Category: Field Reports

Broad Ambition: Hartford New Music Festival 2012

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Lisa Coons - Field Reports, Headlines

This year’s Hartford New Music Festival (HNMF)—an annual event founded in 2011 by percussionist/composer Bill Solomon and composer Matt Sargent—consisted of a marathon concert on Saturday staged at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford. As director, Solomon explained that his goals were to “present a mixture of local composers/performers/ensembles and more internationally recognized composers…to present newer work in a historical context.” Though this may seem like an ambitious programming objective, it succinctly captures the primary characteristic of Saturday’s four-hour long concert.

Embroidery for small ensemble played by Ben Klein, tuba; Nathan Bontrager, cello, Libby van Cleve, oboe; Maura Valenti, harp; Carl Testa, bass, Bill Solomon, percussion; Anne Rhodes, voice

In an era when the term “music” has become so all-encompassing, we often find art categorized into complicated frameworks of sub-subgenres. To make sense of the expansive repertoire, we become hyper-specialized listeners; organizers limit events in scope, aesthetic, media, and artistic pedigree to the most conservatively curated set of similar (if experimental) works. But this was refreshingly not the case at HNMF. By including everything from electronic works and acoustic ensemble performances, to a sound art installation for amplified table, and even an eight-foot long embroidered score, this festival was a testament to the area’s artistic diversity.

In Alvin Lucier’s Charles Curtis, cellist Jessie Marino insinuated her slow, vibrato-less tones into a haunting soundscape of electronic drones. The work unfolded as a study of timbre, without deviations in gesture that might overshadow the colors. The patient insistence of the repeated gestures allowed us to experience each harmonically rich sonority as a discreet “object.” The room quieted to hear the subtle timbral shifts in the otherwise static material of each gesture.

EXILKABARETT (Darren Chase, tenor; Jessica Goldring, soprano, Lauretta Pope, soprano; Bill Solomon, piano) performing Peppermill Songs by Kirsten Volness

Only minutes later, the mood changed drastically. The ensemble EXILKABARETT unleashed a furious burst of acoustic energy in Kirsten Volness’s Peppermill Songs. These pieces, performed without break, set WWII-era protest writings by cabaret performer Erika Mann. In keeping with cabaret tradition, an exaggerated performance invited the audience into the piece, though it did not read as musical protest. Tenor Darren Chase spat out lyrics while unceremoniously dropping the oversized pages of his score down to the two sopranos sitting at his feet. The women picked up each, holding the caricatured portraits that were sketched on the backs of the pages high for the audience’s benefit. Volness’s satirical cabaret merely hinted at the musical chaos to come, however. In John Cage’s Musicircus later on the program, all were invited to move throughout the space as seven of his works were performed simultaneously. This fanciful piece—part performance, part installation, and part social event—seemed to illustrate the breadth of the festival’s stylistic ambitions.

Owen Weaver presented two movements from Memory Palace by Chris Cerrone. In the first, he plucked a quirky diatonic melody on piano strings to an electronic background of crickets and drones. The second was performed on a “homemade marimba” of wooden planks, from which Weaver elicited a fluid melody in controlled rolls. The dry attacks of the mallets grew more pitched and resonant as the electronics amplified the inherent tones of the wood. This simple, but elegant, process continued for several minutes, undermined only by the conspicuous placement of a kick drum at the performer’s feet. The waiting instrument evoked questions of how the piece’s gradual development could accommodate this disparate object. Those questions were resolved abruptly; Weaver struck skin and wood simultaneously and the melody, with its ghosted electronic resonance, was suddenly gone in a percussive snap.

Robert Carl’s Woodwind Quintet No. 2, “Bird of Guandu,” addressed ideas of anticipation and space through the observation of nature. The quintet began with simple chorale-style progressions separated by brief silences. For the second movement, the players moved from a traditional centered formation to separate corners and donned headphones. Each responded in imitation to his/her personal birdsong recording, creating sparse eruptions of instrumental warbles and coos. This movement acted more as installation than linear composition, disregarding the conventions of form and development. We could not anticipate the moments of silence, changes in texture, or the progression of sounds—we simply observed the Taiwanese birds through the filter of the quintet. The final movement acted as resolution, combining a variation on the first movement’s material with the introduction of a sparse electronic background of birdsongs.

Embroidery for small ensemble by Anne Rhodes

The festival commissioned the final piece on the concert, a work by Anne Rhodes titled Embroidery for small ensemble. Rhodes’s embroidered graphic score (measuring 2’x8’) acted as a map for the improvising musicians who premiered it. Though she did not limit the performers in their ranges of sound, Rhodes gave specific instructions for interpreting the score: rhythms and contours in squares were to be interpreted literally; figures contained in circles were to inspire the performers to explore extended techniques; musicians were to stay roughly together in the score by listening to one another; they could leave off anywhere in the form to play either the square in the bottom left corner or to perform an interpretation of the background texture. Rhodes described how the varying textures, colors, distortions of the fabric weave when stretched, and imperfectly realized shapes could elicit varied and surprising responses from musicians. This lovely artifact did seem to inspire the musicians, and the structures imposed helped to create more formal coherency in the performing group’s improvised music.

A display of Anne Rhodes score and artwork at the entrance to the festival.

Beyond the concert in the main room, works of sound art were installed throughout the Cultural Center. Most notable among these was a piece by Ken Steen and Gene Gort, two artists collaborating under the name New Music New Media New England (NMNMNE). Their project randomly paired 60 videos with 60 compositions, all of 60-second duration. They explained that 60x60x60 began as an exercise for students; it was a means of exploring complex relationships between audio and video beyond those of the common “predictable, illustrative, cinematic” combinations. NMNMNE referred to themselves as “curators/participants” in “a generative process,” not authors. The minute-long works were often compelling in their own right, but it was the experience of watching them in succession that evoked the strongest response. It drew attention to the roles and relationships of sound and video, but also to those of the observer; knowing that these were random pairings, one had to acknowledge the inevitable compulsion to “make sense” of the two elements as a unified whole. 60x60x60 is ongoing, with another call for submissions and an interactive version of the project on their website.

