by Patrick Kosiewicz

From 1972-1975 Miles Davis and a band of warrior musicians
took audiences back to the furthest reaches
of human and earth history
with their elemental, organic, universal, and utterly spontaneous sound.

It began as a return to Africa,
site of the first human revolution,
radiated to the Indus Valley and the jungles of South America,
and then went further back in time
covering the expanses of Pangea, Gondwana, Panthalassa and beyond.

Michael Henderson set off massive tectonic shifts and stirred seas of magma with his bass.
Pulse of life through time and space ran through James Mtume’s hands.
The organic bounce of the biosphere sprang from Pete Cosey’s guitar strings and wah-pedal.
Miles’ horn was a rumble from the earth’s core, a terrifying message from the sky, the breath of man’s eternal state of the blues on this turtle-back world…

Warm mud bubbling up from a primordial land…warm blood running down the leg of primordial mother…the childscape of humankind where people spontaneously adorned themselves with spiraling hats of grass and blazing pigments crushed from earth’s color wheel…the secret dance of cellular procreation…a mass migration of mammoths with birds chattering on their backs…a giant butterfly landing on a naked child’s hand…the lost legends of man and woman told by a horn at a gathering of people around a fire….

Scholarly sources for the earliest planetary and human history abound, but this library of nature’s funk is just as rich a source for one seeking answers to the origins (and future) of man: On the Corner, Dark Magus, Pangea, Agharta, Live- Evil, Get Up With It. There is much that will provide you with radio-carbon-fortified facts and dazzling speculations, but little that will take to you to an original state of mind. The soundscapes in the above-mentioned albums reveal human beings’ deepest beginnings and most distant destinies.

On the Live - Evil album cover you will find a naked, gleaming African earth queen adorned with crimson samurai helmet from the future-past…a wall of archaic Arabic calligraphy that mirrors the topography of a microchip…a woman who is perhaps our ancient Ethiopian mother, perhaps a bronze mother of a future humanity…A people traverse badlands in sky-colored robes, wave of blood and fire with a human face arcing over them…

When this music was being made there was an outcry from critics who wanted Miles to forever inhabit the realms of Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and Miles Smiles (they later praised the music and deemed it ‘ahead of its time’ and so on). These people were very much like some producer who once told Miles to think about slavery when playing his blues, and there are many still who prefer the safe, easily-fathomed Prince of Darkness. But to the brave ones, in the words of Miles: “Pack your toothbrush and your douche bag,” we’re going to Gondwana.

An extremely long and image-dense New York art fair report by Janet Bruesselbach

Everything I shot from Wednesday to Sunday is here.

FIRST COURSE: The Armory Show

I registered as press in advance for this and showed up about ten minutes after the press conference to pick up my badge. I briefly glanced at Pier 92, where they only show dead artists, or at least which consists primarily of resale by historical, museum-level galleries. While there’s much more interest in the first market of Pier 94, the historical gap is small.
Example:

Juan Genoves, Transcurso, 2006 detail. From the press balcony this looked like a photograph but it’s really thick impasto.

As press, I have exchanged my attention and goodwill for privileged access, and operate as free publicity for the show. But as a cultural consumer advocate in the attention economy, I now consider anyone non-VIP who pays for access to be a Sucker. If you have a blog or anything I recommend you write yourself an assignment letter or just register on their site and get in free.

Maybe my research-fu is weak but I cannot find an image of how the pier is laid out. It’s basically a T. I started on the right arm of the T and methodically went down the rows. Because there are an odd number of rows on the staff of the T you can end up redundantly walking along it this way (and thereby seeing the featured Berlin part twice), so it’s best to do the arms by row and the pier over the water in a zig zag with a little overlap in the middle. It’s easy to get distracted by something on the other side and overwalk. With the white lights and walls everywhere, my eyes got much tireder than my feet. One thing I found I ended up doing was lingering in a corner staring at a piece I found completely uninteresting, just to rest.

I felt I was coming into this one with preferences different from ones I would have other years or even other days. Some of my arbitrary rules, and why:
1. Galleries that are basically retail shops for pop art stars (Hirst, for example) aren’t worth discussing.
2. I’m sick of contempt for the audience and easy cultural critique. True, just because the economy’s down doesn’t mean artists should make collector-friendly work, but conceptual laziness just means you have nothing intellectually complex to talk about. It looks like some idiot has scammed the gallery and that’s just business.
3. I’m paying particular attention to class issues as well as ethnic politics. While the Armory is aggressively post- and inter-national, it began as an American exodus for the European avante-garde. Without contemporaneity entrenched in the Obama Era we’re just looking at aesthetic balloons.
4. Things that are difficult to transport or install are interesting. Animatronics, performances, digital media.
5. But contrary to (4), things obviously marketed towards a particular part of the market - either museums or collectors - aren’t as interesting as those that really work just for the Armory. It’s like admiring mall displays. I’m looking for what is essentially intimate public art without the effects of public funding.
6. Every year I am less and less inclined to like something just because it resembles my own field, figurative painting. There’s a lot of figurative painting that’s done either photographically or non-representationally that is to be considered more as conceptual.
7. Things that would appeal to people with no art background and anything that disregards the whole modernist project hold a certain fascination, if only because I find myself so willing to dismiss them. This also goes for “bourgeouis” or “kitsch” work aimed at a theoretical market solely about interior decorating. Many critics overlook this work because it’s boring, and it does take up the bulk of the show, but it’s the sanctuary for the many many artists who just want to make beauty. Escapism is practical.
8. I like computers and science. And environmental issues. Grids, numbers, language: these are things I look at because they’re not something I can do well. HOWEVER. I am, if not a dogmatic technophile, at least an anti-Luddite, and will dismiss anything that’s simply critical of technology/modernity/”synthetic”.
9. Unless it’s something new by a favorite, I’m not looking at things I’ve seen before, either at Basel or at last year’s Armory. There are actually repeat pieces, which looks like it would be embarrassing or at least appears lazy. It could be argued that the galleries are standing behind their investments but it’s a waste of time to a spectator.
10. I am not looking at other art blogs and I am trying to see things other art blogs don’t before I read them.

Ultimately it’s just what caught my eye, which has an average sort of attention bandwidth, and VIKI’s camera.

What struck me in particular yesterday was the sort of economy simplified by postcolonialist Ngugi as the rich stealing from the rich. Or rather, most galleries are investments by rich people who consider themselves smart enough to try to find the few stupid rich people, or to catch the rich in moments of irrationality. Hence the free flow of champagne for handpicked VIPs. I can barely speculate on what percentage of art sales are gallery to gallery. At the super blue chip level there’s little to firmly connect particular artists to particular galleries besides geography, and even that’s irrelevent when the fairs, especially in an art hub like NYC, consist of the fattest international ambassadors.

Lets look at pretty pictures now.

Okay, Ian Davis does these awesome wide-angle landscapes full of identical figures, commentaries on industrial science, but I can’t find the new ones he had up and the picture didn’t come through. Look out for “hubris” and “skeptics”.

