Author: Christian Carey

CD Review, File Under?, jazz

Ches Smith – Interpret it Well (CD Review)


Ches Smith
Interpret it Well
Ches Smith, percussion and electronics; Bill Frisell, guitar; Mat Maneri, viola; Craig Taborn, piano
Pyroclastic Records

Percussionist Ches Smith was previously working in a trio with violist Mat Maneri and pianist Craig Taborn. In 2018, guitarist Bill Frisell heard them live and wanted in. The resulting quartet had to deal with the vicissitudes of the pandemic; their 2020 sessions weren’t released until 2022. Every eighth note is worth the wait.

Smith plays drums and non-pitched percussion. He is also a talented vibraphonist. It makes a big difference that a bass player isn’t part of the proceedings. Taborn, Frisell, and Maneri sometimes emphasize a bass line to fill in for this absence. For the most part, the texture they inhabit doesn’t imitate a classic quartet, instead creating its own, inimitable thing. Interpret it Well is named after the 1987 drawing by Raymond Pettibon that appears on the recording’s cover. The title track employs multiple rhythmic layers, with Taborn creating a steady pulse while the others polyrhythmically depart from it. There are searching solos from Frisell and Maneri and Smith creates a rollicking groove at the drum kit. Another of the extended cuts on the recording, “Mixed Metaphor,” features a long instrumental introduction by Frisell, with other instruments gradually entering from the background to join him. Taborn and Maneri each take solo turns, the pianist creating intricate textures while the violist plays with particularly fiery enthusiasm. Smith urges them on with a strong backbeat.

“Clear Major,” begins with Smith on vibraphone alongside the rest of the quartet, all playing just as the title suggests. Things get thornier as they progress, with the infiltration of sinuous chromatic lines played by Frisell and Maneri, clusters forcefully played by Taborn, and fast triplet percussion fills by Smith. The mid-section moves towards bluesier gestures, with Taborn playing seventh chords and Maneri inflecting his own grooves with trademark microtonality. Frisell gets in on the fun by dovetailing Maneri’s riffs in the same register. The texture dissolves into arpeggiations and terse rhythmic interjections, once again outlining the home key with greater clarity, with Taborn repeating an impressionist harmony over and over. They hang out in this aphoristic atmosphere for a good portion of the piece’s second half. There is a long fade that ends mirroring the beginning’s tonal ambience.

“I Need More” uses a tune based on the spoken rhythm of the title, an old-fashioned technique that is deployed in anything but an old-fashioned sound world. That said, there is a thread between the playing here and more traditional – say post-bop- gestures. It is fascinating to hear how the quartet is able to encompass this change with such subtlety and skill. The climax teases going off the rails only to reassert the tune in unison riffs and end the piece with interlocking ostinatos.

“Morbid” is more chamber music than jazz, with a modal and mysterious sound world that shares more than passing references to Arnold Schoenberg and George Crumb. That “Morbid” is spontaneous, instead the careful composition of its influences, makes the expressionist result all the more stirring.

Two short pieces begin and end the recording. Taborn and Frisell create a loping groove on “Trapped” that is punctuated by repeated chiming from vibes and Maneri sneaks in with a few repeated gestures. Like an unwinding music box, the piece comes apart at the end. On “Deppart,” there is instead a surface that takes time to cohere, almost like the clock winding up here into another corruscated set of repetitions.

Interpret it Well is one of the finest creative music releases thus far in 2022. Look for it on many year-end lists.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Kronos Quartet – Mỹ Lai (CD Review)

Mỹ Lai

Kronos Quartet

Smithsonian Folkways

 

In one of its most ambitious projects to date, Kronos Quartet has recorded Mỹ Lai, an opera by composer Jonathan Berger (Professor at Stanford University) and librettist Harriet Scott Chessman, who has also written a libretto for Georg Friedrich Haas’s next opera. Vocalist Rinde Eckerdt and multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Vo ̃ joined Kronos to create an East/West musical hybrid, with t’rưng, đàn bầu, and đàn tranh, traditional Vietnamese instruments, being added to the string quartet instrumentation.

 

The story of Mỹ Lai is one of brutality against civilians, over 500 killed by the U.S. Army in one village, and of an officer who sought to stem the massacre. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson put his helicopter between the miscreant soldiers and noncombatants, to little avail. Later he refused to remain silent about the massacre, leaving him a pariah for much of his life. Today, we see the bombing of civilians in Ukraine and call it what it is, a war crime. During the post-Vietnam era, there was tremendous conflict about whether the United States was justified for its involvement in the war.  Mỹ Lai came to be exhibit A for those who felt that war crimes were never justifiable and that there had been a significant amount of atrocities committed by the Americans.

