Moderne Sounds:
New York (Part 9)Topical performance art, a new Philip Glass production and some very big lungs greet Spannered's Martin Longley on his return to New York.
Photo shows Buffalo Collision (photo by Martin Longley)Buffalo Collision: Roulette
They call the band Buffalo Collision, giving no small hint of their wiry-maned intentions. Two generations of improvisers meet at Roulette, the experimental music space in SoHo: pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Dave King are two-thirds of The Bad Plus, who in their youth, were prone to gazing upwards at the herculean prowess of saxophonist Tim Berne and cellist Hank Roberts, who used to be two-thirds of Miniature. This four-piece team-up is an inspired concept, offering the opportunity to observe two sets of players who normally wouldn't meet. Buffalo Collision are setting off on a journey of resourceful spontaneity, the older guys quaffing beer, whilst the youngers sip mineral water, in some kind of statement on the gigging times. Berne sets off the action by stuffing his surplus plastic water bottle into his alto, almost completely stoppering its wheezy emissions. King is scuttling dexterously, an evil goblin of blur, pottering and picking at his skins with a constantly detailed microscopy. Roberts has a split personality, fighting between the restraint of the barely audible scrape and the temptation to flick on his effects pedals to trigger a covering of sonic scurf. The be-suited Iverson looks almost out of place, ever the linear melodicist, but eventually he begins to capitalise on his long-running rapport with King, jagging out a granite vamp. The Buffalos veer from fragmented abstraction to near-funky Philly grooving, working on an engaging tension between these two traits, each constantly jostling for dominance. Iverson forms a riff, and Berne builds on it, setting King off on a therapeutic detonation run. Roberts is the anchoring centre, bowing binding ribbons to tangle in-between the other three's perpetually shifting relationships.
Philip Glass: Guggenheim Museum
Uptown, in the bowels of the Guggenheim Museum, the Works & Process series continues into its twenty-third year, providing a forum for artists to discuss their output, giving illustrations on the way. Tonight, it's composer Philip Glass, heralding a new production of Satyagraha, his 1980 opera based around the early South African days of Mahatma Ghandi. It starts at The Metropolitan Opera on 11th April, and sitting beside Glass is the Met's general manager Peter Gelb. Such is the grand scale of this work, it's been rarely performed down the decades. Glass has a completely unaffected demeanour, laced with dry humour, setting up an appealing banter with Gelb. After 1976's Einstein On The Beach, this almost seemed like a conventional opera, and it must have felt, at the time, like a bold new adventure for the composer. Glass reveals that he wrote the libretto in Sanskrit principally because he was intimidated by the imagined pressures of an English text, but the pleasing side-effect of this is a strongly abstract quality, for those who can't speak this ancient tongue. Then, the pair are joined by the two-man Improbable Theatre, a slightly eccentric British team who are responsible for the production's ambitious direction, its visuals mostly assembled by means of wickerwork and newspaper puppetry, the latter imported from Italy, where they still print in the favoured size. All of the talking is interspersed with two scaled-down excerpts from the work, with Dennis Giauque and Glass himself taking turns at the piano. Richard Croft (Gandhi) and Bradley Garvin (Arjuna) are the singers, and the two sections sound very affecting down in this acoustically-rounded basement theatre. This is opera for those who might despise the form, the distinctive Glass progressions completely inhabiting their own musical universe. On one level, it's a work in progress, complete with Croft's throat-clearing, and a slight uncertainty from Glass, but it's a mysterious, magical performance, completely imposing its mood, seconds after the light-hearted panel exchanges cease.
