A Viscerally Intense, Purposeful New Album From Violist Jessica Pavone
Violist Jessica Pavone has been one of the most consistently interesting and compelling musicians on the New York improvisational scene for the better part of a decade, someone who always seems to elevate other players to new levels of spontaneity. Everybody wants to work with her: trumpet icon Wadada Leo Smith, haunting psychedelic art-rocker Rose Thomas Bannister and the late, great guitar stormscaper Glenn Branca number among her many collaborators. Her broodingly surreal 2012 song cycle Hope Dawson Is Missing is a genuine classic, and her Dark Tips project with another hauntingly chameleonic multi-instrumentalist, Raquel Bell is magically murky. Pavone’s latest solo release, In the Action is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s playing on a killer twinbill on Feb 20 at 8 PM at Happy Lucky No. 1 Gallery, followed at around 9 by charismatic accordionist/multi-instrumentalist songwriter Rachelle Garniez, who’s playing with another first-rate violist, Karen Waltuch. The cover charge is a mystery right now; ten bucks would be a fair guess.
Pavone is not typically a showy player, preferring purpose, melody and texture. Muted, rhythmic white noise flickers behind uneasy, slowly resolving, multitracked close harmonies as the album’s first track, Oscillatory Salt Transport gets underway. Pavone wails on a pedal note when she’s not working twisted permutations on what could be the intro to a Scottish air.
With tons of reverb echoing from her spare, plucked phrases and overtones burning from her low strings, 2 and Maybe in the End could be a deconstructed 80s spacerock anthem at quarterspeed. Using her trusty loop pedal, Pavone builds vortical variations from a chugging diesel engine idle in Look Out Look Out Look Out: these stygian sounds hardly bring to mind the typical range of a viola. She turns the pedal off to begin the album’s concluding title cut, digging into her axe’s natural low registers in a return to allusions to British Isles folk, teasing the listener with that insistent opening cadenza up to a wry, completely unexpected false ending. As is typical of Pavone’s work, it has the freshness of having been made up on the spot even though a lot of it was probably planned out in advance.
Dynamic, Kaleidoscopic Massed Improvisational Sprawl from Ingrid Laubrock
As a saxophonist, Ingrid Laubrock has formidable chops, borderless ambitions and an often devious sense of humor. While she’s been increasingly sought after for prestige big band gigs in the last couple of years, her own compositions up til now have been mostly for small groups, heavy on the improvisation. This blog characterized her 2016 album Ubatuba as “free jazz noir.” Her latest release, Contemporary Chaos Practices – streaming at Bandcamp – is her most ambitious project to date: two lushly invigorating, Braxton-esque pieces for orchestra and soloists. Those looking for bouncy hooks and swing won’t find it here, but as far as grey-sky massed improvisation, vivid unease and wry humor are concerned, this album is hard to beat.
One big innovation here is that Laubrock employs two conductors. Eric Wubbels conducts the score, while the conduction of Taylor Ho Bynum guides the improvisational aspects of the performance. A big whoosh from the 42-piece orchestra kicks off guitarist Mary Halvorson’s insistent pointillisms as the first segment of the epic four-part title piece gets underway, quickly echoed by the full ensemble: the hammering effect is very Louis Andriessen. Echoey, after-the-battle desolation alternates with massive upward swells; hushed flickers interchange with assertive, massed staccato. From there, a big, portentous heroic theme gets devoured by a flitting swarm of instruments: the effect as funny as it is disconcerting.
The first two movements segue into each other; the third begins with Messiaenic birdsong-like figures, then Jacob Garchik’s trombone kicks off a deliciously off-center, frantic chase scene from the whole ensemble. Led by dissociative figures from the strings, the calm afterward foreshadows the eerie resonance of the coda, awash in enigmatic low brass while Kris Davis’ electric piano flickers and flutters like the celeste in a Bernard Herrmann horror film score.
The album’s second piece, Vogelfrei, begins lush and still, Davis’ muted, ghostly piano signaling a droll exchange between strings and low brass. The intricacy of the interplay, right down to the tongue-in-cheek whistling of the strings amid a slowly emerging, lustrous melody, may be more thoroughly composed than it seems. Comedic moments – Halvorson’s guitar detective hitting a brick wall and then collapsing, and a yes-we-can/no-you-can’t smackdown – liven an otherwise persistent disquiet. A sepulchral choir of voices enters as the instruments build to a crowded skatepark tableau, which disappears only to pop up again.
Davis’ brooding neoromantic figures echo over a distant whirl and bustle, followed by a couple of slow but vigorous upward crescendos. Moments of bittersweet melody fall away one after the other, fading down and out with a long shiver from the strings a la Julia Wolfe.
Laubrock’s New York home these days is the Jazz Gallery, although she also likes to explore the fringes, both literally and figuratively. Her next gig is on Jan 31 at Holo in Ridgewood with a like-minded cast of improvisers: guitarist Ava Mendoza, microtonal violinist Sarah Bernstein, bassists Adam Lane and Brandon Lopez, and drummer Vijay Anderson. It’s not clear who’s playing when or with whom, but the lineup is worth coming out for whatever the case might be. Showtime is 7 PM; cover is $15.
