Tag: improvisation

Happy New Year

Posted on January 6, 2012 by - Columns

Time to get the resolutions in order: no more dangling minor 9ths! (Well, maybe that’s going a bit far. Better to just stick to losing ten pounds or so.) Better yet, try to get to some different venues for improvised music and see what makes them tick. It could be a great thing to do between now and the next winter solstice, which I’ve heard will be a pretty major resolution. But I won’t give too much credence to apocalyptic predictions, they seldom come to pass.

Last night, however, I heard a set at The Stone that might make one of mine hit its mark. The first half of January 2012 is being hosted by Stefan Winter, who founded JMT records in 1985. Besides launching the recording careers of Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson, Robin Eubanks, Gary Thomas, and Jean-Paul Bourelly, JMT (now called Winter and Winter) also championed many “downtown” artists, such as Tim Berne, Mark Feldman, Mark Dresser, Bob Stewart, Craig Harris, and Herb Robertson. Jane Ira Bloom and Fred Hersch recorded their classic As One album for JMT and the late Paul Motian introduced his bassless trio on the label with Monk in Motian (which featured Dewey Redman and Gerri Allen as well).

Some Gear for Herb Robinson

Photo courtesy of Cheryl Pyle

It was trumpeter Herb Robertson who invited me to perform with him, bass trombonist Dave Taylor, saxophonist Adam Niewood, and drummer Jay Rosen in the opening set at the Stone on Thursday (Jan. 5). We played one long piece, Beyond the Threshold, composed for the occasion by Robertson. It was written in a combination of graphic notation and multiple-choice directions that focused on specific uses of textures but no specific technique. Each part included a single or double note to be used as a recurring motive throughout the piece’s aleatoric realization. Robertson and Taylor’s use of mutes and growls was nothing short of extraordinary; even when Taylor drops his mute on the ground (intentionally) it is recognizable as his, and Robertson has extended the idea of “mute” to include megaphones and paper plates.

The second set featured a group led by drummer Jim Black and featured saxophonist/clarinetists Oscar Noriega and Chris Speed, guitarist Brad Shepik, and bassist Trevor Dunn and was listed as a tribute to Paul Motian, who passed away last month. Their program included works from Motian’s quintet with Joe Lovano, Jim Pepper (or Billy Drewes), Bill Frisell, and Ed Schuller, as well as material from the Lovano-Frisell-Motian trio and from Motian’s Electric Bebop band, of which Shepik and Speed were both members. I first heard Jim Black in 1991 while he was touring Europe in a duo with saxophonist Lee Konitz. That was the only time he and I met before last night, so we first had to laugh at how we’ve both evolved into bigger (and better!) people, before he stated the obvious, how no one, no matter how well versed in Motian’s drumming, would ever come close to sounding like him. (Motian is to drumming what Thelonious Monk is to piano playing.) Black is a consummate musician, though, and studied the original recordings as well as the volumes of “bootlegs” available of the material. Instead of attempting to play in Motian’s style, Black played the melodies of the music with the band in his own way, which is powerful, virtuosic, and metrically diverse. The result was a performance of some of Motian’s best known works—“The Owl Of Cranston,” “Conception Vessel,” “Mumbo Jumbo,” “Blue Midnight,” “Look To The Black Wall,” “From Time To Time,” “Circle Dance,” and “Drum Music”—that captured the spirit of Motian without being derivative of him and lent the air of legitimacy to my very safe prediction.

Sadly, Stefan Winter took ill in Europe and could not be in New York for Thursday’s concerts. I was told he is much better and will be flying in for the rest of the series. I suggest trying to catch some of it. I know I will.

I Hear the Gongs Singing—Percussive Adventures in Chicago

Posted on December 21, 2011 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Tatsuya Nakatani is the very picture of dedication to his music and the carefully constructed sound world that he fully inhabits.  His stage incorporates an expansive collection of gongs, mallets, bows, and drums that he loads and unloads from the van he drives, touring for months at a time in order to bring his immersive percussive sound to an assortment of ears in towns and cities across the country.  He builds his own bows and engineers his own metal frames.  He sells CDs and vinyl records to support his singular approach to a music rich in standing waves and complex overtones shaped by his finely honed intuition for his improvisations.  His rapport with the audience and other musicians is understated and disarmingly humble.  This is in stark contrast to the focused intensity and disciplined technique that goes into his transformative performances.

