Christian Marclay Festival

This festival, held at the Whitney Museum lasted about a month between July and August. One the third floor of the Whitney, There was an exhibit devoted to his visual art. The exhibit also served as a performance space for his conceptual music pieces. The two performances I caught were "Ephemera" performed by Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori and "Wind Up Guitar" performed by Mary Halvorson.

Ephemera is a strange take-off on the concept of the graphic score. Marclay collected a vast array of items featuring musical notation in non-functional form (i.e. as a decoration or design, not meant to be played.) He then wove images of these items together into a musical score. The result is a graphic score that, well... also has musical staves in it. The players are free to musically interpret both the musical notation and other parts of the score, and to elaborate freely on any of the melodic ideas presented there.

I can't be certain what effect it had on the musicians. Although the musicians did seem to pay attention to the score and were honestly devoted to the piece, the result mainly sounded like Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori improvising. Of course that is something that those two do very well.

Perhaps no one has done as much to realize the potential of extended piano technique in improvising as Sylvie Courvoisier. She has developed a variety of techniques, including the use of chinese exercise balls and duct tape. Furthermore, she has really studied them to the point of being able to incorporate them into improvisation flawlessly. She can fluidly switch between the keys of the piano and it's insides and sometimes even plays both at once. This way, the use of her extended techniques is never forced; she can access them at exactly the necessary moments. She also has a phenomenal conventional technique with which she produces some brilliant figures that sound totally alien to any sort of conventional jazz.

I know less of Ikue Mori as a musician. I have always had a little bit of trouble relating to music coming out of a laptop computer. This performance sold me on her a lot more. Her and Courvoisier have a tight-knit musical relation, and hearing the interaction between them helped me to appreciate Mori's skill in improvisation.

The piece "Wind-Up Guitar" consists simply of having a guitarist improvise on an instrument built by Marclay. This instrument is a small acoustic guitar with about ten wind-up music boxes built inside of it, and the wind-up keys protruding from the instrument's body. Each of the boxes played typical music box fair, but when several of them were started at once, the result was a dissonant and surreal fog of ringing sound.

Hearing Halvorson play solo (fairly unusual, as I understand) revealed a lot about her as a guitarist. She proved herself to possess a more impressive technique than I had believed. Power-chords were a pretty frequent facet of this performance. I guess come to think of it, I can imagine her at a young age being just another kid who took up the guitar to follow after their rock idols. (I'd imagine that next she discovered Sonny Sharrock or Keji Haino and then...) These rock-like chord riffs would then develop in complexity until they became dissonant and thrashing waves of noise. At other points, she played twisted and harmonically angular vertical lines.

The music boxes inhabited a very separate world from the guitar playing. Halvorson's improvisation evolved alongside the music box melody, but with only the faintest hints of any relation. At some points, when she played her loudest chordal figures, the music boxes would be totally obscured. When she subsided, the audience would catch a few seconds of tinkle-tinkle before she launched another attack- a very effective technique. As simple as the concept of this piece was, it worked very well for me.

Summer Concerts: Mary Halvorson

I guess I kind of chose guitarist Mary Halvorson as the artist I was going to follow this summer. It wasn't a bad choice at all. She is the antidote to every bad association guitars have for me; she plays with enough originality to offset the the negative effect on the universe of every kid from my high school who bought a guitar and tried to impress his friends by sitting in the hallways and cranking out weak-assed renditions of nirvana tunes.

In any case, I managed to hear her three times this summer.

The first was with a quartet lead by saxophonist Ellery Eskellin also featuring bassist Mark Helias and drummer Tyshawn Sorey at the Stone.

The entire set was freely improvised, and felt like completely democratic music, with no one leading too much. As with the best free improv, the players did not confine themselves to traditional instrumental roles; Sorey's playing was as much in the forefront and as melodic as anyone else's contributions. In this setting, Halvorson's playing is even more free than in her own groups. she played a lot of excellently gritty chordal lines made frequent use of a pitch bend pedal. I should like to hear her incorporate open ended situations into her own groups a bit more. (You won't find it on her record, but if you seek out a bootleg of her trio that was recorded in London, you can hear a more of this kind of playing. It's out on the interweb somewhere.)

In July I heard the first night of a three day run at Roulette with her quintet featuring Tim Berne on alto sax, Kirk Knuffke on cornet, John Hebert on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. The quintet really brings out her writing skills even more than the original trio did. The compositions that night featured complicated and very engaging polyphonies and a a full use of the possibilities which the larger ensemble provided.

