Spring Semester 2011

A new semester is underway. I am undertaking several projects this semester that I am very excited about

The first is the continuation of Jules Verne, formed this fall with Carl Mitchell on Saxophone, Ian Mccolm on Drums and Dan Pappalardo on Bass. Due to an unfortunate and ongoing injury Dan is not currently playing with us, however the equally capable Nathan Swedlow is now acting in his stead. Of particular interest to me is further exploration of American Folk Music as a source of material. Our first foray into this was a rendition of the Charley Patton song "Some of These Days I'll be Gone" which we rendered in a free expressionist fashion. If you are not familiar with Patton's music I strongly urge you to give it a listen. Fewer people are as crucial to the blues and the roots of American music, and few could put a song over with as much honest soul and down to earth grit. Anyway, that number became a mainstay of our repertoire, and we are now looking for other songs to follow it with. While I was first attracted to the blues, I've also recently grown interested in appalachian area folk music, or old time. Accordingly, I brought in the folk tune "He Rambled," recorded by Charlie Poole and Fiddlin' John Carson, to the quartet. Hopefully this interest will be developed further. We also have plans to make studio recordings in the near future.

Another semester of the Oberlin Improvisation and New Music Collective is also promising. The ensemble is much larger than it was in the fall, which will be a very good challenge. During my time in that ensemble, we have been struggling with the immense difficulties of large group free improvisation. Our last two performances in December were certainly the most cohesive and convincing that we have played so far, and I hope to continue in that direction. I also look forward to improvising in small groups with some of the individuals I have been working with for some time now, Matt Chamberlain Jessie Downs and Doug Farrand, and also with some new collaborators.

Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard 8/31/10

My return to Oberlin has found me to busy to do any writing. I am therefore currently using my recuperation time from this unpleasant cold as a chance to catch up.

Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard 8/31/10

Okay so maybe this was the best show of the summer. Tough call. I have heard Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano live before, and it was quite a show. This show blew that one away.

While Motian's recordings for ECM in the past decade have generally been about restraint and gentle subtlety, they were out for blood this night; it was the most aggressive I have ever heard Paul Motian play. Bill Frisell was the shy guy that night, in the shadows towards the side of the stage, hunching over his guitar. His solos were brooding and introverted but full of dark energy. He mixed jarring dissonance and rhythmic akwardness with twangy folk-like passages. Lovano was the extrovert, gushing tremendous post-Coltrane lines at high speeds, sometimes breaking into his melodic altissimo, one moment holding his saxophone off to the side like Lester Young, the next moment lifting it above his head like Albert Ayler and all of that history there in the music. Motian's playing was typically cryptic and fragmented, giving only the loosest and most round-about references to time. As always, it somehow managed to swing like mad. The trio played through three of Motian's pieces and three by Thelonious Monk. It is my belief that they are one of the very few contemporary groups who bring anything original to Monk's music. The set highlight was was Misterioso. After a very loose and collective take on the theme, Lovano took the first solo- mostly post-Coltrane knotty and sophisticated lines. Frisell followed, still introspective, but bringing in a lot of bluesy grit. Lovano then returned to take a second and longer solo. Halfway in he began referencing the blues heavily too, stomping it out like Illinois Jacquet. Motian's playing became uncharacteristically funky in response. While never playing any really obvious backbeat feel, he communicated his own unique sense of funk. This was a very rare moment for this group, I think.

The Paul Motian Trio is still one of the most innovative groups in contemporary jazz. Motian has nothing left to prove, he's just doing his thing.

Improvisation and Sound

Had the opportunity last week to play some music with Mark Michelli, Jessie Downs and Doug Farrand. After surrounding myself with hardcore jazz all summer it was refreshing to play in a completely different direction (Non-idiomatic improvisation I guess, but I have always thought that that was a stupid term.)

I remember after a solo piano improvisation I played for a friend some time last month I commented to myself "I need to respect the sound more." I felt a need to remove the personal ego from my music. Some thoughts I had been sitting on- the music of Morton Feldman, and his idea of "sourceless sounds" also the work of artist Yves Klein, who I had beliefs that would be the visual art analogy to Feldman's ideas. Klein wanted his works to be about more than himself creating a piece. He wanted to depict the immaterial.

In any case, the music we played that day left me very satisfied. In all cases, the sound triumphed over individuals. The result was evocative as a whole, but was not stamped with the intent of any performer, something which can ruin music.

Look forward to more of this when I return to Oberlin in a week.

Hermeto Pascoal e Grupo-Damrosch Park Bandshell

This was it. It was the best concert of the summer AND YOU MISSED IT OSCAR! YOU MISSED IT!

I'm new to Hermeto Pascoal, having heard only a smattering of his music. When I heard that he was giving a free concert as part of Lincoln Center's summer series at Damrosch Park Bandshell, it seemed like an opportunity I shouldn't miss.

I have a very hard time describing what happened on stage that night, but it was an incredible experience. The influence of jazz and brazilian samba and bossa nova music where evident, but to call the music a mere fusion of those two styles would be a great oversimplification. The music was thickly layered and polyrhythmic. As a listener, I could feel a pocket, but when I tried to count out time, or tell where one was, it became totally confusing. Every so often the band would settle down, and a clearly discernible meter would emerge. Only several seconds later they would depart again in a completely different direction.

The hour long set was played with very few pauses. The band would only stop playing for a few seconds at a time. The effect was overwhelming, like reading a novel in one sitting. Although I didn't have any time to think about what I was hearing, it was a really great effect. After the show I was left with incredible impression of the music I had heard, without being able to put together any of the smaller details in my head. Also, special recognition is due to Aline Morae, Hermeto's wife and vocalist in the group. She sang for an hour, while performing incredibly complex music with such intensity that the whole audience was awed.

I had come across some very cynical philosophies about this country and life in general this summer, for reasons I won't get into now. Basically, I was very frustrated with living in an increasingly conservative and consumer driven society. This concert really cleared my head out. After seeing Hermeto e Grupo on stage I was left with an important but very obvious revelation- "Right. That's why I am a musician."

Performance Announcement

I will be playinfg music at a farmer's market held at Princeton Public Library on Thursday the 26th at 12:30. The band is myself on piano, Dan Filipak on bass and Theo Lebeaux on drums. We will be playing music by Theo, myself, Miles Davis and Carla Bley among others. Come check it out.

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.