Anne Rhodes, soprano; Johnny Rogers, wineglasses; Maura Valenti, Harp playing Anthony Braxton’s Compositions 256 and 307

There were many more works to experience on Saturday, including an imaginative electronic installation by Brian Cook that used a wooden table as its physical interface; thoughtful installations by Lief Ellis and Scott Comanzo for audiences of one; a trio by Anthony Braxton with monomaniacal numeric text; Marc Burns’s composition combining chance, through-composition, graphic notation, and a kitchen clock; and a mix of acoustic and electronic pieces by Feng-Hsu Lee, Cenk Ergün, Todd Merrell, and Matt Sargent. Indeed, this was a festival of unpredictable and often incongruous works, but therein lay its charm. Larger cities have so many artists and performances that one can almost always find his/her musical “clique,” but the scenes in smaller cities are often organized as much by geography as aesthetic. And while it’s exciting to know you can find nearly any kind of a performance (no matter how specialized your tastes) in large urban markets, it’s also exciting that such wide range of artists come together in places like Hartford to create and promote work. The strengths of these collaborative communities reside in their eclecticism: diverse events make room for varied perspectives and, perhaps, an even more complex musical dialogue.

The Kids Are Alright: The Texas Young Composers Concert

Posted on May 7, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

When I was in high school, most of my free time was spent figuring out Van Halen licks, not writing orchestral music. I played classical guitar a bit and spent two years in juvenile detention at Tickle The Ivories Penitentiary, so I had some familiarity with the little black dots. However, for any number of reasons, the idea of composing never occurred to me. Who was I to put those things in order? This is apparently a question that never came to mind for the nine students who were chosen from across Texas to have their works performed at the Austin Symphony Orchestra’s second annual Texas Young Composers Concert. Still, even the night’s first composer Jack Roberts understood that this set him apart. “Writing music is just not a normal thing for a kid to do,” he acknowledged.

2012 Texas Young Composers Concert Winners with Joe R. Long (center) and ASO Executive Director Anthony Corroa (right). Photo by Don Hill.

Roberts’s Into the West was the opening work of the evening and was introduced by the composer via a short video projected above the orchestra. Similar videos preceded each piece and provided not only information about the background of the composer and the generation of the work, but also insight into the maturity and character of each artist. I’ve often said that I’m a very lucky guy to have not grown up in the YouTube age[1], but I can’t help but wonder if a sense of constant observation might speak to the high level of maturity and eloquence on display in these presentations. Bursting in all its pentatonic glory, Into the West put on display a number of tropes from the best of the old Westerns. Bright leaping horns held the door open for sad strings, all of it culminating in a triumphant ending.

Austin’s Jocelyn Chambers told a story of staring at a blank Sibelius screen, warmed over John Williams themes created and erased, while her grandfather played piano in another room. From among the lines coming from the piano, a Bb, Ab, and G spoke to her and became the germinal motive for her work My Heart. A largely melancholy composition with a number of dramatic transitions and a glimmer of hope in the woodwinds, My Heart was an impressive show for the youngest of the night’s composers.

Garrett Tatum’s Paradise—Paradise Lost had a strong declamatory opening, great brass voicings, and rich string scoring, all leading to a playful waltz which occasionally straddled the line between whole tone and diatonic. Contrasts by Wells Leng was just that, relative to Tatum’s work. A slow entrance in the winds paved the way for odd-time, ostinato, pentatonic material treated polyphonically at first but also leaving space for a number of solo sections. Trevor Villwock’s When I Woke Up in the Forest wrapped up the first half of the show with Tchaikovskian orchestration and a focus on the flute.

Bleak Dawn by Behnam Arzaghi was the most contemplative work of the evening. A broad harmonic language and long lingering lines set the stage for a more focused mix of Persian folk tunes and lyrical melodies which played hide and seek in the texture. Brennan Anderson’s Downfall Rising was a fantasy narrative of sorts, complete with peasants, heroes, and villains drawn from his experience in writing music for video games. (I should mention that although this was the first time I’ve actually met Brennan in person, I’ve corresponded with him ever since he approached me for an internship a few years back. We weren’t able to make it work at the time but we’ve kept in touch, and I was happy to see that he’d made better use of his time than running to get coffee for me.) Brandon Maahs’s Song of Love and Joy, the first movement from his Symphony No. 1, had a number of compelling features, including thoughtful string orchestration, use of 7/8, and arguably the most thunderous “Kaboom Ending!” of the evening. Finally, Jared Beu’s Affirmation featured varied and rich harmonic language, strong changes of mood, and a wonderful interplay of harmonies in the brass and flourishes in the woodwinds.

Let me tell you, if you want to see some proud parents (and hear some great tunes!) then be sure to check out next year’s show. Music Director Peter Bay and the orchestra put all of their forces to bear on these works, and when the composers (dressed to the nines in everything from tuxedos to Charlie Chaplin bowlers—I’m looking at you Brennan) were acknowledged in the boxes…well, let’s just say if you could harness the beaming power of those parents, you could power the country for a month. Or the East Coast leg of the Fair Warning tour.

***

1. There are quite enough thoroughly embarrassing still photos. Thanks, Dad.

Border Crossings: Switchboard Music Festival and The Little Match Girl Passion

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

Brava Theater, as seen from the Indian food truck

Chocolate cake!

The Safeway grocery store chain was among the sponsors of this year’s Switchboard Music Festival (which took place in San Francisco on April 1), donating a large sheet cake to the annual 8-hour musical extravaganza. Concertgoers were greeted with free slices near the entrance to the Brava Theater, just after receiving their entry wristbands. Verily, every performance should begin with a slice of chocolate cake.

Switchboard started in 2008 to showcase new music that sits at borders of genres. At the time, the three founders—clarinetist Jeff Anderle, composer/guitarist Ryan Brown, and composer/clarinetist Jonathan Russell—were all studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Though two of the three have since decamped to Princeton, Bay Area artists retain a strong presence in the festival’s programming, and the founders’ connection to the conservatory remains clear.

Jonathan Russell, Ryan Brown, Jeff Anderle (L-R)

Switchboard starts at 2 p.m. and doesn’t stop until 10 p.m., at least on paper; in reality, this year it lasted quite a bit longer. Thirteen sets ran through the day on the Brava main stage, with audiences allowed to come and go as they pleased (hence the wristbands). This year’s smorgasbord of artists included a guitar ensemble from the conservatory, a one-man piano/percussion “duo” (Danny Holt), a two-man guitar/percussion actual duo (The Living Earth Show), an electro-acoustic ensemble with strings and electronics (The Hurd Ensemble), and a band that was described as “hobbit rock” (Faun Fables). Here’s the full list of performers, along with generously lengthy audio samples from nearly all them. Though the printed program provided no biographical information about any of the artists—the info is only available on the festival’s website—regular Switchboard attendees likely recognized some familiar names: both Russell and Brown had compositions performed; Anderle performed a solo set; and longtime collaborator Cornelius Boots, who played with Anderle and Russell in the awesome bass clarinet quartet Edmund Welles, performed in two sets.