I ran into Jack Tilton, and had a look at Roberts & Tilton, his L.A. branch, which had some Kehinde Wiley (who may have stepped on me) and Titus Kaphar, who deconstructs canvases to comment on race history:

“Nip tuck” (or “Lillian Dandridge”?), 2009, Crumpled canvas oil painting.

Markus Schinwald, Carola, 2009. 22×18cm oil on canvas. 19th century style portraits of cyborgs are a good direction (and many were made in the 19th century already)

Also at Yvon Lambert was one of those “difficult to reproduce” near-conceptual museum pieces by Zilvinas Kempinas, Serpentine, consisting of magnetic tape blown in a corner by a fan.

This is interesting because apart from context it’s illustration or at least kind of gross pedophiliac erotic art. It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit. I apparently didn’t photo the attribution - if you know it, say it.

Muntean/Rosenblum: another of these paintings entrenched in photography, but there’s something about the children/escalator imagery and the discouragement of connection between photo and caption that has a poetic kick for me.

You know what? Because I’ve been just taking photos of labels (when they were there, because they weren’t always) to attribute, I may as well use those. Let’s try that.

It is a photo of a moon landing with the astronauts made black.
No, that method doesn’t really work.

The galleries that featured shows of individual artists seemed to be very proud of doing this - it was something they could afford to do, selflessly. It definitely paid off in attention to have an immersive, consistent space. A prime example is Adam McEwan’s “I Am Curious Yellow” installation at Nicole Klagsburn, which consisted of a series in only white and yellow, including blowups of Soviet German buttons, swastikas, and large prints of an article about an Olympic runner’s alleged gender fraud.

Peter Liversidge got a bright little room with two installations (”Come On In” of handpainted dice, and “little by little” neon) including the proposals for those installations.

The preponderance of high-hung neon was nicely deflated by a Japanese artist’s smashed neon sign near the ground.

I always like what Mizuma has, but if there’s a message to take from this show it’s that Orientalism doesn’t even work any more.

My bandwidth was shutting down in protest and I started favoring one-liners. I chatted with the Andrew Kreps assistant working under a painting consisting only of the words “tiny little microscopes” for a few minutes as a kind of high-stress palate cleanser. Kreps also featured a pro-choice piece by Andrea Bowers, consisting of a pre-Roe v. Wade letter from a shudderingly oppressed woman who had no idea where to get an abortion to a sympathetic (or maybe not) organization.

English mega-gallery White Cube featured this life-size bronze of a trans man by Marc Quinn.

What I find interesting about Benjamin Edwards (”Solo”, 2010 and already sold) is that 3-d is already, especially if done right, far beyond the glitchy emptiness he foregrounds.

Limning the differences between him and Justin Faunce is a quick exercise.

SCHNELL.

I love David Schnell very much.

I wonder if the title “world map of genreal hazards” is intentional. I rather like “genreal” better than “general” or “natural”. I don’t know who did the Scrooge McDuck but it’s excellently posed for this photo op.

South African galleries felt especially strong this year. This taxidermied farcegory had a live band playing incidental music that I saw VIPs covering their ears for.

I think that’s about all I can salvage. I don’t want to declare a judgment on the show overall, because it’s a lot of different galleries trying a lot of different tactics, and sometimes the good parts are just good and the bad parts are really interesting. I’ll do further posts on the many other venues that have sprouted up this week. There are qualitative comparisons to be made, and I’d rather not debate context or content.

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot Reid Seifer’s Forget perfume booth. They had spray, for forgetting. It didn’t work.

SECOND COURSE:Scope

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent.
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC, calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn’t be enough security personnel even with well-behaved, informed crowds.
That’s part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than meta-commentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn’t it taste great? David Stein’s absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE’s corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People’s Revolution, Kelly Cutron’s PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE’s VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Bad boy scout making noises.

THIRD COURSE: Verge

It’s young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace “emerging” and “overlooked” art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn’t have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather’s was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche’s Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

FOURTH COURSE: Pulse

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works. Tonight’s theme: Cybernetics.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here’s what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40×60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art’s snarky political cartoonist. He’ll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we’re really post-Oedipal, and I don’t think so). He’s been working incredibly hard this year, and I don’t know why he’s not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend’s dessert, #class - its strength is that it’s such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: “Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?”

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I’d already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting what I like to call dessert (see Part The Sixth).

Who did the hypervirtual photo that’s on the cover of Lethem’s Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that’s who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48″x60″ (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

DESSERT:

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don’t think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It’s ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic’s heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn’t work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we’d get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I’ve said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn’t teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to “social media expert”/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton’s husband and friends. Everyone’s kids were there. Powhida showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don’t think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I’m made nervous that everyone else there had day jobs, but better-paying ones than mine.

This shit is bananas. S-H-I-T.

by Phaedra Pinkston

Staten Island, New York vocalist/guitarist Dorian Spencer can be seen performing live around New York City making the commutes around town a little bit more relaxing for the always-on-the-go New Yorker.

Originally born in Puerto Rico, the self taught musician was greatly impacted by musical legend Jimi Hendrix additionally, all of Spencer’s songs are originally composed by Spencer himself.

The soloist even has his own record label, Mode Records.

A Jack of trades in instruments, the singer/songwriter is also well versed in the piano, saxophone, and the trombone.

Spencer is frequently seen performing at Grand Central Station, Whitehall Street Terminal, Penn Station, and of course, Times Square.

To hear original tunes by Dorian Spencer please go to www.dorianspencer.com

Cheers

Local bass musician is a graduate of the Sarah Lawrence College music department. Only twenty-four and McEvoy has already previously performed Lincoln Center and the BlueNote however McEvoy makes it a point to perform live once at month Tribes Gallery in the East Village of Manhattan. Heavily influenced by artist such as Jimmy Hendrix, Duke Ellington, and Hank Williams, McEvoy’s style of music is rather mystifying an cannot be put into just one one classification; it’s a custom sound in the making and anything but tame. It maybe considered chamber music with a fusion jazz twist and often improved with something little extra.

By: Phaedra Pinkston

It’s mid-December and the temperature in New York has finally reached 46 degrees. New Yorkers clamor for their sweaters and snow boots and complain that it hasn’t been the sunny 65 degrees they were spoiled with up to this point.

It’s December, the sparrows in New York have not gone south and they’re fighting over a stale bagel tossed on the sidewalk outside Rockefeller Center.

Christ people! It’s fucking Winter! We’re supposed to be shoveling snow at this point!

Does anyone find something wrong with these pictures?

DJ Spooky aka Paul Miller aka that Subliminal Kid goes to Antarctica to get to the root of the issue of Climate Change. Mixing sounds he recorded at the Southern tip of planet Earth with a turn-table and theremin and live performance of two violinists, an upright bass and piano, Spooky is the sorcerer conjuring sounds that connect with projections.

