Pastime with good company.

A Derek Bailey tribute doubles as a fund-raiser for a good cause, plus words about a Sarah Hennies concert and live-music picks for the next seven days.

Derek Bailey (Photograph: Gerard Rouy)

Not a single Christmas has gone by in over 20 years that I haven’t stopped to think about Derek Bailey, the magisterial British free-improvising guitarist and Incus Records co-founder, who passed away on that day in 2005. I wrote a long remembrance of Bailey on my O.G. blog that year, and have continued to share it annually. My review of a Company Week improvisation series Bailey assembled at Tonic in 2001, which I wrote in a manner meant to affectionately emulate A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, became one of my most-read blog posts, once I retrieved that earnest but deeply silly bit of experimental prose from the oblivion of a now-defunct listserv not quite a year after Bailey died.

The first time I ever saw Bailey play live was at the original Roulette on West Broadway—an epiphany that transformed me from years of puzzlement about Bailey on record to a deep, profound enduring appreciation for one of the most original, significant musicians this planet has ever produced.

Bailey never got to play at the gracious Roulette theater space in Brooklyn, which opened in 2010. But this Thursday through Saturday, Jan. 25–27, for the second consecutive year, the venue is hosting an Improv Nights series in his memory, assembled by the improvising saxophonist, composer, and community organizer John Zorn—who played fruitfully with Bailey many times, and collaborated with Karen Brookman, Bailey’s wife, to assemble a marvelous Incus Festival at Abrons Arts Center in October 2009. (We’ve since lost Brookman in December 2022, and percussionist Tony Oxley, an Incus co-founder, in December 2023.)

Zorn is of course an experienced hand at improv klatches, having hosted free-form rent parties regularly to support his own live-music laboratory, The Stone, in its original East Village setting. This year’s Improv Nights series is a fund raiser for a similarly worthy cause: Tzadik Records, the label that Zorn has operated for years to document his music as well as that of his ever-expanding artistic community.

The Roulette site explains the need:

Limited Run, the online distributor for Tzadik’s direct-to-consumer mail order projects has declared bankruptcy owing the label $70,000. To help rebalance this loss these kind musicians have generously offered to make these three concerts benefits for Tzadik.

Please come, donate, and help Tzadik continue its mission to support and document new music in the 21st century.

EDIT Jan. 29, 2024: Reader Roger Rohrback points out correctly in a comment that it is not the web platform Limited Run but rather the merchandising company Second City Prints that has declared bankruptcy, causing financial trouble for Zorn and other artists. Text in this post, apart from the direct citation above, has been changed to reflect this.

Admirers and collectors know this is the second time Zorn has been subjected to fiscal chaos by the collapse of a service provider, following the calamitous crash in 2019 of crowdfunding platform PledgeMusic, through which he issued the elegant Masada box set The Book Beriah.

This is what you see if you go to tzadik.limitedrun.com right now. (Screenshot)

More recently, Second City Prints has been the sole source of similarly coveted projects, including high-end vinyl releases, a CD box set compiling the complete studio sessions of the original Masada quartet, and a series of exclusive CD sets devoted to Zorn’s more recent Bagatelles canon. (Ironic to recall now that those aforementioned vinyl releases were made as a response to the PledgeMusic debacle.) According to the Tzadik website, the sole source now for the label’s Second City Prints products is the steadfast retailer Downtown Music Gallery.

Meanwhile, there’s the matter of these three shows, which – unlike last year’s festival – evidently will not be live-streamed or archived. Surprises are possible, but here are the confirmed lineups for each evening:

THURSDAY JAN 25

John Zorn sax
Ned Rothenberg sax
Jim Staley trombone
Michael Nicolas cello
Miles Okazaki guitar
Simon Hanes guitar, bass
Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson vibes
Arturo O’Farrill piano
Anna Abondolo bass
Nava Dunkelman percussion
Kenny Wollesen drums

FRIDAY JAN 26

John Zorn sax
Jon Irabagon sax
Peter Evans trumpet
Dave Taylor bass trombone
Erik Friedlander cello
Wendy Eisenberg guitar
Sae Hashimoto vibes, percussion
Brian Marsella piano
Jorge Roeder bass
Henry Fraser bass
David Weinstein electronics

SATURDAY JAN 27

John Zorn alto sax
Kalia Vandever trombone
Dave Douglas trumpet
Micah Thomas piano
Sean Ono Lennon guitar
Josh Modney violin
Jay Campbell cello
Luke Stewart bass
Ikue Mori electronics
Billy Martin percussion
Brian Chase drums

As you can see, it’s nearly impossible to choose between these lineups… but also impossible to go wrong. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door; seniors and students get in for $20.