Tatsuya Nakatani

A solo, improvised set of music from Tatsuya Nakatani emerges as an act of intense, creative ritual.  His language of bowed gongs and scraped snare heads focuses on percussion as a source for drone textures that ripple with complex energy.  The music erupts and subsides with an intense focus on the intersection of disciplined technique and raw sonic energy.

Nakatani has been looking for practical ways to expand his solo percussive world.  To this end he has taken an interest in workshopping pieces for what he calls the Nakatani Gong Orchestra.  The membership of the orchestra is made up of people local to wherever he happens to be performing, which he finds gives it a dramatically different character every night.  His preference is to work with non-musicians for a brief period–just two to three hours–before staging a performance.  This is just enough time to cover the basic techniques of striking and bowing his large gongs and to teach the performers a set of hand gestures that communicate his intentions as the conductor.  Conceptualized as an extension of his own appendages, Nakatani uses the ensemble to realize the sound of a multi-limbed version of himself.  Working with performers without previous musical training allows him to better shape a sound that utilizes his own exceptional restraint without having to also manage the personalities and impulses of trained musicians.

Tatsuya Nakatani: Conduction

The opening set for his recent stop at Chicago’s Elastic Arts began with a Gong Orchestra performance.  The wide dynamic range of six performers bowing and striking gongs of various sizes was startling, although much of this music was not particularly loud.  The relatively small space at Elastic Arts could easily be consumed by the vibrations of so many large gongs.  Tatsuya Nakatani’s aesthetic draws from a sense of restraint that allows the complexities of sustained gong tones to fill the space without resorting to volume.  Nakatani conducted crescendos and decrescendos that washed in like ocean waves.  At other times he would shape a sustained, quiet textures that served as a bed for his own playing at the front of the gong orchestra.  The formal construction of his conducted improvisation was remarkably transparent as he sculpted an elaborate drone that allowed the wealth of anharmonic frequencies to dance in the air between gongs and eardrums.  Much of the performance featured Nakatani leading through conduction before reaching for his own bows and mallets to contribute his layer of sound.  The vibrations within the room were filled with nuances that shifted audibly with even the slightest movement of one’s head.  It gave the air a feeling of density, like being submerged within a rich liquid of sound.

The second set of the evening featured a solo performance with Nakatani playing a drum kit, several gongs, and handheld percussion. Nakatani’s dedication to his sonic language is readily apparent in the meditative, near trance-like state that he goes into once the music begins. The sense of invocation that flowed from the way Nakatani regarded his handcrafted instruments gave rise to a spiritual quality that was reinforced by his sense of submission to the improvisational space. It was a drum solo realized as a continuous drone as Nakatani explored a range of percussive frictions and air pressure applied to the membranes of his drums through a technique of blowing through the hole of a cymbal held flat along the surface of the snare drum.  These were combined with the sonic richness of his bowed gongs, which demonstrated his ability to react and truly control the contours of the sound through subtle changes in bow speed and angle.

***

Later that same week, Third Coast Percussion offered up a performance of new music as part of the Sunday Salon Series at the Chicago Cultural Center.  The quartet of Owen Clayton Condon, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore presented a polished set of composed music that explored different aspects of ensemble drumming.

A tight rendition of Mallet Quartet by Steve Reich opened the afternoon concert.  It is a relatively recent work that builds upon the familiar harmonic progressions and fast-slow-fast form that are such an identifiable part of Reich’s sound.  The use of two five-octave marimbas opened up a wider harmonic range of which Reich takes full advantage, particularly in the slow section.  The use of amplification combined with the live acoustics of Preston Hall made for a loud excursion into the composer’s sonic language.