Standing at the center of an upside down V-formation on stage, Spooky, the mad scientist of sound mixes visual media of Artic glaciers, bodies of water, penguins and reels of old Russian footage projected onto three screens – two behind Spooky and the musicians and one transparent screen that comes down in front of the performers. At this moment you can see a body of water in motion and Spooky and the musicians riding on top of the waves. When there is a mountain of snow projected, you can see the performers climbing with the wind and snow formations.

The projections were further exciting when they became vector lines of the glaciers, music notes, and molecules that suddenly burst out over the audience, adding to the spectacle of the performance and allowing the audience to feel that they were part of the artistic expression.

At this point, I have to say that even I could not look away to take notes for this review. And to think, that I hadn’t even planned on attending this performance.

For most of 2009, due to lack of personal funds, I’d found myself missing out on a lot of the performance and art world. I’d received several emails from Spooky’s list about the show but knew that I couldn’t afford a ticket for a show at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). So, I sent Miller good vibes and continued searching for work.

Then, I got an email from Spooky’s list about a poetry contest. The winner would receive two tickets to one of the three shows that week. I had become inspired, which wasn’t an easy thing for me to be at the time.

I did my research and wrote Terra Australis, which is what explorers first called Antarctica. Believing that this frozen, barren land was a mythological place that existed as much as the garden of eden, the sub-zero territory went unclaimed by other countries for centuries. The poem was a winner so, I went and promised Steve Cannon of A Gathering of the Tribes, a long time friend of DJ Spooky, that I’d write a review.

Spooky’s vision for much of his art is admirable. He joins concepts from various cultures to create questions and reveal truths. Unlike many, who take the stance of exposing truth, Spooky does not set out to terrify us or point the finger and say, “this is your fault” or “how can you just sit here? Go out and fix global warming.”

If we were overwhelmed in our seats it was because we were in awe of the beauty of the land and it’s sounds, amazed that it is owned by no one and captivated by it’s history as a landmark.

Of course climate change is a frightening occurrence and I agree that toxic emissions in the ozone atmosphere add to this rapidly increasing problem, but Spooky’s Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica says, with a child’s wonder, “hey, did you know about this?” His intention is not to overtly terrify us or to be condescending, but to remind us that our actions have a chain reaction and that there is a world outside of the perfect life we’ve engineered for ourselves. That this other world is a living, breathing organism with a heartbeat that begs to be heard. DJ Spooky arranges Antarctica’s voice and the land tells us its story.

Watching Spooky’s Antarctica unfold was inspiring and reminded me that this life is not all about me and my own financial woes, but something greater.

Terra Australis
By Amy Ouzoonian

Ptolemy knew you
Wrapped rope of wind
Fabled curve of fire
and ice.

Your sound crawled
Deep
Sang red and sank orange dawn
Drank light through powerful
Veins. This diamond sutra
Vibrating green Rain
Springs
Of DNA
Coil blue and indigo in cog frio

Fear
Rings and
Experiments spear and splint
To make sense in the
splice of death
And dream.
Samadhi: Violence
Greets peace
Eats when Terra Nova sleeps.

Her face is
Minnesota Nice.

The price of a melting glacier
Is 1,000 species
And the numbers are rising
From her hands that change

Oil into shame
Promise into progress
Progress into blame.

Last seen
Scaling a sky
that beds with desert
Snow.

Every God Damn Day,
Trumpeted by the sun,
She bleeds
Back into myth’s well of
Emotion like the tongue
That challenges symmetry
And science.

Open your mouth
And take this country
In you
Until you cannot imagine
A world without the Southern most
Tip of Terra—

A semblance of all mantras
Stamped into a code
Embedded
Within.

by: Kim Amir Sitafalwalla

    For the simple fact that everything good has already been done I seldom follow contemporary anything. There are a few bands, however, that demand attention and I wholeheartedly follow their releases, tour dates, and if they have any, causes they are fervent about. Yet, again and again I am disappointed by current music’s cookie cutter production, one-dimensional lyrics, and lack of ingenuity, though I put hope in the bands that deviate from this lackluster norm… I wonder if I am too young to be so cynical. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a band I totally dig. I rock out to their records because they are distinct, fun, edgy and, at least as their older stuff goes, not catered towards commercial success. Boy, was I let down upon listening to their most recent LP release, It’s Blitz. 

Okay, lets put aside the critical analysis. The band has been progressively watering down their art punk slash New York indie rock and instead trading it in for a poppy, dancy, Blondie-esque sound circa 1979. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have, however, kept some consistency with the strong, feminine vocals distinct to Karen O, the sing-along choruses, and Nick Zinner’s simplistic, catchy guitar riffs. The opening song, also their first single, “Zero,” has a similar vibe to 2006’s “Gold Lion,” yet does not show any signs of progress. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good single, its easy to groove to and has all the facets of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song to make it theirs, but that rawness and punk attitude appears to have been traded in for pop. The cheesy synthesizers in the next track, “Heads Will Roll” is paired with a disco feel but eighties sound… nothing new except for the fact that this dance-y music is supposed to be the “evolved” YYY’s. Still no harm done; the next two tracks are slower—more like Show Your Bones, though still no Fever To Tell reminiscence—but ballads are typical to the band.  It is these ballads that the general public go for that make the US charts. Take 2003’s “Maps,” which made it to #9, and as a whole, the album Fever to Tell rocked harder than that one song. But radio listeners opt for the catchy single; it seems the band went from there and as the years pass on they have diluted their sound—next thing we know they might get Timbaland to produce their next record. What’s in demand is “electro-pop” and I guess the trio thought that they might as well give it a spin.  Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe my expectations are too high, but the band does reaffirm themselves as one of my favorites of contemporary music with track number five tactfully placed in the middle of the record: “Dull Life,” picks the listener back up, throws him against the wall, and demands that he shake his booty while singing along. Another un-notable track is one that was probably passed over by Donna Summer and given to the YYY’s to record: “Dragon Queen” sounds like it should be spun in an obscure warehouse with bell bottomed, polyester wearing, androgynous pill popping dancers. Still, the layered guitar and bubbly synthesizers make for a catchy beat. The rest of the album is non-monumental except for Karen O’s vocals, she is the drumbeat of the band using her voice as the strongest instrument. At times it’s girlish, Lolita innocent sounding, and at other times it’s a don’t mess with me, “I’m tough,” that reminds us of the self-titled EP released eight years ago.

It’s Blitz is no way near the garage-y indie rock of Fever to Tell that gave them their status in 2003; its dance-y, its electronic, its synth-y, and its indie POP (although I don’t think the band qualifies as indie anymore, since they are being released on Interscope). In spite of these misgivings I will listen to this record while getting dressed for a night of debauchery, I will listen to this record in the car, and I will listen to it while burning calories in the gym; it’s versatile and bound to put anyone in a good mood. 

