Brewing luminous.
Pianist and composer Kris Davis waxes Messiaenic in a Jazztopad premiere at Dizzy's… plus live-music picks for the next seven days in NYC.
Admittedly, the fried pickles distracted me.
Otherwise, it wasn’t hard to get completely swept up in The Solastalgia Suite, a new long-form piece by pianist, composer, and bandleader Kris Davis, who presented the world premiere with the Lutosławski Quartet last Thursday at Dizzy’s Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center. The concert was the opening event of Jazztopad Festival New York 2024, the eighth local edition of an event that’s been running successfully in Poland for 21 years.
Davis personifies a tendency often referred to by writers as “inside-outside,” meaning someone who’s comfortable writing tunes, playing changes, and swinging hard, but also veering off into unbounded terrain, probing sound, and uncorking raw energy. The Lutosławskis I’d heard previously on Metamorphoses, an album by bassist Michael Bates, a composer often inclined to plumb the classical canon for creative fodder. They played together as a proper piano quintet: chamber-music style, no rhythm section.
If I’d had my wits about me beforehand, and absolutely if I’d accepted a formal assignment to review this event, I’d have requested a score so as to follow what Davis had written, and to discern where notation ceded to improvisation. Davis blurred that line intentionally; so too, in his own way, did Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, the quartet’s namesake, in his String Quartet of 1964.
What I knew in advance was limited to the meaning of solastalgia – “a term recently coined to articulate the emotional distress wrought by environmental change” – and a handful of cited influences: Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Cecil Taylor, and Beyoncé.
The quartet – violinists Roksana Kwaśnikowska and Marcin Markowicz, violist Artur Rozmysłowicz, and cellist Maciej Młodawski – opened with an anxious, buzzing tremolo that frayed into lean, slashing lines. Lather, rinse, repeat. A taut fanfare ushered in Davis’s bounding piano, which chased the strings away into queasy glissandi, croaks, whistles, and whoops.
That’s all in just the opening few minutes of the first movement. (How many movements there are in total, I couldn’t say; again, should’ve asked for a score, so don’t mistake this verbiage for a proper review.) Through animated chattering and whispered intimacies, a lively conversation developed among the string players and pianist, veering and caroming at a sometimes manic pace.
A strings-only interlude of slowly drifting chords provided Davis with time to prepare the piano with objects that would dampen and alter certain notes; what came next evoked a clog dancer gamboling to Morton Feldman. The prepared notes continued to clack and rattle during a stretch of whorling Tayloresque tempus fugit.
It was around then that I noticed the couple sharing a table with me and music and film critic Steve Dollar were passing notes to each other on their phones, handed back and forth across a plate of fried pickles. Eventually they appeared to be texting one another outright. As delicate piano notes skated across a glassy string surface, one imagined tourists who’d turned up for a big Jazz at Lincoln Center outing, only to discover they’d happened into a new-music recital.
One at a time, they slipped away. The pickles remained.
What’s sad is that they missed the more instantly appealing music that followed: bumptious rhythms presumably accounting for the Beyoncé quota, passages of Messiaenic sublimity and grace, string solos of clock-stopping beauty, a lullaby so bejeweled it prompted premature applause, and more. Not easy listening, not jazz with strings, but a weighty composition suited to its weighty theme.
I’d welcome an opportunity to hear The Soltastalgia Suite again sans cutlery, soda jets, and thankfully conscientious waitstaff—ideally in some chamber-music setting where microphones wouldn’t be necessary. (A recording is promised.) Still, the relative intimacy of Dizzy’s was enough to provide an honest account of Davis’s substantial score. No question, the atmosphere was charged, the listening close and intent.
Also, next time I’m ordering the pickles.
I do wish I could have arranged to hear more of what Jazztopad brought to New York. On Saturday afternoon, I lingered for a while close to a soundcheck for a concert the festival presented on Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza, between David Geffen Hall and Lincoln Center Theater. Polish violinist Amalia Umeda, the festival’s artist-in-residence, would join forces with Hand to Earth, a striking Australian quintet including two aboriginal musicians, who blend ambient soundcraft with improvisation with the ancient Manikay (public songs) tradition to forge something refreshingly new.
The little I heard made me wish I could linger… but my daughter and I had a date with the Kronos Quartet across the street. The innovative presentation was everything it was promised to be… and given how long I’ve been following this singular ensemble, I suppose it it shouldn’t have surprised me to feel a pang in my chest knowing this would be the last time I’d see violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt in the lineup. The in-program, on-screen salute to longtime Kronos manager Janet Cowperthwaite was lovely and warranted, as well.
Thanks for the memories. And here’s to making some new ones.
The Night After Night Watch.
July 18–24
Concerts listed in Eastern Standard Time.
NOTAFLOF = no one turned away for lack of funds.