Laurie Anderson: Carnegie Hall
Performance artist Laurie Anderson's latest piece comes across as a bit of a gig. Even though Homeland features extensive narrative input, it's nevertheless based around a four-piece band, performing what can only be called 'songs', even if many of them are half-sung, or act as ambient backing for a storytelling experience. A US flag droops to stage left in Zankel Hall, which is Carnegie's smaller alternative space. A multitude of candles flicker in their glass jars. Anderson is at the keyboards, as is Peter Scherer, once a member of Arto Lindsay's Ambitious Lovers. The cellist is Okkyung Lee, and Skuli Sverrisson plays the bass. Not many of them are Americans, with their countries of origin being Switzerland, Korea and Iceland. This time, there's no images pumped up on screen, no stage directions, no theatrical moves. Even though there's an almost seamless progression, this is fundamentally a suite of songs, however word-heavy. This is ostensibly an updating of United States Parts I-IV, her ambitious 1983 piece, though there are new specifics in place, post WTC collapse. Although there are repeated references to the current climate of invasion, torture, surveillance and paranoia, these concepts are kept fairly general, attacked with a twinkling eye as opposed to a hateful stare. Nevertheless, when she sings about the 'experts', and their ability to diagnose (or not) a 'problem', Anderson slashes her target with precision. In a lighter moment, she speaks of vast billboards, spreading giant Gods Of Underwear over Manhattan, becoming more general in her media critique. The music is often stalled at 1980s electro-pop, so it's currently sounding rather timely, puttering with tight little electro-beats, and doused in synthesiser orchestrals. This is Anderson at her most populist, at least on a purely musical level. Most of the tunes operate within similar terrain, leading to a somnambulist character as the non-stop ninety minutes progress. Her violin sings chorally, and her voice is sometimes pitch-shifted down to a deep William Burroughs tone. Anderson's trademark sing-song delivery lulls the audience into a state of becalmed meditation: Homeland is an entertaining work, but certainly not one of her finest.
Margaret Leng Tan/Sylvie Courvoisier: Merkin Concert Hall
The Upper West Side's Merkin Concert Hall opened its short Pianoply season with a double-bill of solo female artists. The Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier is chiefly known as an inhabitant of the New York improvising jazz landscape, having resided in Brooklyn for the last decade. Tonight, though, her Signs & Epigrams sequence sounds more like a scripted moderne classical experience. Initially, she appears to be pressed like a butterfly under airless glass, formality frozen on the brightly-lit concert stage. Steadily, though, Courvoisier accumulates vigour, sculpting doomy bass blocks and strumming harp-like under the lid. Her scampering progressions and interior interests are not dissimilar to those of the English jazzer Keith Tippett. The best playing arrives during the last few of her six sections, chiefly due to an increased loosening-up as the performance progresses. It must be said that any pianist would suffer by comparison with the evening's second player. Margaret Leng Tan came to my attention as as an interpreter on the toy piano, a queen of this growing mini-repertoire. She knows how to navigate the real thing too, in a literal sense, as she's prone to wandering under the lid, to the extent of traipsing down to the far end of the piano, completely commanding its entire body. Her set-list traversed works by Henry Cowell, John Cage and George Crumb, all infamous for their broad understanding of the piano's complete structural potentiality, from elbowed block chords to prepared strings, fisted batterings to fingernail string-strokes. Tan has the power to completely conquer her instrument, not only with 'conventional' keyboard virtuosity, but as a physical presence of striking confidence, pouring her very essence into a performance of completely uninhibited expression. I don't think I've ever seen a player wander down to the piano's nether end for a strum, whether in the jazz or classical realms. It's a simple enough activity, but usually, even the wildest of players will remain rooted up at the keyboard end. The closing piece is Tongues Of Fire, by Stephen Montague, a US composer living in London. Lights are dimmed, and Tan enters the stage by pulling herself along a stretched piano string, until she reaches her seat, beginning a dialogue with the composer's electronic tape (the work appeared in a different version back in 1983). Though alluring and atmospheric, the piece suffers following the exaggerated theatricality of the preceding works, but it could be argued that it winds the concert back down to a more mortal sense of normality, which is certainly saying something given its multi-speakered cosmic soundscaping.
Ray Anderson & Bob Stewart: The Cornelia Street Café
Trombonist Ray Anderson and tubaman Bob Stewart call themselves a Heavy Metal Duo, but this refers to the literal weight of their hefted horns, rather than a songbook of Ted Nugent and The Tygers Of Pan Tang. It's not often we'll see such a brass teaming, with no other players in range. These pair eschew the use of samplers and effects pedals: their broad sonic scope is a result of a purely buzz-lipped vocabulary, massive lung capacity and a general staccato-tonguing stamina. They might even be jazz traditionalists, down at their core. Much of the set-list is made up from old Duke Ellington-ish numbers like Blood Count and East St. Louis Toodle-Ooo, but the twosome also contribute several of their own modernising pieces. Either way, the language is a mix of bluesy jazz huffing and disembodied splutter techniques, as one player (usually Stewart) sets up a grumbling riff, and the other (usually Anderson) takes flight with nary a pause for breath. There is great comic potential with these two horns, which Anderson and Stewart fully milk, but they're also here to impress with their complete technical mastery, so the audience are forced to alternate broad smiles with hanging jaws.
