler, Sophia Smith, Brenden Varty, Kyle Tarder-Stoll and Jonathan Lau – battle it out with the brass. The fluttery false ending before Funston’s spiky solo is a cool touch.
The album’s big improvisational epic is The Tempest, beginning with stark low-register foreshadowing from the piano, followed by a series of skeletal accents throughout the ensemble as the bass growls in the distance. Slowly they rise out of muted skronk to an increasingly nebulous but agitated swirl as flute and trombones soar and resonate. The storm recedes quickly with a few fitful flourishes.
The fifth number, Elegy is where the whole group really coalesce with a shadowy power, in variations on a broodingly rising modal piano riff. Kwok’s misty, melancholy lines pack a quiet punch when the music recedes. The lakeside imagery as the upward drive returns is characteristically evocative.
Kwok brings the suite full circle with the final number, Red, Right, Returning, building on the original high-seas theme with carefree sax and a soulful muted trumpet solo. The rest of this inspired crew include trumpeters Megan Jutting, Matt Smith, Paul Callander, Marie Goudy and trombonists Nick Marshall, Andrew Gormley, Charlotte Mcafee-Brunner and Inayat Kassam.
So where the hell was this blog when this album hit the web in 2017? Focusing on the New York live music scene. Concerts: remember those? It won’t be long before we’re all going out again just like we used to. This summer, everybody’s going to bust loose. Lockdowners, you’re surrounded, time to raise the white flag or else.
Augusta and Georgina McKay Lodge Unearth Colorful Rarities From 18th Century Germany
Violinist Augusta McKay Lodge and her violist sister Georgina are a throwback to a time when classical musicians were also routinely expected to be good improvisers. Their new album J.G. Graun: Chamber Music from the Court of Frederick the Great – streaming at the violist’s music page – unearths rare baroque treasures for a global audience. What’s most exciting about this recording is that it contains a small handful of world premieres. It’s also noteworthy for including two of the earliest known works for viola as a featured instrument. And in keeping with a mid-eighteenth century German esthetic, the ensemble revel in opportunities to add individualistic embellishments, dynamics, and even entire parts. Much as obscure archival works are becoming more and more of a meme, this elegant and often unexpectedly colorful album is a real find. The duo have assembled an all-star cast here which includes Eva Lymenstull on cello and David Schulenberg on harpsichord.
They open with Johann Gottlieb Janitsch’s somberly crescendoing Trio Sonata in G minor For Violin, Viola and Continuo. The pedalpoint of the viola and harpsichord build a hypnotic quality early in the second movement, then waltz through the conclusion. Music for the entitled classes from this era is seldom so dark; needless to say, this is a welcome rediscovery.
Schulenberg reaches for an opulent rubato to open Johann Gottlieb Graun’s Sonata in C minor For Viola and Keyboard, Lodge rising from spare, plaintive phrasing to a long series of biting, lively fugal exchanges with the harpsichord. There are plenty of convention-defying surprises in this piece: kudos to the Lodges for resurrecting it.
Graun’s Sonata in B-flat For Violin and Keyboard is considerably more lighthearted, but this is a vigorous performance, lit up by Lodge’s steely legato, and Schulenberg’s playful ornamentation and pacing. The short phrases of the Sonata in C For Cello and Basso Continuo, by Carl Heinrich Graun, are more predictable, Lymenstull’s shifts in attack and dynamics front and center.
Franz Benda’s Sonata in C minor For Viola and Basso Continuo begins with elegantly wary pacing from Schulenberg behind Lodge’s gorgeously bittersweet resonance and melismas. The brooding counterpoint goes straight back to J.S. Bach and so does the sheer tunefulness: it’s arguably the high point of the album.
The Lodges save their most animated embellishments for the final work here, J. G. Graun’s warmly nocturnal, lilting Trio Sonata in A For Violin, Viola and Basso Continuo, anchored once again by Schulenberg’s uncluttered, nuanced harpsichord parts.
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