The next piece on the program was Credo in US composed in 1942 by John Cage.  It is an early collage work that plays up Cage’s whimsical side, combining a mash-up of popular musical styles from that era along with the use of radio as an instrument, the live broadcasts adding various popular musical styles from this era into the mix as well.  In addition to the radio, Credo in US is scored for piano, muted gongs, tom toms, tin cans, electric buzzer, plus a phonograph—though an iPhone served that role here as a 21st century technological substitution that was well within the spirit and sonic purpose of its 20th century counterpart.  John Cage’s music soars when performed with a balance of reverence and enthusiasm, and the interpretation of this work by Third Coast Percussion—the tin cans and other physical materials tastefully selected for their timbral qualities—was an incredible success.

Third Coast Percussion

Third Coast Percussion performing Common Patterns in Uncommon Time (2011) by David Skidmore.
The second half of the concert consisted of Common Patterns in Uncommon Time by Third Coast percussionist David Skidmore.  Inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the piece begins with the mallet instruments entering seamlessly from specially designed pre-recorded intermission music. The pulsating sound suggests Reich, but with a decidedly different harmonic sensibility.  The music then breaks abruptly from the mallet instruments and moves into more expanded percussive timbres.  Each movement exploring subsets of metals, drum kits, woods, or membrane instruments over a span of time that systematically exhausted a stage filled with instruments.  The abrupt timbral transitions between movements emerge as a signature quality of the piece.  The use of electric fan-driven wind chimes over a soft texture of mallet instruments was particularly striking. It served as a fitting contrast to the loud beats pounded out on multiple drum kits just before that section.   The piece concluded with two of the performers moving into the audience while playing clay pots as an effective nod toward the sense of space that marks Frank Lloyd Wright’s creations.  It was music that built out nicely from the iconic 20th century composers featured during the first half of the program.

Six Skinny Strings: The Reason for the Season

Posted on December 19, 2011 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Two weeks into the virtually undodgeable 24/7 Winter Wonderland sound collage that is this time of year, I’ve been looking for something without sleigh bells, warm brass, and mixed chorus. Though we’ve finally cooled to a seasonally congruent temperature here, it’s still odd to hear all the Christmas tunes when only a few weeks back people were still wearing shorts and sandals in the beer gardens (I’m looking at YOU, me). I don’t mean to come off all Scroogey. For the most part I enjoy all the seasonal goodness, but my search for sanctuary from the rising Yuletide led me to Skinny’s Ballroom in the heart of downtown Austin for a bit of improv holiday cheer. After paying a sliding scale cover ($5-$10, pay what you can), I found myself in a physically typical and fairly swanky shotgun shack of a downtown bar (though one that had been thoroughly renovated) with a bar to port, a half-dozen church pews to starboard, and the requisite booths, stools, and dudes. A cursory glance at a stage decorated with drums, monitors, guitars, and all the typical gear—including a guy checking levels on a red Gibson 335—seemed to indicate a place that was prepped for any of a number of Austin’s indie bands.

The show was curated under the auspices of Ten Pounds To The Sound by Chris Cogburn (whose No Idea Festival will be covered here in the very near future) and featured three guitarists—Jonathan Horne (Austin), Lucas Gorham (Houston), and Mexico City guitarist and improviser Fernando Vigueras in his first ever U.S. tour. Kicking off the festivities was Horne, who started his set in a sort of gonzo, quasi-Hendrix fashion, steeped in feedback and blurred scale runs, head lolling around like a rag doll. Standing mute before a microphone, Horne smeared blues licks mixed with arpeggios in a flurry of messy, expressionist fretboard gymnastics. The second tune featured bowed sextuple stops and heavily textural elements—think of the first minute of Penderecki’s Threnody… without the following minutes, for about six minutes. In a screeching left turn, Horne followed up with an instrumental cover of the Carter Family’s version of “Wildwood Flower,” the melody peeking out through the madness like a country mouse lost in the big city. A brief encore echoing the gestural elements of the first piece wrapped up Horne’s set.

