Something to live for.
Adventurous listening with Sarah Hennies and Talujon, observing International Jazz Day with Dave Douglas, and live-music picks for the next seven days.
Anyone who reads me regularly knows I’m a fan of recordings, to put it mildly. Even when I’ve been severely overextended and forced to skip writing these things, I’ve mostly kept the Friday “For the Record” column going—to the extent that some correspondents now think that’s the newsletter’s name.
But, as I mentioned in a Musical America review of two concerts featuring music by Sarah Hennies, and said again aloud during last night’s concert by all-star percussion squadron Talujon at Roulette, there’s no substitute for attending concerts in person. From the Hennies review, a passage pertaining to a performance by Yarn/Wire of Primers on an April 2 Pop-Up Concert:
Sometimes the music was juddering and abrasive, a hammering post-minimalism akin to Louis Andriessen; elsewhere, it shimmered and throbbed like some distant cousin of Steve Reich. In its most extraordinary moments, instruments not present onstage – xylophones, piccolos, human voices – seemed to appear in the ether just above the quartet, conjured by the frequencies and frictions Hennies created.
The review, which also covers the April 4 Composer Portrait concert shared by Yarn/Wire and Mivos Quartet, is behind a paywall and probably inaccessible to most of you, sorry to say. (Read Lana Norris’s account for I Care If You Listen, here.)
But the point I most wanted to make was simple: The music Hennies writes, played with the authority and conviction these artists showed, has a physicality, potency, and mystery no recording could fully serve. Being in the same room as the players, awash in their vibrations and reverberations – and among the presence of other listeners – is an experience that can’t be replicated. And I say this having heard Primers numerous times via audio and video recordings.
I had that same impression last night during last night’s Talujon concert at Roulette, and mentioned it when I spoke with ensemble member Tom Kolor and composers Victoria Cheah and Christian Wolff in a mid-concert chat. Along with a roomful of attentive listeners, we’d just heard the world premiere of Cheah’s Pool with two figures, a sublime and mysterious piece filled with the sonorous peal of beaten, rubbed, and bowed objects—and with enigmatic intimations of hidden resonances embedded within, too.
Cheah has always shown an extraordinary gift for creating arresting, distinctive music filled with beautiful, elusive tones and textures, produced with acoustic, electronic, and hybrid sources—here was another example. You can see and hear the expert performance on the archived livestream video – and I hope you will – but as I listened to vibrations meeting and mingling, propagating aspects unseen but profoundly sensed, I felt again that some ineffable essence of the piece was only available to those in its presence.
After we chatted, Talujon played the world premiere of Wolff’s Music for Seven Percussion Players, an animated, gregarious frolic with deep grooves amplified by the players’ body language, and some laugh-out-loud keyboard licks as well. Like most of Wolff’s music, the new piece compels and rewards close, attentive cooperation among its players. It was wonderfully effective music, and a piece I’d have loved to get my hands on during my long-ago student percussionist years.
The whole experience reminded me again why the privilege of sharing space with music and musicians remains such a vital, necessary treasure never to be taken for granted—especially when a devastating global pandemic that’s far from entirely over still prevents many music lovers from returning to life as it was.
This just in.
Dave Douglas Gifts Trio
Rizzoli Bookstore
1133 Broadway, Midtown East
Sunday, April 28 at 5pm; $33.85
eventbrite.com
April is Jazz Appreciation Month, something I hadn’t quite noted until I was reminded last Friday. (Then again, I’ve never needed prompting to appreciate jazz.) I didn’t know until recently that April 30 is International Jazz Day, which will be observed with a global webcast from Morocco and satellite events worldwide. This April also happens to be the 125th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s birth—again, something I didn’t know on Friday when I was listening to Gifts, the new Dave Douglas album, and following where it led me.
