Category: Listen

Joan La Barbara – voice

There is something really disconcerting about hearing Joan La Barbara sing the line “Are boobs just mostly fat?” over and over again to a melody somewhat reminiscent of Steve Reich’s tune for Wittgenstein’s sentence “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” in Proverb. The words Neil Rolnick chooses for his 2004 composition Body Work, however, are not a major philosophic pronouncement but rather the first of series of questions posed by students in University of Portland professor Terry Favero’s biology class published in the November 2003 edition of Harper’s Magazine. The line is disconcerting not because it’s shocking—is anything anymore?—but because it isn’t. It’s just a series of syllables as worthy of a melodic turn of phrase as a sonnet by Petrarch that Monteverdi would have set, the difference here being that it is surrounded by other layers featuring La Barbara’s trademark vocabulary of extended vocal techniques.

This enshrining of the seemingly quotidian is a Rolnick hallmark which finds many more fascinating outlets in other works contained on this new disc as well. Infectiously catchy ditties emerge from seemingly austere cascades of single pitches in his wind quintet plus electronics Ambos Mundos. Idiomatic yet completely incongruous western swing invades the first movement of his string quartet Shadow Quartet as a memorial to his Texan father. All in all, Rolnick’s music is extremely approachable yet at the same time, it makes you rethink what you’re hearing, which is somehow the best of both worlds.

—FJO

In the seemly infinite stream of CD releases from Beverly Hills-based Michael Robinson comes Vachaspati, an hour-long exploration of raga and technology. Robinson fully notates his compositions and then records them with computer precision using sampled instruments such as ud, tabla, ghatam, dholak, and berimbau—you’ll hear all of these and more during the course of the piece. If you’re like me, you’d probably prefer the sonic subtleties of real live performers, but I have to admit that I was almost hypnotized by the electronic rainstick—have you ever heard an electronic rainstick before? What will they think of next?

—RN

When this Will Bernard Trio disc came around in the ol’ CD changer, I thought for sure I’d been woken by some New Orleans backroom blues band. Turns out to be a crew out of Oakland, but that hardly matters. A blues-jazz-barroom concoction heavy on the guitar and a lounge-y beat, things groove along in general, though tracks like “Riddle Me This” stand apart as being more “out” than some of the rest. The addition of violin deepens the sound world, and the ensemble takes a little more time to breathe, play, and develop rather than run a groove. There’s a head in there, but it hardly becomes the track’s strict road map. All the players throw in their measures of creativity, but personally the real gem is the National steel guitar work.

—MS

Whoever says the symphony died with Mahler has missed some of the most interesting repertoire of the past century, if not the most interesting repertoire bearing the epithet “symphony.” Yet, to define exactly what constitutes a symphony in the years since Mahler left his 10th incomplete is almost as big a conundrum as what constitutes music itself. Well, you might say, you need an orchestra, but I have heard great works called symphonies scored for 100 electric guitars as well as just four pianos. I believe there’s even a symphony for one piano. Go figure. Others say it must be a hefty multi-movement work. But, what then to make of Leo Kraft’s very orchestral 1985 Symphony in One Movement, which is just that and lasts a mere 17 minutes. Well, Sibelius gave us a one-movement symphony back in the 1920s, although he debated whether or not to call his radically-structured composition that for over a year. Kraft, on the other hand, crystallizes the trappings of a conventional four-movement symphony—fast, scherzo, slow, fast—into an extremely concentrated single utterance using a repeated interlude between each played by different sections of the orchestra as glue. The result comes off as extremely well-Krafted (sorry, couldn’t resist), but if analyzing what he’s doing here architecturally is not the way you listen to music, you can still revel in the details that pop out like the fabulous dissonant homophony that he carefully orchestrates about two-thirds of the way through.

—FJO

Lesser’s website greets you with a billboard-size message: “I don’t give a fuck what’s on your iPod.” All the same, you’ll find six MP3 to download which collectively amount to an EP release free for the taking. Obviously Lesser (a.k.a. Jason Doerck) doesn’t give a fuck if you download ’em either, but take it from me, these gems are worth the disc space. Aside from “This Is What We’ve Become,” the artist’s punk and breakcore past are set aside for a more languid and exploratory approach. “When It Comes To Fidelity” practically comes off as a ballad, intertwining field recording with digital call and response. Despite the occasional harsh texture, the track shows signs of folk-inspired melody and harmonies, almost but not quite.