By Brian Boyles

Let’s agree that, like the blues or most folk music, hip-hop is concerned with observation and storytelling. Let’s not argue about its usefulness in today’s America or the clarity of its lens. The form is a tool for these reporting functions and, as such, its appeal long ago spread to other parts of the world, particularly urban centers and oppressed peoples. We’re into the 2^nd generation of this exportation, and we could guess that the majority of the world’s ghettos have hip-hop or its influences coursing through their alleys and hallways.

In a plaza in Fes, Morocco, I stood on the frontiers of the music that began in the South Bronx. Around me pulsed a crowd of a thousand or so urchins from the oldest medina in the world, 15 year olds who freaked out at every song. They didn’t have the uniforms, they had the crazy. They represented the newest converts, the kids with faith and blown minds. Though the dancing was different and the backdrop was a medieval wall instead of a rec room in a project, the fever in the air was a mutation of the one struck hit Kook Herc’s neighborhood in 1975. Everywhere I looked, people shook and screamed. This, I thought, is where hip-hop ended up, but it is anything but finished.

The next thing that struck me was the lack of reference to the original aesthetic, only to the original feeling. Unlike secondary hip-hop scenes in France or Japan, there was none of the commercialized hood style, no practiced sullen posing taken from magazines or the internet. I’m not saying that to hate on anyone else’s version, but the absences resounded with me. Instead of savvy or restraint, these kids were in the thrall of hip-hop like it was theirs, like the world might be theirs right then. They believed.

And after all, this was the “Fes Festival of World Sacred Music.” From the outside, reading the program, you might think a hip-hop show an odd fit amongst the chants and choirs. But standing in the middle of the crowd, it made fine sense: these kids were as dedicated, as entranced as any follower. Like other generations of adolescents before them, they took a direct hit from hip-hop, from its defiance, its boldness, its urgency. I thought about rock n’ roll’s appeal to the original Baby Boomers, and how the snappy chorus sung in unison is a condensed solidarity and rebellion. Hip-hop, though, has streams of words, broken up by hooks. Memorizing all the lines, then chanting the general “Fuck you” hook, trying to keep up with the MC’s verbal dexterity–these are great exercises for the young mind juiced on hormones and first run-ins with the adult world. Nothing in music is as powerful as hearing a sound, a lyric that has you as the subject, and then singing along as loud as you can.

Many of these kids in Fes that day knew the words, but a lot of them just squealed and spun in circles.

The group, Fnaire, was a trio from Marrakech, so the relative bond of country probably strengthened the bond with the crowd. This wasn’t some far off hero of another city’s battles, these were Moroccan guys like them. And Fnaire did a good job of stoking the hysteria. They had their stage shit together, moving as a unit, with one of them the requisite Nate Dogg crooner. I thought the beats and delivery sounded a little more British than American, and more monotone than many of today’s rappers. Overall, though, Fnaire was quality. The response to them was fanatical.

Hip-hop, the eternal hope and the persistent disappointment. We have seen it rise and, in this country, become a major force in the cultural lexicon. Formerly vital stars make unsubtly racist reality shows and real estate agents in Texas use words like “jiggy” and “bling” while rocking Sean John ties. Hip-hop in the US is not dead; it is bloated, profitable, mainstream, and the underground continues with its legends, circuit, charlatans, and workhorses. To be sure, making a declaration on the state of the music would be to incorrectly assume it is one state. Still, the point is, hip-hop is familiar, taken for granted. It’s not scaring anyone or surprising anyone. Whatever changes it has wrought over the last three decades are polluted with cash and an unceasing, “get mine” attitude. Great things, bad things, but never new things. Your grandmother knows something about hip-hop. She heard it on a car commercial. It’s a part of the cultural noise.

Not in North Africa. This wasn’t a derivative reaction. The boys and girls in the plaza weren’t freaking out because they loved Tupac or envied the American teen who can ride in an SUV with big speakers and Ecko sweats. They were freer than that. The rappers had made the music and the music was in the hands of these children now, and the stage seemed to be as far as they needed to look for inspiration, for desire, for affirmation. Hip hop mattered in that moment and place.

Who knows if it will still matter in Fes in 10 years? Maybe it will make more of these kids waste money on second-tier brand name t-shirts. Maybe they’ll become materialistic, violent, angrier. Maybe the whole thing will get old to them. There’s no way to know. Hip-hop doesn’t have an inscribed fate in store for its followers. But across the world, its followers treat it like life or death. In the next decade, these Moroccan kids might make something completely different out of hip-hop. Regardless, hip-hop will be the music of their youth, and you never forget the songs you learned when you were 15.

The beauty of the Festival’s free shows was the amount of grandmothers, fathers, shrouded women, sexy women, tough guys, toddlers, moped riders, and rug salesmen. At all the concerts, the crowd was everyone in Fes, emptied out of the medina for some free entertainment. But the core at the Fnaire show on June 13^th was a group of teenagers who reacted to the music like they’d discovered it, like it came from them. They tossed each other in the air, they rode on each other’s shoulders, they waved their hands in the air.

To be one of those boys flung into the air, to look down for a brief second at all the people in the ancient city. To have only the swallows and sky above you, the rapper at eyelevel for one gasp. To believe that your time and your beat had arrived, just in time for you. That is a beautiful thing.