18
Mise-En Festival 2024
Various locations, Brooklyn and Manhattan
Tuesday, June 18–Saturday, June 20, times vary; free admission
mise-en.org
The season of big festivals is upon us today, but smaller series like the one mounted by Mise-En contribute mightily to this city’s creative spirit and diverse ecosystem. That said, this year’s 10th-anniversary edition is particularly ambitious, focusing on politics in contemporary classical music, broadly defined, and comprising five days and nights of concerts and discussions at Brooklyn College, the National Opera Center, Tenri Cultural Institute, and Mise-En Place. For a detailed list of events, go here.
Katie Porter
Brooklyn Music School
126 St. Felix St., Fort Greene
Tuesday, June 18 at 8pm; free admission
issueprojectroom.org
For the second project of her Issue Project Room residency, clarinetist Katie Porter examines perception of change over time with an evocatively titled program, Collecting Rocks From the Places We’ve Been – Music in Time & Space. Her distinguished collaborators include composer-performers Nomi Epstein, Jennie Gottschalk, and Teodora Stepančić, and media artist Claudia Schmitz.
TILT Brass
Sisters
900 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Tuesday, June 18 at 8pm; $10–$30 sliding scale (cash/Venmo at door)
sistersbklyn.com
Presented under the banner of a residency curated by saxophonist Sam Weinberg (who plays an unaccompanied set tonight), TILT Brass fields a quintet featuring trumpeters Peter Evans and Sam Jones, trombonist Christopher McIntyre, Kyra Sims on French horn, and James Rogers on bass trombone and tuba to play pieces by McIntyre, Ed Bland, and Steve Martland. Evans also plays in Headvoice, a new quartet led by drummer Sam Ospovat, also including guitarist-banjoist Brandon Seabrook and bassist John Hébert.
Vision Festival 2024
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn
Tuesday, June 18 at 6pm, though June 23; $70, livestream $20
Full festival pass $370; livestream $110
roulette.org
The opening event for this year’s Vision Festival, the long-running bastion of improvisational ecstasy and elasticity in music, dance, poetry, and visual art, honors bassist, composer, bandleader, and festival mainstay William Parker with the Vision 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award. The program covers a substantial slice of the sprawling Parker canon, spanning from swinging small groups and ritualistic assemblages to a large-ensemble finale. For a complete listing of events running through June 23, go here. To get a sense of what’s still driving Parker after all these years, check out a 2022 interview conducted by Nate Chinen, newly shared via The Gig.
And for a festival overview of gemlike precision, don’t miss Jim Macnie’s well-chosen words on Lament for a Straight Line—where you’ll also get a sense of what an incredible week for creative music this is in New York City… Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society… Ingrid Laubrock… Marta Sanchez… Immanuel Wilkins… Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg… on and on and on and on.
20
Metropolis Ensemble
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
990 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
Thursday, June 20 at 5am and 7:30pm; free admission
biophony.metropolisensemble.org
Biophony, a four-year collaboration between Metropolis Ensemble and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, culminates in two free outdoor performances of Canto Ostinato, the 1976 minimalist magnum opus by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt: one to greet the dawn at 5am at Cherry Esplanade, and another at sunset at Plant Family Collection. Composed for multiple keyboards, the piece has been adapted for myriad instrumental forces—including a daredevil multi-tracked solo version by Erik Hall, who’s participating in this event along with Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion. You can learn more about ten Holt and Canto Ostinato in a New York Times feature by Hugh Morris (gift link).
21
Make Music New York 2024
Multiple locations throughout New York City
Friday, June 21, 10am–10pm; free admission
makemusicny.org
Make Music New York, a day-long summer solstice celebration that musters musicians throughout the five boroughs for public displays of aural artistry, feels less destination-oriented now than in years past, focusing instead on music made by and for communities rather than big-name commissions. That said, there are plenty of performances during this year’s presentation that warrant marking your calendar and deploying your mapping app, including a Tilted Axes electric-guitar procession at Richard Tucker Park and a gathering of 112 Musicians for Peace & Unity assembled by Matt Lavelle in Astoria Park, both at noon; a Percussia concert featuring new and recent pieces by Frank London, Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, and Carlo Nicolau in Gantry Plaza State Park at 5pm; and a sunset performance by Gamelan Dharma Swara on Rockaway Beach at 7:30pm. For a complete schedule of planned events, go here. (Not included in that master list is a second Tilted Axes event, for stationary guitars and mobile speakers, happening at 6pm on Astor Place Plaza, 8th St. at Lafayette St. in Greenwich Village.)
24
Tim Berne
Lowlands Bar
543 3rd Ave., Brooklyn
Monday, June 24 at 8pm; pass-the-hat
instagram.com/berneornot
Saxophonist and composer Tim Berne has maintained an on-again, off-again residency at Lowlands for months now, so you know creative juices are flowing. This week’s conglomeration – the last one until autumn, says Berne – brings together key players from a variety of recent projects. Should be big fun to hear Aurora Nealand and Gregg Belisle-Chi mix it up in the 8pm set, which also features John Hébert and Tom Rainey; the second set at 9:30pm is stripped down to a molten core of Berne, Belisle-Chi, and Rainey.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.