 

It is a truly operatic subject, and Berger integrates the various musical forces to heighten the dramatic tension inherent in the story. The string quartet is provided with post-minimal figurations that reminds one of their works with Steve Reich. The strings often break off into plaintive counterpoint. Most compelling are the interludes in which Kronos and Vo ̃ play together, integrating their two technical backgrounds into fascinating textural combinations. It is worth noting that the quartet bridges the gap from West to East. Their considerable experience playing non-Western music is displayed in their keen deployment of sliding tones and strummed passages.

 

Eckerdt’s performance is captivating, with stalwart reportage of the events unfolding, aching high notes in passages exhorting his fellow soldiers to stop the massacre, and sensitive piano singing in reflective sections. The addition of spoken word footage supports the narrative and adds another multimedia component to the piece.

 

Four decades on, collective memory is fading about the controversy over atrocities in the Vietnam conflict. Art can serve as a reminder, an exhortation not to forget lives lost and brutality enacted. Berger and Chessman have created an opera that speaks as much to today as it is a valuable history lesson. Once again, Kronos has taken on a piece with great resonance for our society.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Piano

Hamelin plays Bolcom’s Rags

William Bolcom – The Complete Rags

Marc-André Hamelin

Hyperion Records

 

William Bolcom has been an important exponent of the ragtime revival. He helped to mount Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha, has performed Joplin and much of the ragtime repertoire. Bolcom may have had a hand in Joshua Rifkin’s famed Joplin recordings, which were used in the movie The Sting. As Bolcom tells it, he played Rifkin rags by Joplin at a party before the recording was made. Bolcom also encouraged contemporary American composers to return to ragtime, trading many rags with composer William Albright (one of the pieces on this recording is a collaboration between them), and performing the rags written by a number of others, mainly during the 1970s. His own catalog of rags is considerable, and considerably varied. 

 

Joplin’s sheet music often included the admonition, “do not play fast,” instead urging a deliberate pace. Bolcom takes this to heart, and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, the interpreter on this recording, pays studious attention to the details of tempo and phrasing that define ragtime. Like most classic rags, Bolcom uses titles that hearken back to ragtime progenitors past (“Eubie’s Luckey Day,” “Seabiscuit’s Rag”), give a sense of character and gesture  (“Tabby Cat Walk,” “Rag-Tango”), or are punnish (“Brooklyn Dodge”).

 

Many of Bolcom’s rags are suavely stylish, such as the well-titled “Contentment” and “Tabby Cat Walk.” Of course, not fast is not ubiquitous. In a set of rags titled “Eden,” the third, “The Serpent’s Kiss,” is rollicking, “girl on the railroad tracks” music with a taste of silent film accompaniment. The Allbright-Bolcoe collaboration, “Brass Knuckles,” avails itself of splashes of dissonance, recalling Nancarrow and Monk through a Joplin lens. In “Rag-Tango” and “Estela – Rag Latino,” other genres are successfully amalgamated into ragtime. It is difficult to pick favorites, but I’m partial to “Three Ghost Rags,” in which music of times past is echoed. Hamelin plays this group with particular sensitivity.

 

Like Joplin’s rags in the 1970s, Bolcom’s in the 2020’s deserve wider currency. Some are quite difficult, requiring the chops of a pianist of Hamelin’s caliber. Others would be excellent pieces for competitions or study. The liner notes, with an essay by Bolcom, give an erudite, encapsulated view of classical rags and contemporary contributions. Highly recommended.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Guitar

James Romig’s The Complexity of Distance (CD Review)

James Romig

The Complexity of Distance

Mike Scheidt, electric guitar

New World Records

 

James Romig is best known for his solo piano piece Still, an hour long meditation on the paintings of Clyfford Still. Trained at Iowa and obtaining the Ph.D. at Rutgers, where he worked with Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, Romig has a number of serial works to his name. The structuring of Still displays this, but the surface has a limpid character and the gradual development of the material also demonstrates an affinity for Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. Pianist Ashlee Mack’s recording of Still was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, an unusual choice for the committee, as large-scale works – opera, orchestral pieces – are more often selected. 

 

Romig’s current project is an even greater departure. The Complexity of Distance is for solo electric guitar, tuned down a fifth so that the low string is A instead of E. It was commissioned by doom metal guitarist Mike Scheidt and composed during the remote times of the pandemic via long distance communication. Scheidt is best known as being part of the band YOB, but he adapts well to the detailed notation and solo context of TCOD. 