Even an especially accommodating definition of what jazz is will not place its beginnings much before the first few years of the 20th century, and so this world of music, this hallowed tradition which constitutes an entire paradigm of musical practice, is barely one hundred years old.  Among many implications of this, one is that a single artist could participate in most of the history of jazz.  Many did; and those who were canonized as jazz greats did not merely influence the development of the art form with a notable recording or famous concert, but continued, on many occasions, to shape and refine the possibilities which jazz – and all music – could reach.  Born in 1917, 90 years ago this October, Thelonious Monk lived such a life within, parallel to, and constitutive of jazz as we know it today.
As an inversion of the history of European classical music, entire historical eras of jazz history make up mere periods of an artist’s style.  Because of this, a number of individuals like Monk held the power of changing the course of jazz history.  In some ways, it is remarkable that we have such a clear canon of great jazz artists, musicians who added such a distinctly creative element to jazz that everyone ‘afterwards’ understood jazz a little differently because of them.  The dust has barely settled on the 20th century and somehow we already know who is who.  Miles Davis, for example, was like the Pythagoras, Pope Gregory, Beethoven and Schoenberg of jazz, and weaved the decades of music together in a complex progression of music.  In contrast to a fairly straightforward lineage of composers through the eras of classical music, in jazz we find a complex progress of many simultaneous geniuses, who overlap and come together in groups and then go their own way again.  With Monk, too, we find a pivotal genius through which it is possible to understand jazz’s entire history.
.  But in many ways Monk is cleaner.  If we had to continue our classical music comparison, we will give him a single comparison and say Monk is the J.S. Bach of the jazz historical context.  What Bach did was unified the understanding of music before him into a style and concept of musical aesthetics which directed the next three hundred years of music.  His clarity brought the music of his past into the understanding of music of the future.  Though he did not make his strategies explicit, students of music return to him at every level to understand tonality, the possible relations among musical voices, and the boundaries of chromaticism.  We cannot credit Bach for the invention of major and minor tonalities and the other basic concepts of common practice theory.  We value him for showing us what was possible in the musical arena which history gave him and the rest of classical music.  Like Bach, we do not credit Monk for theoretically establishing the versatility of extended tertian harmony, or for creating an entire new technique of playing the piano.  The history of jazz presented Monk much of this: the style of stride piano, the practice of re-harmonizing popular songs, the established chord relations were where he found himself as he was developing his own concept of music.
For its youth, jazz cannot likewise be seen as proportionately smaller than classical music in importance.  It was a big hundred years.  In no sense metaphorically, Solo Monk is equal in significance to the collection of Bach’s chorals.  Both these collections, the pure articulation of these artist’s styles, establish music-theoretical aesthetics that escape – shall we say transcend? – their role as historical indexes.  They quiet the aesthetic relativism in us for a moment.  We think, against our postmodern condition: damn, this is fundamental.
The paradox with Monk’s music is that while he was playing within a new sense of harmony, and hence establishing that harmony, his solos and comping are filled with seemingly archaic, “corny” harmonic material right along side what was entirely new conceptions of progressions.  Yet the jagged, assertive character of the articulations and phrasing unified it all into a forceful style.  For most musicians, playing with two almost inconsistent harmonic vocabularies would sound either ironic, or as though they didn’t know what they were doing in one or the other.  Monk, though, plays a simple G major chord in the same character as a G7b9#11.  There are no wrong notes here, because each note, each passage, arises out of a decisive physical gesture of musical creation.  Unlike Bach, the harmonic context Monk established doesn’t matter in respect to what he played – it will catch up if it wants to.  For us, though, it is the only thing to hang on to.
For students of jazz, the piano keyboard is a map on which the history of harmony is understood, from Bach to Monk and beyond.  The context of what ‘works’ and what doesn’t is laid out in terms of interval relations and visual/kinesthetic patterns.  Music theory and eras of styles are situated there in terms of notes.  With Monk, the keyboard was not like this.  It was a place for events, physical gestures turned into music by a physical encounter of a person and an object.  While all
In music, we search for the right notes – because a composer told us to do so, because we heard them on a recording, because our elementary music teacher inculcated it thus.  Bach told us one way of making the right notes come out.  It involved, through intervallic relations, music which encompassed the entire keyboard.  Monk tells us another way of getting the right notes.  It begins with the keyboard, goes up and down it, then it travels out, floating above, into straight fingers, into the body, up walking around, an out of keyboard experience, then back to the single dimension of where the finger hits the keys.  How do you play like Monk?  Got me.  It’s extended tertian harmony, it’s un-extended triads; it’s what has taken the history of music out of the traumatic Modern rejection of harmony and kept things going.

For Nora, in that moment, righteousness was a sound awash in tears. On that bright November day, folks on the street stopped, looking up with her to meet a warm rush of sound flowing effortlessly like a tropical tide, bright with the myriad colors and forms of a living coral reef. In that moment, as a brittle, obstinate thought persisting in her mind met the gentle surge of that musical current and suddenly dissolved, Nora McCarthy began to cry.

Above, in the space from which the music emerged, some twenty musicians expertly shaped a spiral galaxy of sound in a unified gesture of balance. Guiding the musicians, alert and attentive to every detail, stood musical director Jorge Sylvester, cueing with precise gestures the unfolding moments in which human song sails forth in search of time’s horizon.

The song was Nora McCarthy’s “Life is a Song to Sing”, evoking an affirmation of Life “as fragile as a butterfly’s wings/fluttering, fluttering.” For Nora’s butterfly, Jorge Sylvester had orchestrated a magnificent rainforest, and in this moment on Sunday, November 4, 2001, the butterfly, its rainforest, and the Conceptual Motion Orchestra had all brilliantly come to life together.

These journeyman musicians had assembled for the first rehearsal of this new orchestra, enthusiastically responding to Jorge Sylvester’s invitation to join a new and creative venture. Most of these musicians had worked together in large ensembles in the past, where they had previously played compositions and arrangements that had evolved in Jorge’s imagination for nearly three decades. Yet, this new orchestra came to life in a context very different from anything previously experienced by any of the participants.

Shroud of silence  –  tragedy’s entrainment

Recursive, breaching shattered walls.

A numbing silence had descended over New York City weeks earlier, in the aftermath of the brutal tragedy of September 11. The Conceptual Motion Orchestra was the fulfillment of the musicians’ need to mount a creative effort in that time of fear and doubt. These were veteran musicians — skilled survivors of a systematic devaluation of their relevance to a social order ceaselessly refactored by billions of profit-taking transactions per second. On that bright November Sunday they had gathered to fulfill an ancient calling of musicians — to affirm fundamental ideas of order in a broken world.

The Conceptual Motion Orchestra is a proof of concept of community triumphant over commodity. Indeed, the righteousness of the very first birth sounds of this orchestra had stopped Nora McCarthy in her tracks and had brought her to a tearful, life transforming realization of the value of her chosen path. Moments later she had joined the musicians to sing her song of Life with them for the first time, and had experienced another indescribable moment when the entire orchestra stood to offer her an ovation.

Such acknowledgement by the orchestra was indeed appropriate. Nora had, after all, provided the motivation and had found the opportunity required for this venture’s inception. It was Nora who challenged Jorge Sylvester to transform his compositional aspirations into reality as the musical director of a new orchestra. It was Nora who prompted Jorge, as they walked in New York’s East Village, to inquire about bringing this orchestra together at the University of the Streets, an enduring grassroots venue, where the agreed terms were simple and fair, intended for making music rather than money — community over commodity.

For years, Nora and Jorge had evolved a collaborative relationship whose strength owed as much to their near telepathic level of communication as to their forbearance in the face of discouragement, limited opportunity to perform, and periods of extreme financial crisis. Despite evictions, relocations, dead-end day jobs, and recurring bouts of despair, they continued undeterred to work on a musical language consciously intended to be beyond the reach of either musician individually.

Like the magnetic field generated by the molten iron core of a planet, the dynamic engine at the center of  the Conceptual Motion Orchestra is the synergy of Nora McCarthy’s voice and Jorge Sylvester’s alto saxophone. As a duo, Nora and Jorge perform under the name “A Small Dream in Red”, thereby acknowledging a deep affinity to Wassily Kandinsky — the artistic pioneer whose quintessential goal was to achieve the unique immediacy of music in abstract visual form. Incredibly, Nora and Jorge have achieved, in their duo performances, an innovative form of musical expression comparable in impact to Kandinsky’s paintings, wherein each work reveals a self-contained world of content, form, improvisation, and — above all — balance.