Like a number of my favorite Douglas records over the years, Gifts is in part a tribute. On previous such albums, he honored iconic artists like Booker Little (In Our Lifetime, 1995), Wayne Shorter (Stargazer, 1997), and Mary Lou Williams (Soul on Soul, 2000), playing their music alongside his own compositions. In a variation on that theme, on Gifts Douglas surrounds four pieces by Billy Strayhorn, among the all-time great American composers, with six of his own.
Hearing Douglas’s accounts of thrice-familiar tunes “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Rain Check,” “Blood Count,” and “Day Dream” – recorded with a distinctive quartet including saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang – steered me to one of my all-time favorite albums, Something to Live For, an all-Strayhorn album Art Farmer released in 1987. (If you ever need a lift in spirits for any reason at all, cue up Farmer’s take on “Johnny Come Lately.”) That in turn led to …And His Mother Called Him Bill, Ellington’s sublime 1968 tribute to his close creative partner, who’d passed the previous year.
It takes nothing away from Douglas’s live-wire interrogations of these time-tested standards when I say that I headed next to more straightforward renditions, and then onward to the source. Indeed, listening to the breathtaking Ellington account of “Blood Count,” probably Strayhorn’s final composition, with Johnny Hodges’s liquid alto an outright sob, and then to Farmer’s luminous version, makes you appreciate the sensitivity and respect in Douglas’s version: ghostly at first, with skeletal guitar and shivering percussion, then cathartic when Bhatia breaks out in a blazing roar.
Lewis sits out “Blood Count” – and the strutting “Rain Check” and funky “Day Dream” too – but makes a strong impression jousting with the leader on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Elsewhere, the saxophonist is a strong, soulful presence, melding and sparring beautifully with Douglas, who’s characteristically intelligent, eloquent, and responsive. Bhatia and Chang, as you’d anticipate from their long collaboration in the dazzling genreless trio Son Lux, are a brilliantly paradoxical rhythm section: by turns limber, loose, and locked in tight.
Douglas terms his Gifts group a “rotating ensemble” in a bio on his website; the quartet on the record spent March touring Europe as a quintet with cellist Tomeka Reid. Perhaps that makes it less surprising that none of his bandmates from the album are featured on Douglas’s date at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City on Sunday, April 28, billed as an International Jazz Day event.
For that date, and an earlier one presented by Ars Nova Workshop on April 26 at Solar Myth in Philadelphia, Douglas will play with guitarist Ava Mendoza and drummer Kate Gentile. Near as I can tell, this is the first time Douglas and Mendoza are collaborating; Gentile was the driving force on Douglas’s 2019 album, ENGAGE. Hearing his new charts played in an even newer way is a real treat; what’s more, Douglas’s situational groups have a way of turning into working bands, so this very well might be the start of something big.
[Obligatory disclosure: Dave Douglas and I have been friendly colleagues for a very long time. I worked with him in an official capacity during my tenure as head of jazz and world music P.R. for BMG Classics in 2000-01, and subsquently wrote the press bio for one of his RCA albums, Freak In (2003). That said, we have had no professional or commercial contact in the 20 years since.]
The Night After Night Watch.
Concerts listed in Eastern Standard Time.
NOTAFLOF = no one turned away for lack of funds.
17
Ringdown
Public Records
233 Butler St., Brooklyn
Wednesday, April 17 at 7pm; $25.75
dice.fm
Ringdown is the ecstatically blissful new art-pop duo of vocalist Danni Lee and composer-performer Caroline Shaw, partners in life and art. Stream their buoyant new single, “Two-Step,” then catch ’em in this intimate show with support from fellow art-pop duo Sky Creature (Majel Connery and Matt Walsh), then mark your calendar for their guest appearance with Decoda at Weill Recital Hall on May 14.
18
Anthony Braxton + Wolf Eyes
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker St., Greenwich Village
Thursday, April 18 at 8pm; $30, advance $25
lpr.com
Almost 20 years after their epochal first encounter at Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, which produced the memorably titled document Black Vomit, improvising composer Anthony Braxton and iconoclastic noise duo Wolf Eyes played shows late last year at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and Zebulon in Los Angeles—the latter preserved just yesterday with a limited-edition boxed set of lathe-cut singles, Difficult Messages, Vol. 5. Joining them for this return engagement is the long-running, transcendentally empathic duo of Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski.