To whet your appetite, last year’s concerts are on YouTube… here’s Jan. 19, Jan. 20, and Jan. 21.

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Listening out loud.

Madison Greenstone, Katie Porter, and Sarah Hennies at Roulette (screenshot)

Speaking of Roulette, last Thursday night percussionist and composer Sarah Hennies presented a refreshing, illuminating concert meant to shine a light on long-neglected chamber music by Michael Ranta, an American expat percussionist-composer based in Cologne. The introduction to an interview Hennies and Swiss composer and writer Vincent de Roguin conducted with Ranta in 2022, published by Sound American, offers a useful snapshot:

In 1967 percussionist Michael Ranta left the United States and never looked back. In the ensuing fifty years, he amassed a vast and singular body of work, while collaborating as a performer with some of the most significant composers of the twentieth century including Harry Partch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jean-Claude Éloy, Helmut Lachenmann, Tōru Takemitsu, Luc Ferrari, among many others. In 1979 after over a decade of travels across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, he settled in Köln and opened Asian Sound, purveyors of unusual and hard-to-find non-Western percussion instruments, which still operates today.

The concert comprised two pieces: Ranta’s Continuum II, a composition for four-channel tape, two bass clarinets, and percussion from 1998, and Hennies’s own Standing Water, composed for the same forces. Both called for close cohesion between the clarinets; in both instances it was hard sometimes to tell where Madison Greenstone ended and Katie Porter began, or vice versa.

The recorded portion of Standing Water was prominent: a continuous chorus of what sounded like nocturnal insects and birds (perhaps?). The clarinets sustained long notes for indicated durations over rumbling tom toms initially, and later badgered and yelped in higher ranges over chiming bell plates and brittle temple blocks. (In an email, Hennies wrote that that the percussion part was improvised and the clarinetists were also given space to play freely.)

Ranta’s piece – heard for the first time since its premiere 26 years prior – initially adhered to similar contours, though its taped component was more subtle: a rising and falling murmur indicated in the score with geometric shapes akin to elongated black diamonds. Said score includes exacting indications of the percussionist’s battery, including a gaggle of Asian gongs and plates, and of techniques all three players should employ. Some notation is indeterminate, but much is rendered in precise notation.

One hesitates to use the term ritualistic in a composition stocked with explicitly Asian percussion, or to draw too much attention to an abundance of space surrounding even the busiest gestures, lest the description inadvertently suggest trivial exotica (acchh, that word). Impressions of ritual were hard to avoid when confronted with bugling clarinet proclamations and stern interjections pounded on drums and gongs. But there was so much more than that to Continuum II, including a playfully bumptious stretch of nattering clarinets, followed by a mesmerizing area of warbling horns, ringing bell plates and almglocken (tuned cowbells), and taped sounds resembling a piano dipped into a pool.

The work’s intelligently proportioned gestures and effects, and its nuanced balance of shadow and light, made for an engrossing introduction to Ranta’s oeuvre. (Tristan Kasten-Krause deserves mention for deft management of the recorded sound sources.) It’s exciting to note that this is only the first public expression of Hennies’s exploration of Ranta’s music; the Boston presenter Non-Event will host a concert featuring the same players and program on Friday, Feb. 9 at SMFA at Tufts (details here), and an initial recording is well underway.

Roulette live-streamed the concert, which is now archived among the vast riches on the venue’s website, and also on YouTube, for on-demand viewing.

Finally, congratulations are in order: Earlier this week, Hennies was named a recipient of a prestigious 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, and this morning was revealed to be among the artists featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

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The Night After Night Watch.

Craig Taborn (Photograph: John Rogers)

Concerts listed in Eastern Standard Time.
NOTAFLOF = no one turned away for lack of funds.

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Improv Nights
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn
Thursday, Jan. 25–Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8pm; $30, advance $25, seniors and students $20
roulette.org

Check the top of this newsletter for complete details.

Locrian Chamber Players
Riverside Church
490 Riverside Dr., 10th floor; Morningside Heights
Thursday, Jan. 25 at 8pm; free admission
locrian.org

The latest program from the invaluable Locrian Chamber Players, an ensemble devoted to playing works no more than a decade old, features John Luther Adams’s Canticles of the Sky, Bright Sheng’s Angel Fire Duo, Jennifer Higdon’s American Canvas, and David Lang’s let me come in. Admission is free, and no tickets or reservations are required.