The path to Kandinsky’s level of creative achievement is an exacting and unfamiliar path, exemplified at the highest level within the jazz tradition by Coleman Hawkins’ unprecedented solo tenor saxophone masterpieces, “Picasso” and “Dali.” In this context jazz claims its rightful place as one of the great achievements of 20th century modernity. To work in this challenging artistic realm requires exceptional integrity and unrelenting honesty. Thelonious Monk, the preeminent standard bearer of musical originality, whose artistic mentor was none other than Coleman Hawkins, specifically and significantly described his own music, with its harmonies and rhythms that to this day astound the most accomplished musicians, as simply “modern music.”

Modernity as exemplified by Kandinsky and Monk is distinguished by a striking clarity of expression focused in the present moment. This clarity and presence is the ideal to which Nora McCarthy and Jorge Sylvester have aspired in their duo, “A Small Dream in Red”, and in its extension, the Conceptual Motion Orchestra. The abstract dimension of these artists’ work, often misunderstood as a stylistic choice, is a necessary key to the focused “Now!” at the heart of their work. Abstraction enables a clear distinction between the essential and the superfluous, and so can serve as a catalyst for powerful artistic expression.

As a new path for human creativity and discovery, artistic and scientific modernity arose as a necessary consequence of a historical moment when humanity’s capacity for knowledge surpassed its capacity for wisdom — Darwin’s discovery of biological evolution. In the arts, the unique hallmark of modernity was a sweeping emancipation of human subjectivity, together with the questioning, common to modern art and science alike after Darwin, of the basic assumptions underlying human understanding. Of great significance in this revolutionary process was the emergence of jazz, unparalleled in its immediacy of individual expression, and its essential connection, through a new rhythmic language, to the pulse of life itself.

Yet today, as the terrifying shape of the 21st century unfolds, the significance of jazz as an expression of  artistic modernity can all too easily be dismissed as just one more naive anachronism, supplanted by a post-modern, terror-alert condition of infinitely regressing layers of meta-cognitive self-reference. How does artistic integrity and honesty survive in an ecology of contemporary human endeavor that encompasses planet-devouring multinational commodity markets and mass-produced suicide bombers? Where is a work of art secure from being submerged by an incessant, attention-deficit inducing global torrent of mass-marketed, streaming media?

For Nora McCarthy and Jorge Sylvester, in confronting such questions, there is no choice but to trust the gift of inspiration with the humility and care borne of craftsmanship and discipline, and to give authentic voice to the vital, microcosmic “Now!” at the core of artistic modernity.  These artists’ work is truly deserving of notice and consideration, because it is work arising out of human necessity, not aesthetic preference. As a result of years of intensive collaboration, their hard-won synergy has enabled them to stake an honest claim to the modern artist’s highest ground — clarity of expression. To begin to understand Nora and Jorge’s fortuitous artistic synergy, it is necessary to know something about these two artists’ complementary personalities and early life experience.

Nora, restless, outspoken, and intuitive, the youngest of five children, grew up in a mid-western working-class family, for whom precious time not claimed by factory jobs, school, and life’s usual mundane distractions, was spent gathered at the piano singing and dancing. Nora’s father, a sometime song and dance man, whose performing aspirations had been preempted by the needs of a growing family, readily encouraged Nora’s early evidence of talent. This loving father who, despite his own careworn burdens, prompted his children to follow their dreams, died tragically on the night the family was to move into a new home for which he and Nora’s mother had worked so hard. Nora was 11 years old, and her family never recovered from this loss.

Music now became a means of solace for this family as its former dreams were traded for the enveloping quicksand of despair and poverty. During this time Nora was a solitary child whose companions were the piano and the radio. Sound was Nora’s lifeline — her constant and trusted guide through life’s uncharted territory. Nora’s development as a musician was unplanned, and was structured only by her restless yearning for new horizons. She learned by doing, and picked up the necessary technical skills and training along the way, through a process of self-discovery perhaps more common among poets than musicians.

Jorge, sincere, quiet, and analytical, the younger of two children, was raised in Colon, the Atlantic terminus of the Panama railroad/canal trade route, in a family where education, craftsmanship, and professionalism were valued and encouraged. Jorge’s father was a highly skilled carpenter and teacher, gifted with an architect’s sense of form and structure, along with the hands-on skill to give material form to his ideas. Owing ironically to a long-term, imperialistic American presence, the sounds of jazz were everywhere familiar in Colon, and Jorge’s father was an avid jazz record collector. Jorge, in early childhood, first awoke to the voice of the alto saxophone by listening to his father’s Sonny Stitt records. Nonetheless, Jorge’s musical wellsprings run deeper than merely the assimilation of American jazz. Panama is this planet’s unique geographical nexus — a crossroads of great oceans and continents — and consequently its people have had to struggle to maintain and refine their own national identity and culture.

Panama has listened with open ears to the characteristic sounds of Cuba, and New Orleans, as well as that of its other Caribbean island and South American neighbors, while preserving its own deep, indigenous musical voice. This generously inclusive identity, intensified by an insistence on the highest standards of excellence, constitutes the exceptional, albeit underappreciated, musical genius of Panama. On such fertile ground Jorge Sylvester took his first steps as a musician, fully supported by nurturing parents dedicated to cultivating his quickly emergent and exceptional musical talent. Jorge’s confident musical mastery today can be traced directly back to the intensive, formal cultivation of his talent underwritten by his parents during his formative years.

When, decades after these beginnings, the very different musical journeys of Nora and Jorge eventually led to their meeting in New York City, they found that they shared a particular and characteristic experience — marginal opportunity to work. They were both sufficiently active as working musicians to have noticed, heard, and appreciated each other’s expressive originality. Yet beyond the halo of this mutual appreciation, which was certainly shared by a growing circle of musicians around New York, they both remained, in some fundamental way, outsiders. Perhaps the doors that never opened to Nora and Jorge will prove in retrospect to have been a powerful motivating factor in their collaborative development, driving each to a deeper mutual appreciation of the other’s original voice and expressive language.

Part of the problem Nora and Jorge have faced in finding regular work is, not only that they are both thoroughly original, but also that they have worked tirelessly to forge raw originality into meaningful expressive capability. Consequently neither of these artists fits comfortably into any familiar stylistic genre. By contrast, many musicians working in and around major centers of musical activity must depend on a chameleon-like versatility for their material survival. Such skillful adaptability is a not only a requirement, but also a well-earned point of pride for a great many working musicians, who have learned to blend seamlessly into a broad range of established stylistic contexts.

In fact this survival strategy helps to ensure the stability of the Conceptual Motion Orchestra’s personnel, whose primary and alternative players, fully versed in the ensemble’s “book”, contribute their talents to this creative effort despite its limited financial prospects. Although, they are versatile enough to make something of a living through more mainstream musical work, it is not necessarily the case that a living wage is assured for any of these talented and dedicated performers. And particularly for Nora and Jorge, a uniquely original sound and expressive language has proven to be an obstacle, rather than an asset in the struggle to survive.