Anderle performing works for clarinet (live and pre-recorded) and electronics

When the festival was just starting out, it took place at Dance Mission Theatre, a small theater in the Mission district that normally presents dance (as you may have guessed). If memory serves, the first festival featured a mini “new music bake sale” (before such things got capitalized), where people sold homemade cupcakes and other simple concessions in the rehearsal studio down the hall from the performance space. The recent shift to the charmingly dowdy Brava Theater (still in the Mission) increased the capacity to about 350, and audiences this year were encouraged to patronize the Indian food truck parked outside, which the organizers had arranged to service the festival. As a result, the lobby was suffused with the savory smell of curry and cumin for much of the afternoon.

Cornelius Boots with Philip Gelb & Karl Young, performing Dunstable’s Quam Pulchra Es

Cornelius Boots with Philip Gelb and Karl Young, performing Dunstable’s Quam Pulchra Es

Though this may seem like a lot of info about the food situation, remember that 8+ hours straight is actually a hella long time to listen attentively to music. I was able to hear parts of 10 of the 13 sets; ironically, I missed the piece performed by the quartet Mercury Falls entitled Chocolate Chip Cookies for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner while I was busy refueling. Fortunately there were enough unexpected sounds to be heard throughout the day to keep the ear engaged, including a Dunstable motet performed on shakuhachis (which Boots introduced by pointing out that at the time “Japanese monks were playing shakuhachi for alms, John Dunstable was writing this”). Boots’s set was preceded by Ramon and Jessica, an endearing pair of San Francisco-based singer/instrumentalists named neither Ramon nor Jessica, performing their simple but clever folk pop songs on violin and ukulele, sometimes singing a cappella, and at one point scratching the mics with the temples of their eyeglasses.

The most unusual performance of the day to my ear and eye was Dominique Leone’s realization of Les Noces as performed by Ensemble Épouser, which was assembled specifically for this piece. Leone re-orchestrated Les Noces for two keyboards, bass, percussion, marimba, and just five singers, one of whom was a woman whose voice was digitally pitch-shifted to sound like a bass. The singers wore enormous blond wigs (the first movement is titled “The Tresses (At the Bride’s House)”) and sang in English, often with pop music inflections. The cumulative effect was disorienting and curiously fascinating—the project’s Kickstarter page calls it a “Stravinsky cover thing,” which is an oddly appropriate description. If you’re interested in hearing for yourself what this sounds like, you can either listen to a substantial sample on the Switchboard site (click the plus sign next to Leone’s name), or visit Leone’s Bandcamp page where you can stream an indescribably mind-boggling recording he released of himself singing all the parts (with pitch-shifting) plus two keyboardists playing all instrumental lines.

***

Volti singing Huang Ruo’s Without Words

I frequently perform with Volti, one of the headliners of this year’s Switchboard Festival, and am the group’s Artistic Advisor so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on their performance (which included works by Huang Ruo and Berkeley-based composer Robin Estrada, who has had several pieces performed at past Switchboards). However, several of Volti’s singers were involved with an unrelated project late last month that would have fit well within Switchboard’s genre-blurring structure: a production of David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion with four singers, Butoh-inspired dance, projections, and lighting design.

Photo courtesy of San Francisco Lyric Opera

The production was presented at the ODC Dance Theater by the San Francisco Lyric Opera, a company led by conductor Barnaby Palmer and director Chip Grant, that used to produce standard repertory operas in smaller settings. It went on hiatus for a couple years and, with this beautiful and heart-rending production, the company has relaunched itself with a new focus on chamber opera and other collaborative projects.

The four singers, who also played percussion, stood in an arc with Palmer conducting at a distance. Anastazia Louise of the theater ensemble Bad Unkl Sista told the story through movement, most of the time on stage in front of the singers but occasionally moving into the audience. At the end of the performance, Grant spoke to the audience about the direct relevance of the story to contemporary life in San Francisco. He drew awareness to the plight of the homeless, a real and visible issue in the Mission where the theater is located, and announced that donations placed in the basket by the exit for a local homeless relief program would be matched by the company up to $1000—a gesture that allowed the audience to consider the evening’s moving performance in ways that extended beyond the walls of the theater.

New England’s Prospect: Echolocation

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

Lautaro Mantilla (speaker) and Andy Fordyce (drums) performing Burr Van Nostrand’s Voyage in a White Building I, April 22, 2012.

The trope of the Forgotten-and-Rediscovered Genius is a powerful one in American culture, sitting, as it does, at the intersection of Rugged Individualism and Democratic Validation. It also, quite often, enables the typically (though most definitely not exclusively) American pattern of an artist’s biographical narrative eclipsing the actual worth of their art. But the April 22 concert of music by Burr Van Nostrand in New England Conservatory’s Brown Hall didn’t include any explanation as to why Nostrand hadn’t composed any music since the early ’90s, nor why the music he had composed had lain unperformed for the same amount of time. Which was really something of a gift: this was music that simply seemed to reappear, pristine, unencumbered by the accumulated residue of a zigzag career.

And it was pristine, in its way—a time capsule so perfectly preserved that its intrusion into the 21st century could make an unusually sharp mark. Van Nostrand, a maestro of aleatory and graphic notation, made waves as a master’s student at NEC in the late ’60s and early ’70s, then moved to California, where only a handful of further pieces emerged over another couple of decades. Jason Belcher, an NEC grad composer, heard a tape of Van Nostrand’s Voyage from a White Building I and was, as he put it, “wonderfully freaked out,” which led to him retrieving other scores from the American Composers Alliance’s archives and organizing this concert.

Each half of the program paired a shorter solo work with a more extended ensemble piece. Phaedra Antomines, a violin solo from 1968, started off by laying out, piece by piece, a familiar box of extended techniques: bowing behind the bridge, rapping on the soundboard, and so forth. But the music instead settled into a half-remembered version of the ersatz-Gypsy fiddling so favored by Romantic virtuosi, the swooning double-stops, the fusillades of left-hand pizzicato, here woozy with glissando and growling, heavy bow pressure: the historical gears sticking on their own rust. (Violinist Tara Mueller gave an excellent account, her casual mien belying a wholehearted technical absorption.)