Mesmerizing Contrabass Clarinet Atmospherics From John McCowen
One of the most subtly magical atmospheric albums released in recent months is John McCowen’s Solo Contra album, streaming at Bandcamp. It’s a trio of solo compositions for contrabass clarinet. McCowen is a protege of Roscoe Mitchell and has a background in punk jazz; this album brings to mind the former if not the latter. Lesley Flanigan’s experiments with speakers and audio feedback are another strong point of comparison. McCowen’s formula seems simple but is actually very technically daunting: to employ this relatively rare, low-pitched instrument to produce surrealistically oscillating, keening high textures via tireless circular breathing.
Gritty, simmering ambience rises out of a mist as the first track, Fur Korv gets underway. Valves pop delicately in the room’s tantalizing natural reverb; high harmonics build slowly and disappear in a second.
It’s amazing how many of those harmonics McCowen is able to simultaneously tease out of the horn in the second number, Chopper HD, a study in burred high frequencies. Much as the sonics often evoke a circular saw, or a loose fanwheel that could use some grease, it doesn’t appear that McCowen uses any electronic effects to make his job easier.
McCowen’s magnum opus here is the practically seventeen-minute suite Berths 1-3. Digeridoo-like spirals contrast with barely audible, breathy white noise; as the pitches grow higher and more acidically scratchy, it’s a clinic in rattle and hum, a treble counterpart to the diesel-beyond-the-bulkhead ambience of Gebhard Ullmann’s BassX3 project. This isn’t music that will hit you over the head, but you can get completely lost in it.
A Musical Tribute to America’s Best-Loved Supreme Court Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a.k.a. The Notorious RBG is not the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court, but her contributions to American jurisprudence arguably surpass those of any other female member and most of its men as well. With that in mind, let’s wish an equally long and influential career to Sonia Sotomayor – she and Ginsburg are needed there more than ever. Beyond RBG’s acerbity and ever-increasing value as a rare voice of reason, she’s beloved for her sense of humor. And like many jurists, she’s not averse to the spotlight, whether on or off the bench. For example, she’s performed in an opera, which makes more sense considering that her daughter-in-law is soprano Patrice Michaels.
While best known as an opera singer, Michaels is also a composer. Her suite The Long View: A Portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Nine Songs is the centerpiece of the album Notorious RBG in Song, streaming at Spotify. Backed by eclectic pianist Kuang-Hao Huang, Michaels traces the career of her mother-in-law through music as diverse as the cases RBG has had to hear. All the songs here are distinctly 21st century: the cellular phrasing of Philip Glass seem an obvious influence, along with jazz and the early, quasi-neoromantic Schoenberg. Michaels’ tendency here to shift between a bel canto delivery and sprechstimme also brings to mind Schoenberg’s art-songs as well as the operas of Missy Mazzoli.
Michaels’ song cycle begins with the brief, incisively insistent foreshadowing of Foresight, based on a 1943 letter from Justice William O. Douglas contemplating when the time might come to allow women to serve as clerks on the court – talk about low aspirations! Celia: An Imagined Letter from 1949, an uneasily circling, spacious ballad, offers insight into how Ginsburg’s mom encouraged her aspirations while holding fast to tradition.
RBG’s father-in-law, Morris Ginsburg, gets a shout in Advice from Morris, balancing the neoromantic with hints of boogie-woogie. Michaels gives voice to RGB’s late husband, Martin D. Ginsburg in the wry lawyers-in-love anecdote On Working Together. Anita’s Story, an 80th birthday present for RBG is a much funnier narrative, colorfully illustrating a political awakening the jurist jumpstarted in one of her clerks.
The brief, Debussy-esque New York, 1961 offers insight into her daughter’s early years as a latchkey kid. The Elevator Thief is a more lighthearted, vividly imagistic picture of innocuous mischief from an era when kids had to come up with ways to entertain themselves instead of relying on their phones.
Dissenter of de Universe: Five Opinions and a Comment is a pastiche of quotable RGB statements on affirmative action, women’s and voting rights (the infamous Shelby v. Holder case), and a mouthful for Michaels to sing, but she’s game all the way through. In the suite’s scampering coda The Long View, Questions Answered, Michaels channels RBG’s tirelessness (more or less, anyway), irrepressible wit and gravitas: it’s the album’s most dramatic moment.
The album contains four more songs. Lori Laitman’s miniature Wider than the Sky is a gently pastoral setting of an Emily Dickinson poem. Vivian Fung’s Pot Roast à La RBG captures a sardonic, unexpectedly acidic kitchen scenario. Stacy Garrop’s poignant aria My Dearest Ruth employs one of RBG’s husband’s final love letters. The final track is Derrick Wang’s You Are Searching in Vain for a Bright-Line Solution, from his comic opera Scalia/Ginsburg. Like the other songs here, it’s a challenge to make music out of prose that, while entertaining. was hardly written to be sung. That’s where the comedy comes in; one suspects that the Notorious RBG would approve.