This was the first time I been to Roulette and it really was a nice experience. Like the stone, the focus is all on the music, and it isn't at all a tourist spot like most of the mainstream jazz clubs have become. It is great to be at a concert and know that everyone around you is a dedicated and passionate listener.

The third time I heard Mary was at the Christian Marclay festival at the Whitney Museum. This really deserves it's own post, soon to come.

If you haven't checked out Halvorson's record Dragon Head yet, I strongly recommend it. Also, a quintet album is due in the fall, keep a look out.

Summer Concerts: Ahmad Jamal

I have been absent for very long. I will try to play catch up with reviews of the shows I have seen this summer. Also stay posted for news of shows I'm playing this month. First up is a trio hit with Noah Baum on violin and Theo Lebeaux on drums taking place at Thomas Sweet ice cream shop in Princeton (the site of my first gig ever) on Sunday the 15th of August at 3:00. Should be exciting.

Ahmad was pretty much at the top of the list of the old masters who I had yet to hear in concert. I caught him at a late set at the Blue Note in June with James Cammack on bass, Herlin Riley on drums and Manolo Badrena on percussion. Beyond how impressive Ahmad's playing is for his age, he's become a much more aggressive player, an incredible contrast to his Pershing Lounge- era playing, where he was a perfect model of the philosophy "less is more." No matter which era of his playing you prefer, he still sounds excellent and his sound is still recognizable. The beautiful tone, delicate but incredibly solid swing feel and perfect precision and execution are all still there. Music is an amazing thing, that so many players are able to keep in such great condition into there elder years (Try hearing Cecil Taylor or Roy Haynes in concert some time.)

The rest of the group was deeply engrossed in the music. Seeing Ahmad live really helped me to appreciate his group concept. His bands are truly not about democracy in the same way that most jazz groups are. HIs band is an extension of his own playing, and he uses it to fill out his personal musical vision. Witnessing the dedication, focus and pure joy that all three sidemen put into this performance assured me of the merit of this group concept. Herlin Riley basically played simple time for the entire concert, but it was the baddest shit just because of how deep his pocket is. Jame's Cammack also grooved hard throughout. His solos showed a lot of technique and finesse. I'm still not entirely convinced about the place of an auxiliary percussionist in a straight-ahead jazz combo. I do not mean to diminish Badrena as a musician. At many times he added something great to the band, and he had a few very interesting solos. But for all that there were also times when his contributions seemed out of place and unnecessary.

Towards the end of the set the quartet played two classics from the Pershing Lounge album- But Not for Me, on which Ahmad repeated his exact solo from the recording (I sang along quietly from my seat) and the popular arrangement of Poinciana. It was a fun moment for all of the fans and die hard musicians who have been through that record so many times. Good to hear that the man hasn't slowed down at all.

Improvisation 12/22

I feel that this piece more or less represents my current approach to solo piano improvisation.

End of Semester Recap

I went through a lot of artistic change during my first semester at Oberlin. I couldn't even say what the net result of it is. If anything, I may have returned to where I started at the beginning of the semester. But if I have no more answers than I had in the fall, I sincerely believe that one can achieve meaningful personal growth through the process of asking and exploring the questions. Here is a summary of some of my important experiences and thoughts from the first semester.

Listening: My musical tastes have gotten all over the map, both literally and figuratively. A couple of the recordings that have had the most impact on me lately:

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar: Marwa and Bageshree

A recording of the great vina player live in Seattle, accompanied by two tampboura players. Dagar eschews dazzling virtuosity for a very slow, drifting, spiritual type of music. His sustained tones and long, beautiful glissandi are entrancing and deeply evocative. The music moves at an almost imperceptible pace, but when it reaches its peak, you'll feel it.

Paul Bley: Open, to Love

Bought this solo piano record a year or two ago, but never listened to it that much until recently. I've been deeply affected by the way Bley uses space in his music, letting a single note or chord hold out against nothingness and silence for what can be almost and excruciating interval of time. I've really taken to heart the way he combines subtle abstraction with poignant, melodicism.

Koachiro Miyata: Shakuhachi-The Japanese Flute

A release of solo shakuhachi music form Nonesuch record's excellent explorer series. Although it is in a very foreign musical language from mine, I found that this music really adhered to the same aesthetic that I was trying to follow, of simplicity and directness of emotion. This is beautiful and unpretentious music.