If Phaedra Antomines was selective in its sound-world, Van Nostrand’s Fantasy Manual for Urban Survival, from 1972, was encyclopedic. Over a long, five-movement arc, flute (Lisa Husseini), cello (Jason Coleman), and prepared piano (Alex Zhu) cataloged variations: individual sonorities were collected into lists, recombined and redistributed among the instruments, or else repeated into jagged ostinato patterns that, perhaps, bowed toward early minimalism before vanishing in swirls of harmonics, bow hair, and buzzing piano strings. The fourth movement had Husseini and Coleman trading sprechstimme as well, a setting of Frederich Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens,” a looking-at-summer-and-imagining-winter bit of Romantic brooding. That was the mood, overcast and rustling. The piece, at times, seemed to retreat into private rumination; it certainly ran the temporal gamut, from initially going by too fast, to stretching into protraction, to feeling too long, to feeling just long enough.

Van Nostrand’s TUBA-TUBA (1973), which opened the second half, shifted the proceedings from theatricality into Fluxus-style silliness. Tubist Beth McDonald played sonorous phrases, but also rattled the instrument’s keys in comic determination, obsessively polished its metal, used its capacious bore to filter a flight attendant’s indications of geographically impossible out-window sights, and finished by turning it into an unlikely version of a magician’s hat. It was more funny than not, though its comedy felt almost decadently slight.

The performance-art japes of TUBA-TUBA set up the vocabulary of Voyage in a White Building I, but didn’t really prepare one for its impact. Dating from 1969, Voyage is big in every way: a setting of Hart Crane’s “Voyages I” for speaker and an ensemble of 19 players (conducted/refereed by Anthony Coleman), some amplified, some not, stretching over some 25 minutes. It is wild, goofy, fierce, impulsive, fully entertaining ambitions to both iconoclasm and grandeur. And it is brilliant—a swarmingly disorienting experience, a piece of the Vietnam-era post-serial avant-garde that actually delivers on its radical, politically charged promise.

Crane’s text is cut up into its constituent sounds, broken down to the edge of intelligibility; speaker Lautaro Mantilla, his performance an absolute tour de force, donned Walter Cronkite horn rims and tie, only to render the text as an unbroken cadenza of giggles, screams, and gasps, half-toddler, half-madman. The poem, a dense, florid warning to children the poet sees playing on the beach, becomes unwitting commentary on the era of protests and happenings; the graphic score, aleatoric in pitch and rhythm but in may other ways fanatically detailed, sometimes goads the text on, sometimes is a story the speaker is reporting. The amplification connects with pop and rock, though often in a critical way: Crane’s description of the children crumbling “fragments of baked weed / Gaily digging and scattering” gave way to a trio of saxophone (Derek Beckvold), electric guitar (Andrew Clinkman), and drums (Andy Fordyce)—a rock group, but, in this instance, one that has lost the beat, that can’t agree, scribbles of noise splayed out. As Crane’s poem directly addressed “you brilliant kids,” Beckvold and Husseini rolled in with the sound of sirens, advice in the form of coercion. After a final explosion of violence, a sitar (Sonny Lalchandani) serenely twanged as the rest of the ensemble descended into heavy, gray rumbles, countercultural fiddling while the city is reduced to ash.

On the one hand, Voyage in a White Building I is very much a period piece. But there’s plenty in it that feels all too contemporary: the generational divide, the glut of simultaneous experience, the underlying information atomized and amplified into sensational nonsense. It’s like landing on a world that seems vaguely familiar, only to realize, Charlton-Heston-style, that we maniacs blew it up after all, even if the explosion came in extreme slow-motion. Van Nostrand, slight and smiling, basked in the applause with the curious happiness of a jester who, unexpectedly, finds that he has become a bit of a prophet.

Fast Forward Austin II: The Reckoning

Posted on April 24, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

When you do a sequel, you can either do Empire Strikes Back or Ghostbusters II.

Which is to say, when you have a hit on your hands, you can take some risks and possibly alienate the fan base that made you worthy of a sequel in the first place, or you can play it safe, give them the same show warmed-over, and collect your pay. Ian Dicke, Robert Honstein, and Steven Snowden upped the ante at this year’s Fast Forward Austin festival by tripling the call for scores winners, bringing in a headliner, and moving to a big, multilevel venue near downtown complete with a bar, soundman, and a dude who stamps your hand.

Precipice perform Coming Together. Photo by Elisa Ferrari

Precipice, a mixed chamber ensemble from up the road in Waco, started things off. Snowden described them as a group who do “things with lots of stuff”; truer words have never been spoken. They began their set with the first call for scores winner of the day, Shawn Allison’s Towards the Flame, a four-movement work for violin, flute, cello, and percussion. Based on a variety of moth species, Allison’s piece began with flourishes and broken lines before moving to unison gestures in the second movement. The third movement featured extended techniques on the flute while percussion patter coalesced to a rock groove. Daniel Webbon’s[*] string trio For thee, oh Absalom, my son in three movements was an attractive, somber, and contemplative work that served well as a last minute replacement on the program. Precipice finished their set with a powerful rendition of Frederick Rzewski’s Coming Together.

Katherine Hodges and Leanne Zacharias. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

When I returned after the set change, I found that the chairs in the venue had been resituated around a piano bench surrounded by three music stands and backlit, pastel tulle. Cellist Leanne Zacharias and dancer Katherine Hodges‘s set of four works was bookended by the first and fourth movements from Cage’s Etudes Boreales. They began the performance as the house lights dimmed, each performer seated on the piano bench but facing away from one another. As Zacharias began playing, Hodges sat motionless, moving slowly around the space only after several minutes of music. Delicate glissando and harmonics complimented the slight, intimate shifting as Hodges made her way through the tulle. Zacharias turned 90 degrees to perform Event Horizon by Nicole Lizee. Pizzicato scale-fragment ostinato, percussive sections reminiscent of heavy metal palm muting, and pre-recorded material (originally for violin, cello, and bass, but here recorded entirely on the cello by Zacharias) were woven with a dance that foreshadowed the slurred cello of the final section. Eugen Friesen’s Pizzicato Etude had elements straight out of guitar technique, complete with arpeggios and syncopated, ascending, slurred groups of three. The final work mirrored the first both in musical character and in presentation, as cellist and dancer came full circle, ending where the other had begun.

Spank Dance Company returned to FFA with another engaging butoh performance, followed by composer and bassist P. Kellach Waddle performing a series of his works for bass alone, ranging from the ’80s through last week. A member of the Austin Symphony Orchestra for over two decades, Waddle is a prolific composer, passionate performer, and consummate businessman, and his production company PKWproductions, through its long time association with Strait Music, supplied the piano for the festival. His works were romantic and dramatic, hair flying as slow melancholy melodies in the lower register were countered by virtuosic runs in the upper, a quasi-improvisatory character running throughout.