—RN

Abraham Ellstein, though best known for his scores for the Yiddish Theater and Broadway, also penned his share of large and small-scale concert music, including this cantorial setting for violin and piano. It is here recorded by Zina Schiff on her third collection of Jewish music, Elijah’s Violin. This brief, charming work captures the ambiance of a Sabbath prayer and then develops into a showpiece while keeping well away from any sort of sentimental caricature. New fans will find much more of Ellstein’s work available on CD through the Milken Archive.

—MS

The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music through its series of recordings for Naxos American Classics continues to unearth important yet forgotten music. One of the latest is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ever CD devoted exclusively to the music of Jacob Weinberg (1879-1956), an émigré from the Ukraine who arrived in the U.S. in 1926 after composing one of the earliest operas sung in Hebrew. In America, he continued to create Jewish-themed music, among which is a ravishingly beautiful string quartet whose movements depict three of the most important holy days of the Judiac calendar: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot through variations of traditional liturgical chants sung on those days. In the Yom Kippur movement, the holiest of all Jewish holy days is captured in music that reaches for the heights of the high Baroque albeit with themes Corelli and Rameau would probably not have considered harmonizing.

—FJO

Perhaps for the very first recorded piece of music I’ve ever written about that has no tangible physical object associated with it, it is fitting that I write about a piece called The Invisible Guy. A piece specifically created for the web that might be to program music what the comic book is to the novel, The Invisible Guy is the brainchild of L.A. based totalist composer and California EAR Unit percussionist Art Jarvinen whose two commercially released CDs sit happily on my shelf and happily wind up in my CD player from time to time. The Invisible Guy website seems to imply that all of this will wind up on CD, and it can definitely work that way—this is not an interactive Web-based music requiring the Internet like William Duckworth’s Cathedral project. Personally, I’ll be happy when it does. I’m a bit of a luddite as far as the whole MP3 thing goes and if I had things my way it all would come out on vinyl. That said, Jarvinen’s chain of MP3 URLs are a great place to visit online and for now the only way to hear his skewed music which is somewhere between Captain Beefheart and avant-lounge music.

—FJO

I can’t help it. When I pick up a disc that has a drums-bass-sax line-up, I immediately think, “Another one?”. This Detz/Wagner/Stuart offering is anything but another Wednesday cocktail jazz band, however. The improv, recorded live at Dizzy’s in San Diego, is angular throughout and lets a lot of light in. The last track, a brief whiff of a conversation, capitalizes on the “what other sorts of sounds can we make with these instruments” technique of generating new creative dialogue. Plenty of intensity on exhibition here without threatening anyone’s earpans with displays of machismo. You can’t dance to it, but all the same, it kind of grooves.

—MS

Composer/guitarist Bruce Arnold’s adventurous comprovisations, which straddle the line between jazz and so-called contemporary classical music, have led him down the path of uptown serialism in the past, e.g. a series of 12-tone heads on the appropriately titled trio CD A Few Dozen and even covers of Webern with the group Spooky Actions, although neither are your parents’ Darmstadt. On a new duo disc, his talents are paired with more downtown leaning Tom Hamilton, who for years has been responsible for the live sound processing of Robert Ashley’s music and whose own fascinating electronic compositions include a musical re-interpretation of a trading day at the London Stock Exchange. The results of this exciting collaboration, which pairs Hamilton’s synthesizer wizardry with Arnold on guitar and SuperCollider (a computer program for real time audio synthesis), yield music ranging from classic Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center soundscapes to grooves that share a remarkable kinship with the more spacey European prog-rock of the mid- to late 1970s—think Heldon or the trippier moments of Tangerine Dream. I know that Holger Czukay studied with Stockhausen, but I’ve always wished that Mario Davidovsky, Bulent Arel, and company would have hung out with Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and John Cale—at one point they all were living on the same island after all—but it was up to the fertile creative minds of a subsequent generation to make the connection.

—FJO