 

The piece opens with a sustained open power chord, which forms the basis of the piece: roots, fifths, and octaves, seldom thirds. TCOD’s rhythmic structure is a three-line canon, which Romig describes thus,”The first rhythmic strand alternates, at a time-interval of 13 beats, between chords with roots written E and G (sounding A and C in A-standard tuning). The second strand alternates every 14 beats between chords with roots of C and D (F/G). The third strand alternates every 15 beats between chords of B and A (E/D).Beginning and ending with a unison pulse in all three strands, the 13:14:15 ratio takes 2,730 beats to resolve. At a metronome tempo of 48, this cyclic process lasts nearly an hour.”

 

The canonic techniques that Romig is using have ample precedents, from Ockeghem and Josquin in the Renaissance, to Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano pieces in the twentieth century, and Babbitt, Carter, and Wuorinen’s use of time points and canonic devices in their post-tonal pieces. The overarching structure requires patience to apprehend, but it is a well-conceived use of rhythmic design. On the death metal side of the equation, the power chords use feedback and distortion and sustain through the score’s rests. Many of the chords employ open strings for resonance. Scheidt’s choice to tune down allows the piece to co-opt the sonic signatures of doom metal, its sepulchral register and slow tempos. 

 

TCOD is a curious amalgam. It stretches the stylistic possibilities in which one may incorporate complex canons and serial procedures. A departure for Romig to be sure, but a winning one.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Minimalism, Organ, Piano

John Tilbury Plays Terry Riley

Terry Riley

Keyboard Studies

John Tilbury, piano, harpsichord, celeste, and electric organ

Another Timbre

 

In addition to their impressive catalog of music of the moment, the past recordings that are uncovered and released by Another Timbre are frequently astonishing. This is certainly true of a recording of the great new music keyboardist John Tilbury playing three pieces by Terry Riley from 1965: Keyboard Study No. 1, Keyboard Study No. 2, and Dorian Reeds.  Written just after In C, these pieces are foundational as well, presenting the methods with which Riley would assemble solo work from patternings. Like In C, they do not have full scores, and their durations may vary. Dorian Reeds was originally written for saxophone with tape delay and is adapted here for electric organ. Tilbury is well known for his performance of New York School composers, Morton Feldman in particular, as well as his work as a free improviser. This is the first recording of him engaging with 1960s American minimalism.

 

The tapes from which this CD was made are from the late 1970s or early 1980s in Hamburg, with other details forgotten. They have weathered well, and provide an important link to that time period, in which American minimalism had begun to have a significant number of British and European interpreters. The 1980s would see minimalism capture English composers’ interest as well, with figures like Michael Nyman and Steve Martland creating distinctive repetition-based music.

 

Tilbury’s performance of Keyboard Study No. 1, played on the piano, clocks in at eighteen minutes. Like In C, a repeated pitch is a constant throughout. The piece features unraveling and returning patterns not dissimilar to Steve Reich’s phase pieces, with tasty secundal dissonances set against fourths and fifths and generally avoiding thirds. Gradually, it moves through all sorts of modal inflections and polyrhythms.

 

Keyboard Study No. 2 has the most elaborate instrumentation: piano, electric organ, harpsichord, and celeste. Over a half hour long, it is also the most expansive. Once again, scales and rhythms morph against a constantly repeating note. Here, the instrumentation brings out different parts of the patterning, the varied attack and sustain of the instruments allowing notes to become prominent or recede in the texture.

 

Dorian Reeds works well for organ, with intervallic oscillations and corruscating melodic gestures punctuated by repeated pitches. The organ registrations provide varied timbres for the piece’s motives, with more and more lines accumulating as the piece develops. Tilbury plays Dorian Reeds with tremendous dexterity. Here, as elsewhere, he delineates the counterpoint with deft touch. The original saxophone version is compelling, but this version is equally so. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Adams Boxed Set Listening Party

John Adams

Collected Works Boxed Set

40XCDs

Nonesuch

 

What a seventy-fifth birthday present. Today, Nonesuch releases John Adams Collected Works, a 40-CD compendium of his recordings for the label and a few from other imprints. 

 

The curation of the set has thoughtful touches. It begins with Harmonielehre, the 1985 recording by Edo de Waart that began Adams’s association with Nonesuch and ends with a live recording of the same work by the Berlin Philharmonic, which released its own Adams boxed set a few years back (well worth seeking out). There are extensive liner notes, with essays by Timo Andres, Nico Muhly, Jake Wilder-Smith, Julia Bullock, and Robert Hurwitz. 