Baylor Percussion Group. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

After a brief set change, Baylor Percussion Group performed Peaux from Xenakis’s Pleadis, which—thanks to my Louisiana heritage—I can pronounce with uncanny accuracy. Peaux is what all guys in drum circles think they sound like, all big and unison and cathartic, and BPG delivered the goods from the second floor loft. BGP moved to the stage for the second movement of Lang’s so-called laws of nature. This quartet features identical instrumentation for all players, including three floor toms, bass drum (with foot pedals), and metal pipes which at first glance resembled re-purposed chimes, but in fact were cut to specific lengths to yield specific pitches. With each performer facing stage-right, the movement began slowly on the pipes and added the toms and bass which eventually take over, developing into a huge pulsing texture far removed from the pitch elements of the initial gestures. The athleticism of the second movement was contrasted by the meditative delicacy of the third. The teacup, crotales, and guiro instrumentation were coupled with pedal-like figures, occasional notes popping up from the tea cup tremolo. The program described an extended diminuendo and ended with applause recalling the volume of the first piece.

Bel Cuore. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Bel Cuore Sax Quartet performed Snowden’s Speed Studies, a work that opened slowly, moving to a series of declamatory statements in the high register. Key slaps and other rhythmic effects in the tenor and bari played hide and seek with rips in soprano and alto leading to a funky groove and a slamming ending topped of by the declamatory statement. Matthew Ricketts’s[*] Summerline was quiet and pensive. Thoughtful use of combination tones by Ricketts and careful phrasing by Bel Cuore made for a wonderful tension throughout the work. David Biedenbender’s you’ve been talking in your sleep was the second call for scores winner. The sighing, sleeping, and breathing that opened the piece were sideswiped by a honking Morse code in the bari, which in turn morphed into full-blown syncopation among the players, culminating in complete tutti madness. Finally, Life and Afterlife by Nick Sibicky closed Bel Cuore’s set. A narrative work in two movements, the piece started with bright pulsing rhythms and moved to more solemn lines. In the second section, BCSQ took a seat and took up rainsticks, shakers, and the errant drum to the delight of a number of kids who sat wide-eyed in the front.

Graham Reynolds and Austin Soundwaves. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

FFA continued its support of non-profit music education for underserved groups this year with Austin Soundwaves, a new program based on Venezuela’s El Sistema program. An orchestra of about 30 students from the burgeoning program was led by Graham Reynolds in providing music and sound effects to a Felix the Cat film. After their short, charming set, Reynolds was joined by several local pros with whom he’d been working on an upcoming commission. The tunes were built from a funky mix of genres and, after several songs, Vicky Chow and Owen Weaver joined Reynolds on stage. Chow and Reynolds banged out several tunes on the keys, and when I say “banged out” I could not mean that more literally. That piano was rode hard and put up wet, and this became particularly clear later in the evening when Chow did her solo set.

Owen Weaver’s set began with Christopher Cerrone’s Memory Palace. Crickets and other sounds of the early evening were joined by Weaver plucking inside the piano and, as the piece progressed, a background of late night sounds played behind Weaver’s delicate performance. The second movement featured Weaver playing a custom mallet percussion instrument. Made of five or six wooden planks and sounding a bit like a muffled set of woodblocks, the instrument was played with two mallets per hand, one mallet above and one below the planks so that Weaver could provide an extended tremolo that made my arms ache to watch. The tremolo was complimented by electronics that picked up and amplified the natural resonance of the bars. Ian Dicke’s 808 featured loops from the classic Roland 808 drum machine along with real-time manipulation (via MAX/MSP) of cymbals, tambourine, cowbell, and bells, among other percussion instruments. I’ve heard this one several times, and each time it’s a slightly different experience. The use of the crash cymbal in conjunction with the electronics is particularly compelling, giving the impression that the sound not only emanates from the cymbal and through the electronics, but also at times returns to the cymbal from the electronics like a genie returning to the bottle. Vicky Chow joined Weaver for Daniel Wohl’s Pixellated. Beginning with a trill on bells and slaps on piano, Pixellated is initially all fits and starts. A rapid, descending trichord entered the fray adding body to the texture which continued to go all herky-jerky on us like breaking news. Strummed chords in the piano further broadened this texture which eventually broke apart like a fading radio signal.

Vicky Chow, Christoper Cerrone, and Owen Weaver. Photo by Elisa Ferrari.

Vicky Chow took the stage before an eager audience and began with a collection of miniatures, of which Digital Sustain by Ryan Francis was a standout. Chords held out by the una corda pedal made a bed for rapid, staccato, player-piano-like figures. Christopher Cerrone’s Hoyt-Schermerhorn for piano and electronics was the final call for scores winner. A spare texture of slowly played and largely consonant chords served to describe the experience of waiting for the train at the piece’s namesake subway stop in Brooklyn. The chords split into a counterpoint between the hands, accented by the single tones as a chordal passacaglia of sorts developed in the left hand. I’m hesitant (as Cerrone was in describing the piece at the show) to go into much detail about the electronics except to say that they show up towards the end of the piece and are really quite effective. Daniel Wohl’s Aorta for piano and electronics, all syncopation in the piano coupled and textural electronic elements, and Andy Akiho’s vick(I/y) for prepared piano brought Chow’s set to a satisfying close. But we weren’t done. Joining Chow on stage for a grand finale performance of Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union were several of the festival’s performers. The combination of approximate pitch and exacting tutti rhythms among the players was an absolutely fantastic visceral experience, and could not have made for a more definitive end to the evening.

Fast Forward Austin built on the strong foundation laid last year at their inaugural festival. A blend of local, regional, and national acts along with a sense of community purpose made for a day that was as intellectually stimulating as it was warm and inviting. As my penguin hand-stamp fades, I can reflect on the events of the day while looking forward to next year’s festival, confident that it will be more Search for Spock than Phantom Menace. Of course, I’d be happy to watch Vicky Chow go all two-fisted Workers Union on Jar Jar, but perhaps that’s a whole different festival altogether.

*The composer of For thee, O Absalom, my son is Daniel Webbon, not David Webern, and the composer of Summer Line is Matthew Ricketts, not Matthew Prickett, as were originally reported. We regret the errors.

