The Can Banger All-Stars are playing Zankel Hall on Tuesday, December 5, beginning at 7:30 pm, in a program called American UnPop

What is American UnPop? This is how Evan Ziporyn, clarinetist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, describes it:

“Vox populi, vox pop, the voice of the people, or rather the voices of many different peoples, filtered through radio, record companies, market testing and the iTunes…pop culture is today synonymous with corporate culture, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  The music industry may be a nightmare, but the sound of pop music, in the broader sense, is the sound of our dreams, the trigger of memories, the actual texture of our unconscious.  A good melting pot still retains the flavors of its ingredients, even when it reveals the personality of the chef.   

 

Conlon Nancarrow taking boogie woogie bass lines and the covert rhythmic subversion embedded in blues and jazz; Martin Bresnick finding the common thread between holy minimalism, Franz Kafka, and the harmonies of Steely Dan; and Fred Frith finding the peril in an old children’s game, searching for the Court of the Crimson King while riding on the O’Jays Love Train.

 

There are ghosts in this machine, eminences to be evoked: Don Byron using the ancestral memories of the All-stars to distill Bernstein and soul jazz; Thurston Moore and Julia Wolfe stirring the pot, raising a cloud of guitar dissonance, through which we may or may not hear Appalachian dulcimers, Moondog’s bass drum, and Cecil Taylor.  

 

If this sounds like an average day on your iPod, well, join the club.  But the iPod shuffle only changes tracks after every song: you travel light, but the border guards are still on duty.  At American unPop, we’ve torn down the walls.”

Does anybody besides me need a cold shower after that?