Nora’s vocal identity, aside from a basic jazz orientation, defies classification, and makes spare use of reflexive stylistic mannerisms. In the placement of her voice, Nora can evoke the power of a Malian Diva’s fearless candor, or perhaps a Corsican Voceratrice’s call to invisible worlds in the language of dreams, or the earthiness of an early blues singer’s unvarnished autobiographical witness. She has been attentive to the fluid articulation, phrasing and timbre of the jazz trumpet, the instrument that most clearly has influenced her vocal development. Her shaping of pitch often foregoes the fluid note-bending of the jazz singer in favor of the full press of a sculptor’s touch against viscous clay.

Jorge’s distinctive alto saxophone sound is imbued with the volatility of the Caribbean basin’s complex mosaic, transformed and focused by the probing musical linguistics pioneered by the great saxophonists of modern jazz. Jorge’s composer’s imagination is evident in the matchless structural coherence of his improvisational work. His charts for the Conceptual Motion Orchestra are brilliantly conceived, with a trademark emphasis on compelling sonority, motivic development, contrapuntal sophistication, and prodigiously imaginative development.

The consequence of such unique originality has been for Nora and Jorge, as was certainly the case with Thelonious Monk for many years, the prospect of extended periods without the opportunity to work. Perhaps, as was also the case with Monk, there will come a day when a wider audience will awaken to these artists’ work, will hear the sound of “A Small Dream in Red” and “The Conceptual Motion Orchestra”, and will experience the resonant artistic commitment at its core.

Until that day may these words serve as a message of gratitude to the dedicated musicians of the Conceptual Motion Orchestra and its two founders, Nora McCarthy and Jorge Sylvester, who chose the path of creativity to help dispel a tragic shroud of silence on a bright November day, not so many years ago.

Matthew Shipp Trio

Matthew Shipp; piano, Joe Morris; Bass, Whit Dickey; drums

With this latest trio effort by Matthew Shipp we are lead deeper into his dark lyrical maelstrom. Slight touches of Tristano can be felt as Shipp caresses and brushes the keys in his usually offensive (as opposed to defensive) manner. As in the title piece, where he creates an inviting rather than threatening whirlwind, always on the attack, in his brutal love affair with his instrument. Here we are taken on short, sometimes bumpy rides, as with the Nichols-esque, off kilter rollercoastering of Key Swing.

In The  New Circumstance‚ we find the trio sharing the weight equally, with fine brush and cymbal work by long time associate Whit dickey and incisive bowing and plucking by Joe Morris. Then the tune advances into a brisk waltz-like dirge, a signature in Shipp’s comping, followed by, consecutively fine paced solos by Morris and Dickey. This piece, having a very definite new form of construct, ends with a short Morris solo which leads into the fierce ‚ Nooks and Corners‚ which, in an explosive way, does just that, explore every nook and cranny of the keyboard‚Äôs capabilities and language.

Sliding Through Space‚ is a slow starting balladic piece that ends up being frighteningly disorienting, as the trio pounds away at our psyches and emotions, then in typical Shipp fashion we are brought safely back to our dreams.

On the track, Quivering with Speed‚ which as the title suggests, builds momentum as it goes along, we find Shipp quoting‚ Giant Steps‚ in the midst of the furor. From there he just climbs and climbs / advances / and takes new ground then  suddenly simply stops, leaving us hanging , jaws dropped, in mid flight.

The final two tracks give of more of this relentless search for a new musicality embedded in the oldest of traditions.

Shipp presents us with an extremely listenable cd, while managing to transport us to the outer limits of music. One feels a slight discomfort while being drawn in to this oddly relaxing vortex.

This music will surely vitalize you so don’t let this cd slip through your fingers. Pick it up today.

Leo Smith Ensemble @ the Jazz Standard/ Anthony Braxton works for Brass @ St. Marks Church

Sept. 22, 23, respectively.

Another great year unfolded for FONT (Festival of New Trumpet) with a packed and diverse schedule as usual. The two events I attended were by the masters Leo Smith and Anthony Braxton, two of the most important alumni to come out of the AACM, and like many AACM figures, composers as well as instrumentalists, who go way beyond the parameters set by the language of Jazz.

Smith’s first set consisted of three compositions, all as diverse as they can get, all utilizing the expertise of the seven member ensemble he assembled to play the work. There were many promptings by Smith within these severely difficult notated pieces. My guess, having seen other Smith scores, is that they were graphically notated.

The ensemble consisted of two cellists, one lyrical, the other more biting and frenetic, a guitarist, a tuba, a contrabass, a kit drummer, and Smith on trumpet and conducting.

All the pieces contained elements of so-called 20th century classical music, were very stilted and crossed many boundaries, the second piece having a bit of funk thrown in. Smith is more than fantastic as a composer/crafter/conductor/soloist/ensemble player. His use of the strings were a main component, almost like a string quartet within the ensemble, creating different graduations of sound and tone within the growing layers. The concentration needed and carried out by all was astounding. Expert solos by the tuba player and drummer added extra colors to this already dramatic palette. The pieces contained all the qualities of a good contrapuntal/intervallic ride. Non-linear text par-excellence capped by bright frothy runs brought over the top, bringing forth a life force that jumped from page to eye to instruments, rolling, repeating dramas, poignant, awkward, internal stanzas of the highest level of conversation.

When the set ended, Smith introduced the members, then introduced members of his family who were in the audience. He then stated that. When you wanna play hard music, it‚Äôs harder to play. Hear, it’s harder to hear‚ (somewhat of a paradox.) I heard. I only regret not sticking around for the second set which I was told, though I found it hard to believe topped the first.

Braxton who was in the audience at Smith’s gig conducted 2 compositions he wrote for brass the following afternoon.

What can I say about Braxton and these two textural complex pieces? One played only once before for his 60th birthday concert. The other I believe, a premiere, though both were over 30 years old.

I’ll start with the second, which, like his Ghost Trance pieces, was a layered, repetitive composition that included a variety of brass instruments including trombone and relied heavily on integrated ensemble work rather than individual solos. It was a quintet, possibly 20 minutes or so in length and after the first piece seemed to me to be rather un-dramatic and flat though quite brilliant and complex, if not familiar sounding.

Piece 1, titled 103 was fantastic, witty and theatrical. It was difficult to see where composition began and theater interjected. Everyone, except Braxton, who conducted both pieces, was dressed like caped, costumed avengers. All were trumpeters, sorry I forgot the count, possibly upwards of 10, all young masters, all playing great within the ensemble and as soloists.

This was a brass track fanfare affair filled with drama, humor, events that seemed both planned and unplanned. The players had plungers, rings, cds, whistles etc. sewn onto their costumes, a lot of which were not just props, or what I refer to, as dangling participles, but tools used to generate and alter sound, within the context of the music. They wore, sewn into their costumes, some sort of anti-Aryan Nation emblems.