Over and Over

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Matthew Guerrieri - Field Reports, Headlines

click image to enlarge

Austin New Music Coop Celebrates a Decade of New Music

Posted on April 11, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

“If we need something, we can find it in this town…”

The above quote (overheard at an Austin New Music Coop meeting) is a phrase that describes the attitude of many Austin musicians. Austin is still a relatively small city, but the ease with which one can find a last-minute replacement for that “contrabassoonist who also owns his own unicycle” part is impressive, and it’s this high concentration of strong, adventurous players coupled with a titanic work ethic that has allowed ANMC to flourish in the last ten years.

Austin New Music Coop performs Earl Brown’s December 1952. Photo by Meredith Maples.

The two-night show celebrating their decade of new music making began with a somewhat theatrical performance of William Meadows’s Loose Atoms for graphics tablet and electronics by the composer. Meadows sat before the audience at a small table stacked with papers. One by one he removed the papers from the pile and distributed them around the table until all he was left with was what appeared to be a thick notebook. He then took out a pen, looked up as though planning the first words of a letter, and began to write. The pen and “notebook” soon revealed themselves to be electronic instruments with samples of Meadows’s speech emanating from the speakers as he moved the pen around the tablet. Various effects manipulated the sound as Meadows held the pen at a variety of angles. The delivery was as compelling and enjoyable as the piece itself, and served well as an opener for the evening. Keith Manlove’s The Becoming Machine II for solo voice, electronics, and video involved a variety of vocalizations that sounded at times like dogs, insects, hyperventilation, and what a contact mic would pick up if it was in your mouth when your dentist asks you to “swish and rinse.” All this audio was run through a four-speaker system that surrounded the audience and was accompanied by a video presentation. Despite the unorthodox sound source and the distinct processing (which, in the hands of a lesser composer, might have been the piece, all bleeps and blorps with no structure) The Becoming Machine II was quite organic and made for a satisfying journey.

Nick Hennies performed Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas by Alvin Lucier. Originally in three parts, this is one of those “pieces that can be played by any number of people at any time,” so on this night Hennies was solo on vibes, his only accompaniment a sine wave. The idea behind the piece is that the notes the performer plays (in this case, Hennies only played one pitch, repeated in several long phrases) should be ever so slightly out of tune with the sine wave such that one might hear the resulting combination of tones. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work with vibes, but I think the following describes how the piece was received:

Audience member #1) “I think they were just tryin’ to torture us with that!”
Audience member #2) “That was my favorite piece of the night!”

No gray areas on this one.

Members of Texas Choral Consort and Austin New Music Coop perform Paragraph Seven of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning. Photo by Meredith Maples.

The Viola In My Life was the first of two Feldman pieces of the weekend. Among his first post-indeterminacy era pieces, it was written with absolute control over all parameters in order to outline the gradual crescendo in the viola throughout the piece, which was well represented by violist James Alexander. After intermission, The Great Learning, Paragraph Seven by Cornelius Cardew was performed by Texas Choral Consort and members of the ANMC. Director Brent Baldwin led between 40 and 50 performers who, over the course of the 30+-minute movement, moved around the stage like flocking birds flying in slow-motion. The piece began with an “Om” that spread through the group like a benediction. “In confusion” gradually began to appear among the voices, the first of several short phrases and single words that marked the sections of the work. Among the striking elements of this performance is that TCC is made up of a number of performers who are non-professional community choristers. To watch them become fully invested in (and give a great performance of!) a long and involved 20th-century work was really thrilling.

The second night of performances began with Nick Hennies’s Second Skin With Lungs for five percussionists. Positioned around the audience, the percussionists described circles with their hands on the heads of toms and snares, recalling the sound of rain. This texture was occasionally punctuated by rolls of thunder on bass drums and echo figures played on the snares and toms.

The Owl built by Travis Weller.

The reflective tone of this piece seemed to pick up from the end of the previous evening, and this continued with Travis Weller’s Toward and away from the point of balance. This piece featured the “Owl,” an instrument built by Weller to more easily perform a number of techniques developed on prepared piano. The piece began with a slow tremolo on the Owl (played with hand-held piano hammers) which developed into unison gestures with the violin, viola, and cello. The gestures gave way to a slow, pulsing rise and fall colored with harmonics and overtones. In addition to the hammers, Hennies also used a “loose” violin bow (essentially two handles with a few feet of hair between them) to manipulate the Owl, creating otherworldly textures with the playing of the other performers. Brent Farris’s I apologize, Julius, for judging you seemed in some ways to be a study in instrument resonance. Sounds like screaming whales (yes, whales, not wails) came from the amplified violin and contrabass and mixed with a constant electronic reverberation in the speakers at the rear of the room that slowly moved forward. A melody in the viola built to a climax, its rise hidden by the amplified strings which then abruptly fell into silence. Cymbal rolls and long tones served as a coda and masked a quiet return of the static rising through the texture before rolling to a halt.

Kinship Collapse, just before the string broke. Photo by Meredith Maples.

Earle Brown’s December 1952 is among the most well known and earliest graphic scores. This performance featured thoughtful interplay among the performers, but I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have sounded like in 1952 with players who had no background in this type of music. The concert concluded with Arnold Dreyblatt’s Kinship Collapse, an ANMC commission from 2008. A definitive closer, Kinship Collapse features amplified violin, cello, and contrabass (the bass player actually had a second bass fitted with unwound piano string), as well as horn, drum set, and an “electric overtone guitar” with four strings and an unusual fretting system that accommodates Dreyblatt’s particular 20-tone just-intoned system. The piece started with rapid sixteenths traded between the violin and horn which were soon joined by similar figures on the cello and on the frame of the snare. The guitar entered speaking metal overtones as the percussion moved from frame to hi-hats, all leading to an early climax which sounded like a dinner bell joined by high register violin with the horn blowing loud and bullish in kind. Riffs and a strong backbeat took over, and while all musicians were chugging along, I noticed that the vamp seemed to be stretching out a bit longer than seemed right. Just then, Weller hopped up, walked backstage, and came back with a new string to replace the one he’d broken in the fray. How he changed the string so quickly, much less retuned with all that swirling around him I’ll never know, but I’ll tell you it took under a minute and they were back on track seamlessly, bringing the piece to a resounding close.

ANMC put on a great two-night retrospective. This report doesn’t cover all the nuances of intermission conversations (Lucier notwithstanding), the mini-museum of Luigi Russolo’s extinct instruments constructed by ANMC [1], or the wonderful reception afterward during which audience and performers casually interacted. For that you’ll have to come to one of their next shows and experience it for yourself. It’s shows like this that make it so wonderful to be a part of Austin and frankly, who wants to live in some backwater where the contrabassoonist has to rent his unicycle?