 

Adams continues his creativity apace. Accordingly, space has been left in the box for future recordings.

 

From 12:00 PM to 12 AM (EDT), listen to excerpts from the boxed set here. 



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz, Piano

Vadim Neselovskyi – Odesa (CD Review)

Vadim Neselovskyi 

Odesa

Sunnyside Records

 

Jazz pianist Vadim Neselovskyi was born in Ukraine. He moved to the US to study at Berklee and has since joined its faculty, splitting his time between New York, Boston, and as a touring musician. His latest recording for Sunnyside, Odesa (the Ukrainian spelling of the city’s name) is a memory book of Neselovskyi’s childhood in Ukraine, with various places and experiences recounted as programmatic elements of the music. Another layer of the recording’s organization is the use of Pictures at an Exhibition, by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, its character as a suite of images that one encounters walking through a museum, as a kind of touchstone for the scenes Neselovskyi has depicted. Accordingly, he subtitles Odesa, “A musical walk through a legendary city.” There are several places where Neselovskyi slyly interpolates brief flashes of Mussorgsky’s music; one will hear a particularly vivid quote at the end of track two, “Odesa Railway Station.”

 

Classical music frequently informs Neselovskyi’s playing. He is a double-threat pianist, one able to channel and play concert music while at the same time possessing sturdy jazz chops and improvisational acumen. On “Potemkin Stairs,” there are flurries of ostinatos, calling to mind both minimalism and the passagework of Romantic concertos. These are interspersed with plummy chordal passages that halt the piece’s momentum to savor a rich harmonic language. Where “Potemkin Stairs” is virtuosic, “Winter in Odesa” seems based on Eastern European folk music, with a concomitant Impressionist cast. Here Neselovskyi builds a moving piece out of a simple modal tune and countermelodies. Over time, elaborate ornaments are added to the middle section, only to return to the modal tune with a fourths and fifths harmonic accompaniment: another signature of folk music. 

 

Neselovskyi had distinguished studies and an early acceptance at Odesa Conservatory. This is celebrated by “Waltz of Odesa Conservatory,” which depicts a mischievous youth playing with humorous, showy, and then jazzy gestures. One can imagine young Neselovskyi far away from his teachers when playing in this manner. The waltz is great fun: one could imagine a notated version serving as a competition piece. “My First Rock Concert” is the only composition on Odesa that isn’t an original. It is based on the rock song “Blood Type” by Viktor Tsoy. The voicings remind one of how barre chords are played on the electric guitar, with lots of parallelisms. Playing this alongside the vocal melody, bass part, and inflections of the percussion is no mean feat, and it stretches out with proggy soloistic sections to eight minutes in duration (now I want to check out some Viktor Tsoy: Neselovskyi makes him sound compelling). 

 

Two interludes serve as etudes for modern jazz styles, the first atmospheric and the second angular. “Acacia Trees” inhabits a hushed wayward melody and aching, poignant harmonies. The opening line of “Odesa 1941” delicate too, but it is accompanied by a thrumming, sustained bass pedal and succeeded shortly by dissonance verticals and a polymetric dance and a thunderous middle cadence. It is like a tempestuous amalgam of works by Bartôk and Shostakovich. At the piece’s conclusion, the gentle opening melody returns, basically unaccompanied. Thus, the entire dynamic and rhetorical spectrum is accommodated in just under six minutes. Supplied with a brief Phrygian introduction filled with open fourths/fifths, “Jewish Dance” depicts another aspect of Neselovskyi’s background. The dance proper has a soprano register tune that glides downward through a minor scale with a flat second, a feature of both Jewish and Eastern European music. The tune reverses direction, rising against countermelodies and thick quartal/quintal bass register chords. The two melodies, now in soprano and alto registers, are juxtaposed and one is augmented, creating a long, pedal-supported cadenza. The last section of the piece brings its register down about an octave, thickening the accompaniment and adding a slice of swing to the polymeter. It moves into half-time, then double-time, and ends with another descending cadenza and a pedaled splash of color. 

 

“The Renaissance of Odesa” concludes the recording.  A haunting midrange melody against harmonically intricate arpeggiations, that lead the tune through a number of key areas, occupies a registration previously unheard on the recording. But two flourishes at the end once again evoke Mussorgsky: low bass fifths and octaves and an altissimo register modal duet. It is as if Neselovskyi is saying goodbye, for now, to his past and to all its treasured reference points. Odesa is imaginative, superlatively well performed, and enthusiastically recommended. 