Catchy Riffs, Ambitious Stylistic Leaps and Irrepressible Fun from David Dominique
People who play off-the-wall instruments tend to write off-the-wall music. David Dominique’s axe is the flugabone, a higher-pitched valve trombone usually limited to marching-band music. As you might expect from someone from that milieu, his new octet album Mask – streaming at Bandcamp – is irrepressibly fun, and rhythmic, and sounds like absolutely nothing else out there. It seems as if he’s been listening to a lot of Ligeti and other minimalist composers, although imputing influences to musicians is never a safe bet. Reduced to lowest terms, this album combines the hypnotic, cyclical quality of a lot of indie classical music with the exuberance of a brass band. Other reference points are the snark of Mostly Other People Do the Killing (and possibly some other snarky critters), along with the surreal live techno of German dancefloor nuts the Jazzrausch Bigband.
The bright opening track, The Wee of Us has jaunty New Orleans flavor, chattering dixieland voicings and tricky, staggered syncopation. If the Microscopic Septet were just getting started right now, they might sound like this, Alexander Noice’s flickering guitar mingling with Brian Walsh’s tenor sax and the altos of Joe Santa Maria and Sam Robles while violist Lauren Baba and bassist Michael Alvidrez hold down an insistent beat in tandem with drummer Andrew Lessman.
Grief at first seems to be a very sardonically titled jazz waltz, Santa Maria’s flute at the center paired against the flugabone and Robles’ baritone, the bandleader overdubbing a da-da chorus of vocals. The music gets serious at the end over Noice’s uneasy jangle.
Beetle, a coyly nocturnal swing number, brings to mind creepy cinephiles Beninghove’s Hangmen in a lighter moment…or Tredici Bacci. To Dave Treut – a shout-out to the ruggedly individualistic Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist – shifts surrealistically from balmy swing to a riffy mashup of Terry Riley and Dopapod, with a tingly viola solo on the way out. Then the band negotiate the odd syncopation of Invisibles, a sliced-and-diced march which is just as much about space as melody.
The band follow Five Locations, a series of brief sketches, with The Yawpee, an exuberantly racewalk through a series of catchy, loopy hooks strung together, with a cynically sinister oldtimey outro. Separation Strategies, with its motorik bassline and tight counterpoint, is the one track that most vividly evokes the Jazzrausch guys. The album ends with Gotta Fumble, tense low-register pedalpoint anchoring a lively flute hook, variations from individual voices spiraling up to puncture the playful, carefree ambience. Throughout the album, the jokes – some completely over the top, some much more subtle – are as entertaining as the band’s tightness and Dominique’s completely unpredictable seismic shifts.
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.
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.
Classical Accordionist Hanzhi Wang Brings Darkly Dynamic New Nordic Compositions to Carnegie Hall
Hanzhi Wang isn’t the first accordionist to specialize in new classical music, but she is the first-ever squeezebox player to earn inclusion on the Young Concert Artists roster. Even though more composers these days are writing for the accordion, that’s still a pretty big deal. Wang has a magically dynamic album of concise new works by Nordic composers, On the Path to H.C. Andersen, streaming at Spotify. She’s making her Carnegie Hall debut on Oct 22 at 8:30 PM in Zankel Hall, where she’ll be joined by the Zorá String Quartet, playing works by Bach, Gubaidulina, Moszkowski, Piazzolla and Martin Lohse. You can get in for as little as $10. Along with this past summer’s Bryant Park Accordion Festival – and maybe Golden Fest, which always has plenty of accordion music – this is THE big accordion event of the year in New York.
The first composition is Lohse‘s Menuetto, a steady, Philip Glass-ine, austerely waltzing theme punctuated by airy, rather still interludes, growing more uneasy as its distantly baroque-tinged, cell-like variations rise and then recede.
Lohse’s triptych Passing begins with a similarly circling if almost marionettishly pulsing allegro section. The steady, moonlit waltz that follows is deliciously ominous; the concluding variation is 180 degrees the opposite until that same resonance is artfully interpolated amidst the starry, flitting optimism. Wang’s precision, all the way through a persistent strobe effect, is striking.
A final Lohse piece, The Little Match Girl begins with sparse, Ligeti-esque syncopation and expands from there: the central theme reminds of the old English folk tune Scarborough Fair. Wang has gone on record as having a close personal connection to its persistent melancholy since it reminds her of her first solitary days and weeks as a Chinese accordion student abroad for the first time in Denmark.
She negotiates the twisted turns and sudden bursts of Jabberwocky, by Jesper Koch with carnivalesque vigor and finesse. The creepiest number here is Tears, by Bent Lorentzen, building to from ethereal suspense to phantasmagorical Flight of the Bumblebee clusters, murky low atmospherics and poltergeist accents bursting in from the shadows.
Wang concludes the album with Svend Aaquist’s practically fifteen-minute Saga Night, which quickly becomes a dissociatively eerie, rhythmically challenging fugue. A heroic theme is alluded to but never hit head-on; then a variation on the opening quasi-fugue makes an enigmatic return. In a way, it’s practically a synopsis of the album as a whole. While some of these pieces could conceivably be played on organ or by a string ensemble, nothing beats the plaintive lusciousness of Wang’s instrument of choice.