Laurie Anderson presents Homeland at London's Barbican, betwixt 30th April and 3rd May.
They call the band Buffalo Collision, giving no small hint of their wiry-maned intentions. Two generations of improvisers meet at Roulette, the experimental music space in SoHo: pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Dave King are two-thirds of The Bad Plus, who in their youth, were prone to gazing upwards at the herculean prowess of saxophonist Tim Berne and cellist Hank Roberts, who used to be two-thirds of Miniature. This four-piece team-up is an inspired concept, offering the opportunity to observe two sets of players who normally wouldn't meet. Buffalo Collision are setting off on a journey of resourceful spontaneity, the older guys quaffing beer, whilst the youngers sip mineral water, in some kind of statement on the gigging times. Berne sets off the action by stuffing his surplus plastic water bottle into his alto, almost completely stoppering its wheezy emissions. King is scuttling dexterously, an evil goblin of blur, pottering and picking at his skins with a constantly detailed microscopy. Roberts has a split personality, fighting between the restraint of the barely audible scrape and the temptation to flick on his effects pedals to trigger a covering of sonic scurf. The be-suited Iverson looks almost out of place, ever the linear melodicist, but eventually he begins to capitalise on his long-running rapport with King, jagging out a granite vamp. The Buffalos veer from fragmented abstraction to near-funky Philly grooving, working on an engaging tension between these two traits, each constantly jostling for dominance. Iverson forms a riff, and Berne builds on it, setting King off on a therapeutic detonation run. Roberts is the anchoring centre, bowing binding ribbons to tangle in-between the other three's perpetually shifting relationships.
Philip Glass: Guggenheim Museum
Uptown, in the bowels of the Guggenheim Museum, the Works & Process series continues into its twenty-third year, providing a forum for artists to discuss their output, giving illustrations on the way. Tonight, it's composer Philip Glass, heralding a new production of Satyagraha, his 1980 opera based around the early South African days of Mahatma Ghandi. It starts at The Metropolitan Opera on 11th April, and sitting beside Glass is the Met's general manager Peter Gelb. Such is the grand scale of this work, it's been rarely performed down the decades. Glass has a completely unaffected demeanour, laced with dry humour, setting up an appealing banter with Gelb. After 1976's Einstein On The Beach, this almost seemed like a conventional opera, and it must have felt, at the time, like a bold new adventure for the composer. Glass reveals that he wrote the libretto in Sanskrit principally because he was intimidated by the imagined pressures of an English text, but the pleasing side-effect of this is a strongly abstract quality, for those who can't speak this ancient tongue. Then, the pair are joined by the two-man Improbable Theatre, a slightly eccentric British team who are responsible for the production's ambitious direction, its visuals mostly assembled by means of wickerwork and newspaper puppetry, the latter imported from Italy, where they still print in the favoured size. All of the talking is interspersed with two scaled-down excerpts from the work, with Dennis Giauque and Glass himself taking turns at the piano. Richard Croft (Gandhi) and Bradley Garvin (Arjuna) are the singers, and the two sections sound very affecting down in this acoustically-rounded basement theatre. This is opera for those who might despise the form, the distinctive Glass progressions completely inhabiting their own musical universe. On one level, it's a work in progress, complete with Croft's throat-clearing, and a slight uncertainty from Glass, but it's a mysterious, magical performance, completely imposing its mood, seconds after the light-hearted panel exchanges cease.
Laurie Anderson: Carnegie Hall
Performance artist Laurie Anderson's latest piece comes across as a bit of a gig. Even though Homeland features extensive narrative input, it's nevertheless based around a four-piece band, performing what can only be called 'songs', even if many of them are half-sung, or act as ambient backing for a storytelling experience. A US flag droops to stage left in Zankel Hall, which is Carnegie's smaller alternative space. A multitude of candles flicker in their glass jars. Anderson is at the keyboards, as is Peter Scherer, once a member of Arto Lindsay's Ambitious Lovers. The cellist is Okkyung Lee, and Skuli Sverrisson plays the bass. Not many of them are Americans, with their countries of origin being Switzerland, Korea and Iceland. This time, there's no images pumped up on screen, no stage directions, no theatrical moves. Even though there's an almost seamless progression, this is fundamentally a suite of songs, however word-heavy. This is ostensibly an updating of United States Parts I-IV, her ambitious 1983 piece, though there are new specifics in place, post WTC collapse. Although there are repeated references to the current climate of invasion, torture, surveillance and paranoia, these concepts are kept fairly general, attacked with a twinkling eye as opposed to a hateful stare. Nevertheless, when she sings about the 'experts', and their ability to diagnose (or not) a 'problem', Anderson slashes her target with precision. In a lighter moment, she speaks of vast billboards, spreading giant Gods Of Underwear over Manhattan, becoming more general in her media critique. The music is often stalled at 1980s electro-pop, so it's currently sounding rather timely, puttering with tight little electro-beats, and doused in synthesiser orchestrals. This is Anderson at her most populist, at least on a purely musical level. Most of the tunes operate within similar terrain, leading to a somnambulist character as the non-stop ninety minutes progress. Her violin sings chorally, and her voice is sometimes pitch-shifted down to a deep William Burroughs tone. Anderson's trademark sing-song delivery lulls the audience into a state of becalmed meditation: Homeland is an entertaining work, but certainly not one of her finest.