(All proceeds from the recording go to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine).

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Cello, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Percussion

Žibuoklê Martinaitytê – Ex Tenebris Lux (CD Review)

Žibuoklê Martinaitytê

Ex Tenebris Lux

Pavel Gunter, percussion; Rokas Vaitkevičius, cello

Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Karolis Variakojis, conductor

Ondine 

 

Ex Tenebris Lux is the second portrait recording in as many years for composer Žibuoklê Martinaitytê. The works here are for string orchestra, two of them with soloists. They present a reduced language, often involving modal collections without any accidentals. Despite this, Martinaitytê draws forth a variety of compelling sonorities and textures.

 

The Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra plays seamlessly, with rich tone and precise intonation. The title work, from 2021, is abetted by these qualities, its descending arpeggiations and vertical sonorities played with rhythmic precision. Conductor Karolis Variakojis understands that forward momentum is a necessary approach to avoid the thick textures feeling languid. In the piece Nunc fluens, Nunc stans (2020), percussionist Pavel Giunter creates gently shimmering passages that enliven the strings. The title is a quote from Boethius, a rough translation being, “The now that passes creates time; the now that remains creates eternity.” Written in the midst of pandemic lockdown, Martinaitytê suggests that this piece was in response to the past being gone, the future being very uncertain, and the only thing left being the present moment. The mindfulness of this bespeaks the meditative trance that Nunc fluens, Nunc stans creates, a beautiful space of contemplation. 

 

Cellist Rokas Vaitkevičius is the soloist on Sielunmaisema (2019). Cast in four movements, the thirty-five minute long piece is a concerto that is more rhapsodic than virtuosic with a spacious ambience. Unfurling melodies, undulating passages, and harmonics are set against glissandos, repeated notes, and achingly long melodies in the ensemble. Ebullient repeated notes and dynamic swells characterize the second movement. The solo takes up harmonic glissandos to provide a coloristic element to the proceedings. The third movement incorporates hushed, mysterious verticals and pitch slides in the solo. The conclusion of Sielunmaisema features poignant overlapping melodies and chordal swells. Questing counterpoint, with the cello solo plangently mining its upper register, creates a closing section that soars with graceful elegance. 

 

Martinaitytê spent her pandemic time productively, crafting two of the three expressive works here. They are memorably beautiful pieces. Her previous recording, Saudade, is also richly recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Minimalism

Steve Reich – Reich/Richter CD Review

Steve Reich

Reich/Richter

Ensemble Intercontemporain, George Jackson, conductor

Nonesuch

 

Steve Reich has long admired the artwork of Gerhard Richter, whose abstraction and ties to minimalism seem tailor-made for a collaboration with the composer. The artist’s film Moving Picture (946-3), made with Corrina Belz and based on Richter’s book Patterns, provided just such an opportunity. Reich/Richter was composed to be performed alongside the film and has received over a hundred performances at screenings starting in 2019. This audio recording of the work is amply diverting on its own. 

 

The piece is recognizably Reich, with ostinatos, polyrhythms and full-bodied harmonies interacting throughout. The use of pitched percussion, piano, and strings (with a particularly rangy double bass part) creates a sinfonietta that is an extension of the instrumentation of many of Reich’s key works. The use of wide-ranging soloistic passages in the winds is particularly suitable for Ensemble Intercontemporain. However, it would be a mistake merely to analogize it to past works. Reich/Richter is distinctive in its own right. Directedness of harmonic progressions, which in interior cadences are sometimes thwarted by deceptive fakes but in closing sections are emphatic, suggests a harmonic scaffolding with considerable long-term planning. The structuring of rhythm is rigorous as well. Belz talked about the film’s organization into “pixels,” and Reich used a time scale of rhythmic values to respond to rows of pixels. The end result breaks up the composer’s trusty polyrhythms into different, at times surprising, groupings. 

 

Ensemble Intercontemporain, conducted by George Jackson, perform a rhythmically incisive and expressive rendition of Reich/Richter. Not so many years ago, the group performing Reich would have been beyond the pale. It is refreshing that those stylistic barriers have fallen so that excellent ensembles known for their interpretations of modernism can have a crack at minimalism. Reich/Richter is a vivid and arresting work that shows as many departures by its octogenarian creator as mainstays of Reich’s creativity. 

 

by Christian Carey