1. The ANMC intonarumori (roarers, cracklers, and gurglers) are totally different from the ones Berkeley-based Luciano Chessa built around 2009. In fact, ANMC’s first performance with them was on November 2005. It seems both projects developed 100% independently! The Austin project was the brainchild of NMC member Sarah Norris, pictured here playing a crackler.

What Makes It Mavericky? The San Francisco Symphony Celebrates 100 Years

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Sidney Chen - Field Reports, Headlines

SOLO FOR VOICE 88
DIRECTIONS
Leave the stage through the audience returning to the stage without leaving the theatre. Do this very slowly.

The San Francisco Symphony has been celebrating its centennial season this year with a slew of ambitious programs, including the return of its American Mavericks festival. In June 2000, six seasons into Michael Tilson Thomas’s tenure as music director, the symphony presented ten programs of 20th-century American music, a massive effort that has had a lasting impact on the identity of the orchestra. (A 150-page book that was published in conjunction with that festival can be downloaded free as a PDF here.) Last month’s festival featured five programs—three comprising primarily orchestral repertoire; two, chamber works—performed at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, some of which then went on tour to Chicago, Ann Arbor, and New York.

Big disclaimer up front: As a member of Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, I performed in Monk’s Realm Variations, one of the four works commissioned for the festival, and toured with the orchestra.

SOLO FOR VOICE 26
DIRECTIONS
Play a game of solitaire (or play both or all sides of a game ordinarily involving two or more players).

The term “maverick” has obviously taken on other connotations in the intervening 12 years, so Tilson Thomas took pains to define what makes a composer mavericky in his estimation. In the video below (one of a series of engaging YouTube clips put together for the festival), he says it means “somebody who is pushing boundaries and exploring new sounds—made by traditional instruments, by introducing entirely new instruments, by using the vocabulary of electronics and now sounds generated through computer technology.” The 17 composers selected to represent this maverick approach to music-making are now familiar names to most listeners: Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Cowell, Copland, Partch, Cage, Harrison, Foss, Feldman, Subotnick, Riley, Reich, Del Tredici, Monk, Adams, and Mason Bates.

In a separate statement, Tilson Thomas added, “What many of these composers have in common is their association with California, with the San Francisco Bay Area. …San Francisco has always been known for its independent, left-of-center spirit.” Indeed, that sense of nonconformity is one San Francisco value that is treasured by those who live here. The affection of the audience towards their hometown band, throwing its full weight behind a festival highlighting unconventional repertoire, was noticeable in both the attendance and the response to the performances.

Monk (singing), Norman (typing), Tilson Thomas (chopping) perform work by John Cage. Photo by Kristen Loken.

SOLO FOR VOICE 46
DIRECTIONS
Prepare something to eat.

The marquee event of the series was arguably the production of John Cage’s Song Books, performed by the improbable trio of vocalists Joan La Barbara, Monk, and Jessye Norman, together with Tilson Thomas and eight musicians from the symphony, and staged by L.A.-based director Yuval Sharon. The Song Books from 1970 are subtitled “Solos for Voice 3 – 92,” but that simple description does not begin to convey the range of what the performers are asked to do or how a performance might be constructed. (James M. Keller’s program notes can be found here.) In the first San Francisco performance, the work was greeted with great enthusiasm overall, along with great confusion in some corners and great consternation in others. It certainly didn’t fail to elicit a response. The production was also performed in Ann Arbor and on the large stage at Carnegie Hall, and perusing the Internet will reveal many discussions and questions centered on whether it was Cageian enough in its execution: Is Tilson Thomas making a smoothie in a blender too shtick-y? Was Norman too operatic? And so on. For my part, I’m just happy that the San Francisco Symphony chose to present this marvelously inventive work on a large-enough scale to trigger these discussions.

SOLO FOR VOICE 51
DIRECTIONS
Play a recording of a forest fire.

The challenge of performing the Maverick repertoire is you really have to throw yourself into it, sometimes doing things that can seem totally off-the-wall. …Anything goes, what the hell—we’ll just go for it. And that’s a quality that San Francisco Symphony definitely has.—Tilson Thomas

The orchestral works were programmed to the symphony’s strengths: outsized pieces like Varèse’s Amériques unleashed the crazy that SFS does exceptionally well. (It was also one of several opportunities throughout the festival to shine a spotlight on the percussion section, which was charged with everything from Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood to Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, performed with organist Paul Jacobs.) Likewise, Absolute Jest, a new work by John Adams for string quartet and orchestra (premiered here by the St. Lawrence String Quartet), gave the musicians an opportunity to amp up the energy level in the room well past the standards of normalcy.

Paul Jacobs (organ), Mason Bates (electronica), Donato Cabrera (conductor) and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus in Bates’s Mass Transmission. Photo by Kristen Loken

SOLO FOR VOICE 63
DIRECTIONS
Engage in some other activity than you did in Solos 8, 24, 28, and 62 (if any one of these was performed).

Along with Absolute Jest, three other works were commissioned by the symphony for this festival: Monk’s Realm Variations, for six voices and seven instruments; Subotnick’s Jacob’s Room: Monodrama, for vocalist Joan La Barbara, electronics, and chamber ensemble; and Bates’s Mass Transmission, for organ, electronics, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (a beloved institution in its own right). It escaped no one’s attention that of the 17 composers included in this festival, there was only one woman and only one who was born within the last 60 years. In the case of Bates, this placed the somewhat unfortunate burden on his approachable and un-thorny piece of having to represent the Maverick Spirit for all American composers who are not yet eligible for Social Security benefits.

PARTCH, photo courtesy of sfmike

SOLO FOR VOICE 15
DIRECTIONS
Using a typewriter equipped with contact microphones, typewrite the following statement by Erik Satie thirty-eight times:
L’artiste n’a pas le droit de disposer inutilement du temps de son auditeur.
[The artist does not have the right to waste his listener’s time.]

Apart from the orchestral performances were two chamber music programs featuring members of the orchestra in various configurations, as well as outside artists. These more intimate performances allowed for some of the more unusual and enchanting sounds of the festival. Jeremy Denk drew out a large palette of unexpected colors in his performance of five solo piano works by Cowell, which called for stroking the length of the strings, strumming them like a harp, and inexplicably bringing forth melodies via cluster chords played with fists. And I wonder when we’ll ever have another chance to hear in Davies the sounds of the extraordinary instruments brought by the multitalented Los Angeles-based PARTCH, for their theatrical performances of Barstow and other works by the ultimate maverick Harry Partch.