Joanna Mattrey
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn
Thursday, April 18 at 8pm; $30, advance $25, seniors and students $20
Free livestream on the Roulette website and YouTube
roulette.org
Is love a battlefield? Find out in Battle Ready, the second large-scale work improvising violist and composer Joanna Mattrey has created for her Roulette residency. As in her urgently expressive previous work, Arrhythmia, Mattrey is joined by a quartet now named Swoon, featuring violinist gabby fluke-mogul, saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, and trumpeter Chris Williams. If you can’t attend, the event will be streamed live and archived for on-demand viewing.
New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center
10 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side
Thursday, April 18 at 7:30pm; Friday, April 19 & Saturday, April 20 at 8pm; $75–$188
nyphil.org
Let’s be blunt: It’s nearly impossible to promote anything involving an institution embroiled in a disastrous situation precipitated by serious allegations of heinous criminal conduct, unforgotten and unresolved. But the brilliant German composer Olga Neuwirth, who has grappled with sexist attitudes in a patriarchal global culture industry for decades, merits recognition for her extraordinary music and her unflagging courage. Neuwirth’s fantastical Keyframes for a Hippogriff – composed as part of the Phil’s worthy Project 19 initiative, and dedicated to the memory of arts patron Hester Diamond – has its U.S. premiere on these concerts, which also include Lili Boulanger’s brief, splendid D’un matin de printemps and Sergei Prokofiev’s noble Symphony No. 5. The performance features countertenor Andrew Watts, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Minnesota Orchestra music director Thomas Søndergård in his NY Phil debut. (And no, you won’t be forced to applaud the individuals then and now named in the incident.)
20
TENET Vocal Artists
St. Paul’s Chapel
209 Broadway, Lower Manhattan
Saturday, April 20 at 8pm; $15–$60
tenet.nyc
Vocal consort TENET is most closely associated with early music, and rightly so. But for The Power of Mythology, a program centering female deities representing Greek, Jewish, and Hindu traditions, the ensemble partners with Trinity Wall Street resident orchestra NOVUS NY to present a world premiere by Reena Esmail. The program also features music by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Guillaume de Machaut, and Gilles Binchois, poetry and musical arrangement by Larry Rosenwald and Shira Kammen, and projections by Camilla Tassi.
21
Mantra Percussion
Various locations
Sunday, April 21 at 12, 3, and 6pm; free admission
resonant-spaces.org
Mantra Percussion is well known for inducing blissed-out trance with its performances of Timber, an elemental work by Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon. On Sunday, the group takes the piece around town this weekend for unique free performances in some of the city’s most sonorous sites. You’ll find Mantra under the 7 Train Viaduct at 46th St. in Queens (12pm), then in two Brooklyn spots: the Endale Arch in Prospect Park (3pm), and the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Memorial in Fort Greene Park (6pm). Go here for maps and directions.
23
El Niño
Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center
30 Lincoln Center Plaza, Upper West Side
Tuesday, April 23 at 8pm; through May 17. $47–$490.
metopera.org
Two of the most thoughtful, expressive, and courageous vocalists now at work in the concert-music and operatic world, soprano Julia Bullock and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, make their Metropolitan Opera debuts in El Niño, a beguiling 1999 nativity oratorio by John Adams, who adopted texts from biblical, gnostic, historical, and modern sources. Also debuting are conductor Marin Alsop and director Lileana Blain-Cruz; mezzo J’Nai Bridges completes the principal trio, and Siman Chung, Eric Jurenas, and Key’mon W. Murrah comprise the work’s uncanny countertenor chorus.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
Bummed to miss the Talujon show, but so glad they have an archive of the livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/_b95RAZoYBI?si=cPKeky3ojpP6kRF9 - Tori Cheah is a wonder...