Negativland
First Unitarian Congregational Society
119-121 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn
Thursday, Jan. 25 at 8pm; $20
issueprojectroom.org

Issue Project Room opens its 2024 winter season with a rare live appearance by veteran transmedia provocateurs Negativland, who collaborate with live-video artist SUE-C in the local premiere of We Can Really Feel Like We’re Here, a jumpy, quirky, and perceptive exploration of electronic media, virtual reality, and the inevitably uncomfortable proximity of video gaming and systems of control. Local vocalist-producer Maralie Armstrong-Rial opens as VALISE. Issue also hosts an admission-free conversation with Negativland on Friday, Jan. 26 at 3pm at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn; details here.

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Experiential Orchestra
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave., Morningside Heights
Friday, Jan. 26 & Saturday, Jan. 27 at 7pm; $20–$75
stjohndivine.org

James Blachly conducts soloists Enrico Lagasca and Haitham Haidar, a vocal group designated Evangelist Quartet, and members of the Experiential Orchestra and Artefact Ensemble in two performances of Passio, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s potently spare setting of the St. John Passion. The concert, presented by the orchestra and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in partnership with LPR Presents, opens with a choral prelude of Orthodox chant settings, conducted by composer and Artefact Ensemble artistic director Benedict Sheehan.

The Rhythm Method + Noise Catalogue
Tenri Cultural Institute
43a W. 13th St., Greenwich Village
Friday, Jan. 26 at 7:30pm; free admission
mamlokstiftung.com

This free concert celebrates the two winners of this year’s Dwight & Ursula Mamlok Prize for Interpreters of Contemporary Music: string quartet The Rhythm Method, winners of the Senior Prize, and Junior Prize recipients Noise Catalogue, comprising a violinist and two percussionists. Each ensemble will play a piece by the late Ursula Mamlok, a groundbreaking, influential composer and educator; interestingly, The Rhythm Method also plays a chorus like distant screaming, a recent piece by its violist, Carrie Frey, while Noise Catalogue includes in its set Hajnali, a duo piece jointly composed by two members, violinist Madeline Hocking and percussionist Daniel Matei.

Craig Taborn
The Jazz Gallery
1158 Broadway, 5th floor, Midtown East
Friday, Jan. 26 & Saturday, Jan. 27 at 7:30 & 9:30pm; $35–$45
Livestream tickets $20
jazzgallery.org

I’d had this show pegged for weeks as a solo affair, due to lack of any further information—and that would have been plenty enough reason to attend. Turns out, though, that the abundantly intelligent, resourceful pianist Craig Taborn is presenting a quartet concept, Intercept Methods, in collaboration with singer and percussionist Anaïs Maviel, bassist Chris Lightcap, and drummer Tim Angulo. If you can’t attend in person, livestream tickets are available both nights.

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Attorneys General
The P.I.T.
411 S. 5th St., Williamsburg
Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8pm; $10 suggested donation
propertyistheft.org

Guitarists David Grubbs and Wendy Eisenberg have established a compelling rapport in a pair of recent gigs, causing all present to understand that this could indeed be the start of something big. Here, the two team up with downtown sound shaman Kramer, whose recent collaboration with Grubbs on the Shimmy-Disc anthology Rings of Saturn is mysterious and seductive. New Haven postpunk improviser Stefan Christensen should be an ideal opener.

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Maverick Offspring
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens
116 Pinehurst Ave., Washington Heights
Sunday, Jan. 28 at 5pm; $15 suggested donation, seniors and students $12
Mailchimp

Maverick Offspring is a collaborative group comprising three prominent New York City instrumentalist-composers: flutist Tessa Brinckman, violinist Stephanie Griffin, and pianist Kathleen Supové. All three have works on the bill for their first public concert, which also includes music by Claude Debussy, Andile Khumalo, Chen Yi, and Zack Browning.

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Vijay Iyer Trio
Village Vanguard
178 Seventh Ave. S., Greenwich Village
Tuesday, Jan. 30–Sunday, Feb. 4 at 8 & 10pm; $40
villagevanguard.com

Pianist and composer Vijay Iyer reunites with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, the supple, versatile trio heard on his 2021 album, Uneasy, ahead of their second collective release: Compassion arrives on Friday, Feb. 2, via ECM.

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Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.