Lucas Gorham

Lucas Gorham
Lucas Gorham began playing almost imperceptibly with a lap steel signal hissing like the start of a record. Volume and wah-wah swells developed so quietly you could actually hear him pick the string before the swell, and the audience (in a bar which required no such reverence) was drawn in and church quiet. These were actual Cageian moments in which the ambient sounds of the room (sounds at the bar, front door opening, someone walking to the back) mixed with the music in a truly compelling counterpoint. Granted, you might get a similar mixture of sounds at your local coffeeshop’s singer/songwriter night, but the impact here was different, perhaps because of the improvisatory and non-lyric-oriented nature of the music. As the piece developed, reverb explosions[1] morphed into lonesome tritones in a captured sound-on-sound texture. A layered figure not unlike cello tremolo was created by beating the bridge of the guitar, and as the sound-on-sound looped round and round, Gorham dumped the lappy and moved to a Strat to begin playing bass notes over the repeating texture. These notes had a multidimensional quality that I can only describe as the opposite of overtones—“undertones” maybe? Swelling power chords[2] oozing distortion spoke to their metal roots while shrugging off any sense of hipster appropriation as sixteenth note strumming lent a percussive rhythmic element to the pulsing mix. A shift to a hoedown rhythm marked a move back to the pedal steel, which Gorham used to play somewhat more traditional licks over the Strat groove-soup that still boiled around him. It was striking that despite the use of these instruments and fairly idiomatic techniques, the music never sounded like borrowed stylistic material. Gorham continued by picking behind the bridge and manipulating a delay pedal, which when done in real time (typically these pedals are “set it and forget it”) created a magical toy piano effect mixed with something of a microtonal glissando. This was followed by a return to the grumble roar of distortion which sort of tore the whole thing a new one. When the sound had faded and Gorham looked up, the audience responded with long and loud applause. There was even a guy in the back who did that “whipping your cowboy hat around in a circle” thing[3], which I can safely say I’ve never seen except in the movies.

Fernando Vigueras

Fernando Vigueras
Fernando Vigueras’s background includes conventional guitar playing and training, but his performance at Skinny’s was anything but conventional. He came on stage with a nylon string acoustic guitar and a small portable fan (the tiny handheld kind you might see around the pool) and sat down on a chair surrounded by foot pedals and other electronics. He began by detuning the bass strings while using the spinning fan blades to create a tremolo so severe that the loosened strings began to slam against the fretboard repeatedly like Bartók pizz trapped in a MAX patch. This quasi-percussive sound gave the impression of a drum roll as opposed to a pitch event, and as the sound evened out, Vigueras captured it with a loop pedal. Above this texture, he gave the same fan treatment to the treble strings which came off like a giant harpsichord or press-rolled hammered dulcimer in a horror film. He then began stick-rubbing, pick-sliding, and finger-tapping the strings against the fretboard, the last of which looked a bit 1980s but sounded really quite 2080s. Against the slow decay of this large texture and in a wash of reverb, he began plucking the strings and adjusting the tuning pegs, providing the first substantial (and melodic—a term I use loosely here) pitch material of the piece. Harmonies began to form from the extended single lines, which in turn formed beds for further melodic material. During the bulk of the performance Vigueras held the guitar in a more or less conventional fashion, but as the piece progressed he pulled the guitar up such that the neck was nearly parallel with his own, with the lower bout (the bottom of the guitar) in his lap. As both arms wrapped around the body, one hand made its way up the fretboard and moved above the nut, plucking the parts of the strings which are only a few inches long between nut and tuning pegs. The other hand moved down to the bridge and began touching the strings, creating sounds through the pedals like the striking of super-tight drum heads or (as it says in my notes) “popcorn in Satan’s microwave.” Finally, Vigueras pulled out a bow, carefully pulling across the highest strings[4] which created impossible overtones that, while quite beautiful, must have completely freaked out any dogs within several blocks.

A few weeks ago, I said that my experience at the Green House show was one that was “uniquely Austin,” and while I stand by that statement, I have to say that my idea of new music in this town (particularly in terms of venue) has been somewhat broadened. This show was really spectacular, pulled no punches, and was only a block from the Austin Convention Center. I’ll never tire of shows in funky little out-of-the-way venues, but to see a full-fledged improv show in an otherwise conventional bar in the middle of the week was heartening. Maybe it’s the season that’s raised my spirit, or maybe it’s Vigueras’s impossible overtones still ringing around in my head, but it’s good to know that I can duck into a downtown bar and hear looped and layered improv guitar alongside the backbeats and blues licks that have echoed through the air in Austin for so many years.