Margaret Leng Tan/Sylvie Courvoisier: Merkin Concert Hall
The Upper West Side's Merkin Concert Hall opened its short Pianoply season with a double-bill of solo female artists. The Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier is chiefly known as an inhabitant of the New York improvising jazz landscape, having resided in Brooklyn for the last decade. Tonight, though, her Signs & Epigrams sequence sounds more like a scripted moderne classical experience. Initially, she appears to be pressed like a butterfly under airless glass, formality frozen on the brightly-lit concert stage. Steadily, though, Courvoisier accumulates vigour, sculpting doomy bass blocks and strumming harp-like under the lid. Her scampering progressions and interior interests are not dissimilar to those of the English jazzer Keith Tippett. The best playing arrives during the last few of her six sections, chiefly due to an increased loosening-up as the performance progresses. It must be said that any pianist would suffer by comparison with the evening's second player. Margaret Leng Tan came to my attention as as an interpreter on the toy piano, a queen of this growing mini-repertoire. She knows how to navigate the real thing too, in a literal sense, as she's prone to wandering under the lid, to the extent of traipsing down to the far end of the piano, completely commanding its entire body. Her set-list traversed works by Henry Cowell, John Cage and George Crumb, all infamous for their broad understanding of the piano's complete structural potentiality, from elbowed block chords to prepared strings, fisted batterings to fingernail string-strokes. Tan has the power to completely conquer her instrument, not only with 'conventional' keyboard virtuosity, but as a physical presence of striking confidence, pouring her very essence into a performance of completely uninhibited expression. I don't think I've ever seen a player wander down to the piano's nether end for a strum, whether in the jazz or classical realms. It's a simple enough activity, but usually, even the wildest of players will remain rooted up at the keyboard end. The closing piece is Tongues Of Fire, by Stephen Montague, a US composer living in London. Lights are dimmed, and Tan enters the stage by pulling herself along a stretched piano string, until she reaches her seat, beginning a dialogue with the composer's electronic tape (the work appeared in a different version back in 1983). Though alluring and atmospheric, the piece suffers following the exaggerated theatricality of the preceding works, but it could be argued that it winds the concert back down to a more mortal sense of normality, which is certainly saying something given its multi-speakered cosmic soundscaping.
Ray Anderson & Bob Stewart: The Cornelia Street Café
Trombonist Ray Anderson and tubaman Bob Stewart call themselves a Heavy Metal Duo, but this refers to the literal weight of their hefted horns, rather than a songbook of Ted Nugent and The Tygers Of Pan Tang. It's not often we'll see such a brass teaming, with no other players in range. These pair eschew the use of samplers and effects pedals: their broad sonic scope is a result of a purely buzz-lipped vocabulary, massive lung capacity and a general staccato-tonguing stamina. They might even be jazz traditionalists, down at their core. Much of the set-list is made up from old Duke Ellington-ish numbers like Blood Count and East St. Louis Toodle-Ooo, but the twosome also contribute several of their own modernising pieces. Either way, the language is a mix of bluesy jazz huffing and disembodied splutter techniques, as one player (usually Stewart) sets up a grumbling riff, and the other (usually Anderson) takes flight with nary a pause for breath. There is great comic potential with these two horns, which Anderson and Stewart fully milk, but they're also here to impress with their complete technical mastery, so the audience are forced to alternate broad smiles with hanging jaws.
Laurie Anderson presents Homeland at London's Barbican, betwixt 30th April and 3rd May.