Melodies were repeated and were re-forged, staccato solos, hissing mutes, ambient screams. Brass rings, mutes etc., falling down the church steps, players comically acting as if bewildered, turning their backs to the audience. I kept thinking of Cyrano over and over again.

This piece is the height of intelligent composing mixed with the best of the theater of the Absurd. A mutating mutant masterpiece where one keeps thinking. Where does theater end and accident begin? Curtain. The End?

“The First Emperor”By Tan Dun

World Premiere: Metropolitan Opera, New York, December 21, 2006

reviewed by, Aaron Hayes

Placido Domingo as Qin Shi Huang

Tan Dun’s recently premiered opera, The First Emperor, has not surprisingly been hailed as a masterful synthesis of Eastern and Western musical traditions. In fact, the story line itself takes up this theme, as the Emperof Chin searches for an “everlasting anthem” to unify the spirit of his new nation. When it comes to the work of Tan Dun, the theme of unity and East-West collaboration can be found around every corner. But East-West encounters these days often bring to mind mini Zen rock gardens and Confucius day calendars, and so the danger with this piece‚Äîas the composer recognized‚Äîis not so much the failure of unity, but the potential for the opera to fall into the shallow waters over which our regular supply of Kung-Fu movies and Oriental mysticism are shipped. Thankfully, this opera does succeed in escaping such na√Øve musical syncretism. But in order to accomplish this, the composer must use what at first seems like a sort of cheap method of organizing the music. Only in fulfilling this method can Tan Dun turn it into a brilliant work, which may revive the tradition of opera out of its modernistic slumbers.

Generally, Tan Dun’s compositional genius lies in his ability to distill powerful musical effects from many different traditions and organize them into genuinely new and fascinating works. The list of contributing styles of music does not merely arise from the composer’s roots in the folk music of the Hunan province and his Western compositional training. Rather, many different musical practices from around the world are taken into account by this composer. Taking instrumental sounds, compositional forms, and various ideas on melody and harmony from these practices, Tan Dun finds exactly what is most notable in them and uses them for his own purposes. But these musical elements are never simply quoted from a familiar convention, nor are they taken completely out of context. Passages which may sound particularly influenced by some tradition or another are created to present only what is most powerful and essential in a certain rhythm, harmony, or instrument. This often leads to very new ways of hearing traditional sounds. Tan Dun does not so much compose with notes as he does musical effects.

In itself, this technique is dangerous, since it is very similar to composing movie music, which is created with the goal of evoking certain emotional responses without regard to musical significance. But unlike a movie score, with all the bad guy cues and love scenes, the musical conventions which constitute this opera and much of Tan Dun’s music come from such a diverse background that their musical juxtaposition allows for entirely different meaning and depth. Taken alone, any moment in this opera could be understood in terms of other past musical traditions. This is why, despite the Tan Dun’s efforts, he is often considered a post-modern composer. Many of the traditional Chinese instruments give certain passages a clearly ‘Oriental’ sound, as do the pentatonic melodic lines and un-translated (in language and style) Peking Opera introduction and interludes. Even the use of sound mass and indeterminate pitch can be understood in terms of their 20th century Western compositional development. And it is, of course, an opera, whose scope and style picks up where the 19th century left off. Even if some point in the music cannot be traced to a clear predecessor, it reminds us somewhat of this or that composer or folk tradition.

An opera which combines East and West is not a novel concept; by at least the mid 19th century, composers had figured out that rotated pentatonic scales are to western tonality as soy sauce is to rice. Asia has long been a source of exoticism, and there are many icons which could easily be incorporated into an otherwise western piece in order to make it ‘Oriental’ sounding. In order to escape this, Tan Dun has mastered the very technique which traditionally is used to present those Asian elements to Western ears. His act of incorporating exotic sounds into the opera makes all of the opera exotic. There is no familiar territory to which we can return.

One way Tan Dun accomplishes this is through the compositional precision of the entire piece. His attention to detail at every moment creates music which is consistent in its quality throughout every passage. In many of the string parts for example, the violins and cellos momentarily take on the sound of traditional Chinese instruments, even as their counterparts sit next to them in the pit. Because the instructions for performing are very accurate, especially in the manner of articulation, (though probably not as much as in his Out of Peking Opera and The Intercourse of Fire and Water) the subtlety and originality is not hidden behind the seeming familiarity of ‘Oriental’ sounds. Tan Dun’s attention to articulation rescues the Chinese influenced string writing from the ill fate of exoticism. The composer makes equal all those traditions from which he takes influence. But this step toward equality cannot be accomplished by making the exotic familiar. This would merely be the emotional colonialism of Broadway and Disney. Instead, by composing with these discreet affects, the composer is able to change their meaning to something more appropriately alien, and thereby bring us somewhere else than our tired musical consumption generally takes us.

This can be most clearly heard in many of the arias of this opera. In one respect, the lyrical qualities of the lines hearken back to the Italian operas which defined the tradition in Europe. Yet much of the harmonic context is defined by folk traditions which have fairly straightforward tonalities, though ones which do not lie easily in an unfamiliar ear. One result of this is that the melodic line often uses much larger intervals than might be heard in a European opera. But these larger intervals, combined with Tan Dun’s colder harmonic vocabulary result in musical lines interestingly reminiscent of Webern’s atonal songs. This sort of writing is what gives the opera its modern quality while avoiding the overuse of twentieth century avant-garde convention. In a similar manner, what often sounds like Expressionist Sprechtstimme is just as notably a result of the Chinese influence on the flow of language. Tan Dun takes into account the denotative qualities of voice inflection which have much more dramatically influenced the musical traditions in Asia. Along with fellow Chinese born composer Chen Yi, Tan Dun has successfully applied the indeterminate flow of Chinese to European musical lines sung in the English language. The result is not quite Schoenberg, but not quite the traditional Chinese folk song. The new context has refined these various musical sounds into their most basic meaning, their sonic effect. For this reason, even the tonal moments should not be considered in themselves as some functional harmony. Instead, moments of relative pleasure must be thought of in relation to the unsettling moments of indeterminate pitch or unfamiliar and jarring instrumental timbre. The entire piece is formed by the combination and relation of the somewhat discreet and contrasting use of sonic events, each of which you may feel as having heard somewhere before.

By the way, The First Emperor only runs at the Met until the end of January. A comparably grandiose production at the level of the Metropolitan Opera may not come around for some time. However, this piece is likely to become a classic of early twenty first century music, if not for its sheer quality then at least for the audacity of writing such a large scale work so closely attuned to the Operatic tradition of the West. For those who are into dramatic pyrotechnics and gigantic productions, then of course this opera is notable. The danger lies in this sort of quality, however. Because there are very consonant moments, and the drama is captivating, and we are perhaps gratified in some strange neo-colonial way with the extent of the Chinese quality to it, this opera is in danger of being appreciated for the wrong reasons. Indeed, there is ’something for everyone.’ Only when each moment instills the right amount of mutual alienation can The First Emperor as a whole fulfill for us its potential as an original and powerful work.