 

***


1.     Anyone who has ever moved a powered-on guitar amp with a spring reverb knows this sound (at about 0:08.)

2.     It’s just a root and a fifth, but with distortion they are, well…quite powerful. Just ask the Scorpions. Do not ask Twee.

3.     It was sort of like this. Sort of…

4.     A technical note for the uninitiated. Unlike the strings of the viola and violin (which describe an arch) the strings of the guitar live on a plane, so for the most part you can either bow the lowest few, the highest few, or all six. Horne was conjuring a big texture hitting all six, while Vigueras (for the most part) was shooting for more precision.

Stan Kenton at 100

Posted on December 16, 2011 by - Columns

I was sitting in the kitchen of my mom’s San Francisco apartment, grumbling about not being able to come up with something to write for this week, when she offered to write my entry for me. For a minute, I thought about taking her up on the offer (although not an improvising musician per se, she’s a good improviser when it comes to negotiating alien territory). We began talking about improvisation—how humans (and all living things, really) improvise as a matter of course—and the subtleties of musical improvisation. Our conversation fairly quickly deteriorated into an argument about whether improvisation is instinctual or cultural, invoking an analogy with walking that included Googling articles on feral children. We couldn’t agree on whether or not improvisation exists independently from culture before I saw a blurb announcing two concerts at the Manhattan School of Music to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stan Kenton next month.

Then I remembered the hours sitting in front of mom’s stereo, listening to Kenton’s Sketches on Standards, Artistry in Rhythm, and Back to Balboa, featuring the arrangements of Bill Holman, Pete Rugolo, and Johnny Richards as well as Kenton. I was mesmerized by the density of the Kenton sound and intensity of the band’s swing. What I sensed, and later learned to be the case, was that no matter how hard the band swung, Kenton was playing music he wanted his audience to listen to that primarily focused on the compositions and arrangements of his stellar orchestrators rather than on his star soloists (which included Maynard Ferguson, Lee Konitz, and Art Pepper, to name a very few).

So I searched out City of Glass, the landmark Bob Graettinger composition, and found that the entire body of Greattinger/Kenton collaborations can be heard online for no charge (other than an internet connection). These works were on the vanguard of the wash of “experimental” music produced after the Second World War but have slid into relative obscurity only because of an affected disdain towards so-called “middlebrow” culture in the critical dialectic. Because Kenton had a dance band, his attempts to create and present new music that embraced cutting-edge compositional and orchestration devices were marginalized. To sell his music, marketing strategies were employed that attached adjectives like “progressive” and “space age” to his name. To this day, Kenton’s contributions are somewhat marginalized, even in the jazz academy. I can remember hearing one of my professors describing him as a modern Paul Whiteman because he championed new music and mostly hired white musicians. Even if one discounts the disingenuity of pulling the race card on Kenton, the fact remains that Kenton’s music was jazz, no matter how many French horns, mellophones, or string players he added to the core big band. Another professor made regular asides about how he thought Kenton looked like a car salesman. But, for that matter, so do some professors (at least the healthy ones)!

But even discounting the “experiments” of Greattinger (like City of Glass, which so clearly influenced Bernstein’s West Side Story), Kenton produced a body of work that set a standard for big-band arranging and pedagogy. I wish I was the person who first noticed that one of the salient features of Kenton’s charts is that they can be played by almost any competent band and they sound like they’re supposed to. One doesn’t have to take the idiosyncrasies of a group’s personnel into account to perform Kenton’s music. All one has to do is play what’s on the page correctly and in tune—an interesting idiosyncrasy in itself!

I certainly hope that there will be many tributes and commemorative concerts during Kenton’s centenary. He left quite a legacy that deserves to be revisited. I don’t know if any of the radio stations that specialize in playing jazz noted the date (December 15, 1911). I’m sorry I didn’t it until it was almost over.

Happy Birthday, Stan Kenton!