Thoughts on music:

-Anything can be an influence on you as an artist if you will let it. This does not always have to take the form of concrete musical ideas that one learns from listening to music, it can be merely an aesthetic or mood that inspires you to create art.

-Sometimes there is value to simply trying to do something different from everyone else. It is more important, though, to be yourself. If you let your art be an honest reflection of your natural self, then you will have a product that is original and different from anything else.

I should also mention again my work with the experimental music collective (a name we are considering changing, but it'll do for now.) Functioning in this group demands listening on a level beyond any other music I had previously played. Trying to fit in to the pure sound focus of the improvisations has forced me to develop many new extended techniques on the piano. The group had its first performance several weeks ago. Hopefully there will be more in the future.

I'll be spending the month of January in Oberlin (there are no classes that month.) I'll be playing my original jazz compositions with a trio featuring Zach Hobin on Bass and Zaire Dearden on drums. I'm very excited to be working with these two excellent musicians. I also hope for a lot of collaboration and experimentation with whichever other musicians will be around. It should be an extremely interesting month.

Hiatus

As of two days ago, I decided to take an extended break from any type of long-form composition. This decision may come a little late as I have already not written anything of that nature for over a month anyway, but it helps to make a declarative statement like that. Spending a lot of time with various composition students at Oberlin made me do some serious thinking about the way I write. I have never developed any kind of methodology to composing. I tend to begin at measure one with only a vague idea of what I want to write, and I keep going from there. This approach can be successful. I've written several pieces this way that I am quite proud of. My discussions with fellow students who have devoted themselves to being full-time composers has shown me that these people have a thought process that I don't have, the ability to hear music on a much more developed level before writing it. The process of writing is merely a realization of their ideas, rather than the process by which the music is created. Is this the only way to write music? I don't think so, but when I decide to resume long-form composition, I want to deeply reconsider the way I go about writing music. I will restrain myself from saying anything more about this right now, as I feel I have become maybe a bit too analytical about my artistic process lately. I already have enough to think about as I dramatically reconsider my approach to playing the piano, and my friends are probably getting tired of hearing me bitch about this stuff by now.

I will say, that I have exempted jazz composition from this hiatus. I feel comfortable doing this because it is really quite different. For the jazz musician, writing and playing are really two parts of the same process. Jazz composition has been quite fruitful for me lately, and I'm producing a body of work that I'm very happy with. I am currently hoping to explore this material as well as many of the pieces I've written over the last six months or so over January term at Oberlin, ideally making a recording of original music.

Practicing Freedom

I've recently had to seriously reconsider and adjust my attitude towards playing "free."

The most important accomplishment was to adjust a misconception that I had let take root in my mind, that playing free was not real piano playing. This does not mean that I didn't take the music seriously. The jazz avant-garde is a very large part of my identity as a musician, and I have nothing but reverence for the great practitioners of this art form. I merely thought that free jazz did not demand the same things from me as a pianist that more conventional playing did. When playing free, I was so concerned with spontaneity that all idea of technique was pretty much lost. I would whip my fingers carelessly around the keys wherever the moment took them.

Another problem was that it had never really occurred to me that one ought to practice playing free. To me that seemed to defeat the purpose of a medium that so heavily relied on intuition and the inspiration of the moment. I did sometimes improvise freely during my practice sessions, but when I did this I always tried to create one coherent piece of music, as if I were improvising in a performance. I would never stop to examine what I was playing or develop on any of my ideas the way I would practice navigating the changes of a jazz tune. This does not actually constitute practicing.

As of the past week, I have started finding ways to develop a vocabulary for free-improvisation and make this a part of my regular practice sessions. So far this has meant devising atonal "licks" and practicing them the way I would a jazz lick. Memorizing licks does seem very much contrary to the nature of free improvisation. I thought to myself however, that when I practice a line taken from Miles Davis or Bill Evans, the eventual goal is not to be able to use that musical idea in one of my own improvisations, but merely as a way of developing the dexterity and knowledge of jazz vocabulary necessary to create my own lines while improvising.

For a long time I resisted practicing this way, thinking that doing so would make my free playing more contrived, and not true free improvisation. Hopefully, developing some amount of consistent musical vocabulary to use in free improvisation will actually help me gain a greater level of freedom in my playing.