Empty oxygen tanks, used as bells for Harrison’s Concerto for Organ and Percussion Orchestra. Photo by Annie Phillips, San Francisco Symphony

SOLO FOR VOICE 35
DIRECTIONS
The text is from the first paragraph of the Essay on Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. Sing in an optimistic spirit as though you believe what you are singing… Before singing this solo, raise either the black flag of Anarchy or the flag of the Whole Earth.

With five full programs of repertoire, there are too many moments that necessarily go unmentioned in a recap like this. Even so, I can’t let the mesmerizingly quiet and beautiful performance of Feldman’s Piano and Orchestra with Emanuel Ax fly completely under the radar. Juxtaposing it with the sheer decibel power of Amériques made for a wonderful and wild evening, in which all sounds seemed possible. Coming out of that concert reminded me of one of the most striking moments of the Song Books performance, when Monk came forth to declaim:

The best form of government is no government at all….
The b-b-b-b-b-b-best form is no f-f-f-form at all….
And that will be what we will have
When we are ready for it.

The San Francisco Symphony has announced plans to record three of the works from the festival next season, for release on their own label: Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, with Paul Jacobs; Cowell’s Piano Concerto, with Jeremy Denk; and Carl Ruggles’s Sun-treader. If you need a Ruggles fix before then, Other Minds has just released the 1980 CBS Masterworks recording The Complete Music of Carl Ruggles with Tilson Thomas conducting the Buffalo Phiharmonic.

Now Hear This: The Nick Mazzarella Trio

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Devin Hurd - Field Reports, Headlines

Nick Mazzarella Trio: Mazzarella (alto saxophone); Anton Hatwich (bass); Frank Rosaly (drums)

To hear Nick Mazzarella play the alto saxophone is to hear a well-honed connection between his creative impulse and the horn that becomes an extension of his musical identity. It is a creative instinct steeped in jazz history and brimming over with a passion for free improvisation. In Chicago’s community of aggressively original talent and dedicated musicianship, his ability stands out. His trio has become an important vehicle for realizing his musical ideas, and it has become a significant presence in the local jazz circuit.

The Nick Mazzarella Trio performs often in Chicago and has achieved a rare level of near telepathic interplay between three deeply accomplished musicians that translates into sets where the trio simmers and frequently catches fire.

Nick Mazzarella’s alto saxophone playing consistently takes on the vocal and intervallic qualities of Ornette Coleman in ways that are startling when performing with his trio. His music is not an emulation of the free jazz master as much as it is an ability to channel the energy and magnetic excitement that was present with Coleman’s trios in the 1960s, a comparison completed by the harmolodic interplay between Anton Hatwich on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. It’s an influence that Mazzarella acknowledges via email correspondence:

What I find inspiring about Ornette is his genuine creative impulse. He arrived on the scene with a fully formed concept that was innovative and completely honest, playing the way he did because that was just how he heard music. The integrity of that approach, let alone the nature of the content of his art, is something I think all creative people aspire towards in some way. I’m influenced by Ornette as a saxophone player and an improviser coming from the jazz tradition, but I’m not really interested in sounding just like him or recreating what he’s already done. The truth Ornette’s sound and concept represents to me has helped me to identify what’s true within myself. If my music bears some resemblance to Ornette’s for some people, I think it can be attributed to my working through these external truths that have validated and unlocked some internal ones that are distinctly mine. As time goes on, I hear myself developing my own style, and the process of working on music like this is a lifelong pursuit.

Mazzarella has managed to make his way into the heart of that tradition and found plenty of room to develop his own identity as an up-and-coming jazz musician. While the roots in Coleman’s music are strong, Mazzarella also cites Eric Dolphy, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, and John Coltrane as equally significant influences. These aren’t just names for Mazzarella: the resonance with this tradition is tangible in his music. His performances frequently draw upon the sonic language of these composers while offering an evolutionary counterpoint to the free jazz movement of the 1960s. It is possible to close one’s eyes during a live Mazzarella performance and be transported to the same energetic sound that marked Henry Threadgill’s Air trio. His resonance with Eric Dolphy’s harmonic approach is striking. His ability to aurally reference these giants without laboring to emulate them is what sets him apart. This is a living tradition and he is breathing fire into it.

Nick Mazzarella Trio: Mazzarella (alto saxophone); Anton Hatwich (bass); Frank Rosaly (drums)

Mazzarella earned his master’s in jazz composition at DePaul University in 2009, though he brings an approach to composition that transcends his academic bona fides. He primarily composes the music for his trio on the saxophone and occasionally at the piano, working out rough sketches and refining ideas while also leaving space for ideas to flow when they require less “working out.” He then takes relatively fixed versions of his pieces to the trio and further refines his ideas through rehearsal, often relying on the group’s collective sensibility.

“I asked these particular people to be in my band because I want them to sound like themselves,” Mazzarella explains, noting that Hatwich and Rosaly each bring strong individual sensibilities to the music. “They sound great individually as soloists, and they sound great together as a rhythm section. Over time, I think we three have built a unique and recognizable collective sound. The written material I provide is really just a vehicle for that collaborative effort to take place.” Hatwich and Rosaly have developed into a creative pair that have set a new standard for rhythm sections in the Chicago scene.

The trio’s debut recording: Aviary, released in 2010 on Thought to Sound Records, offers a glimpse into the melodic constructions of Mazzarella’s pieces. “Pistachio (for my bird)” in particular is a catchy tune that is practically an ear worm that doesn’t wear out its welcome. Its Latin beat and circular melodic phrases that resolve into short repetitions over an understated harmonic progression become a launching pad for an approach to improvisation that balances delicately between restraint and blistering freedom. The collaborative interaction and refined approach to this music is recorded with remarkable clarity on this studio effort. At just over half an hour, it’s a tantalizing set that merely hints at where this trio can go.

The follow up release, 2011’s This Is Only A Test: Live at the Hungry Brain, explodes with a full set that reveals the electricity this group brings to their live performances. The trio was at the top of their game for this particular performance (I was one of the lucky ones present) and their energy is remarkably well documented. The searing, plaintive wails that make up the melodic line of “For Henry” is a particularly rewarding listening that shows off Mazzarella’s ability to channel a soulful approach to his material along with improvisations that deftly explore the extremes of register and emotional range.

Both of these recordings are highly recommended, even if they are just a hint of what’s in store as Mazzarella continues to develop his personal style and further refine his materials. The collaborative role of his excellent rhythm section pushes this music up several creative notches, and shows The Nick Mazzarella Trio to be a creative force that should leave a lasting impression for some time to come.

Devin Hurd

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