Sequenza21

Harris passed away this week.  He and I were in the PhD Composition program at CUNY, admitted the same year–though he decided to go to CalArts first.  I scarcely knew him or his music.  But I remember walking to the subway with him sometime in the spring of 2004.  He was explaining to me how much he liked his fold-up bike.  If I recall correctly, Harris said he had two.

Some well-to-do friends of mine purchased at a charity auction recently a chance to play disk jockey for an hour on WBGO in Newark which is, I believe, the most listened to jazz radio station in the world.  Since they aren’t that much into jazz, they promptly passed the opportunity on to me as a kind of belated 65th birthday present.  I’ve been told to expect a call soon to discuss my “playlist” which can run no longer than 52 minutes.  My problem, of course, is how to distill more than 50 years worth of listening into such a short time period.  So, here’s what I’m thinking;  I’ll choose music that is not necessarily what I think are the “greatest hits” but music that means something personal to me.

For example, in the early 50s when I was growing up on a hill side farm in the heart of Appalachia, the outside world was a long way off.  But, a magical thing happened just after sundown every day, after the local low-watt radio stations had signed off for the day.  From out of the darkness came the 50,000-watt clear channel stations like WBZ in Boston, WOR in New York, WLS in Chicago and WSM in Nashville (home of the Grand Ole Opry).  Sometime around the age of 12 or 13, I discovered a disk jockey named Sid McCoy on WCFL (The Voice of Labor) in Chicago.  Sid played jazz.  I was hooked.  Sid was a big fan of Dinah Washington who he invariably described as the former Ruth Jones of Chicago, Illinois.  So, my first pick is Dinah singing, live, the Bessie Smith tune  Backwater Blues with Max Roach, Wynton Kelly and Paul West laying down the groove.

Okay, that’s about three minutes so how much time do I have left?  The first jazz album I ever bought (and it probably cost $3) was Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea.  The recorded sound is dreadful but it’s a masterpiece anyway so I’ll need something from that.   Oh, when I was in college I got to interview Dave Brubeck backstage at the fabulous Keith-Albee Theater in Huntington, West Virginia, around the time that Take Five became one of those rare jazz hits.  So, there’s Take Five or Blue Rondo a la Turk.

Then, of course, there is the story I told you earlier about my first trip to New York in 1963 and going to the Five Spot Cafe and seeing Charles Mingus threaten a patron with a butcher knife.  I don’t think I mentioned that on my second night in town I went to Birdland, which in recent years was a strip joint called Flash Dancers, at 53rd and Broadway, and heard Stan Getz.  At some point in the evening, he said something about a new Brazilian record he had just done and invited a cute lady name Astrid something or other to come up from the audience to sing and that was the first time I ever heard “Girl From Ipenema.”

And–I think this was the second time I visited New York– I went to see Thelonious Monk play at the Village Gate and when the lights came up my former college roommate, who lived in Nutley, New Jersey, was sitting across the table from me.

Okay, okay, I’m hurrying.  Let’s see.  There was the 40th Anniversary Woody Herman concert at Carnegie Hall which brought together all the greatest saxophone players on the planet, except one.  But I saw Dexter lots of times when he returned from Europe–the most memorable being a Carnegie Hall gig with an another expat named Johnny Griffin.   They did an incredible number on the Sonny Stitt-Gene Ammons “vehicle” (as Dexter called it) The Blues–Up and Down.  It was recorded but it’s nearly 20 minutes long so I can’t play that.

I’m hurrying.  I’m hurrying.  Oscar, Joe Pass, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan, Mel Torme, Peggy Lee’s last public performance.  This is tough.

I do know how I want to end, though.  For 20 years or so, Steve Lacy’s mother Sophie was my next door neighbor and chicken soup connection.  Steve was a lovely man and a wonderful composer and musician who died way too soon–not long after moving back to the States after living many years in Paris.   Before she moved away to assisted living, Sophie gave me all of the postcards Steve had sent her over the years when he was on the road.  (Note to self:  find a library or museum to give them to).  My favorite Lacy performance is the Mingus number Reincarnation of a Lovebird on the Paris Blues album that he did with Gil Evans on piano and electric organ.  Couple of old cats in a studio in Paris cookin’ up a little masterpiece.  Here’s a snippet.

What do you mean my time is up?  My friends are going to have to spring for another hour.

UPDATE: So, what would you play in your 52 minutes and why?

Hey, the new Miller Theater schedule is out.  Some great-looking programs, including the New York premiere of Iannis Xenakis’s only opera, Oresteia.  Composer Portraits are:  Peter Lieberson, Oliver Messiaen (centennial celebration), Marc-Andre Dalbavie (world premiere of his cello concerto), Jefferson Friedman (world premieres for pianist Simone Dinnerstein and indie-rocker Craig Wedren), Milton Babbit (complete string quartets—first time in one evening), Georg Friedich Haas (U.S. premiere of In Vain, his intense 75-minute tour-de-force for 24 players), Arlene Sierra (says here that ICE performs a world premiere by this intriguing young American living in London), Leon Kirchner (90 birthday celebration) and
Jason Eckardt (world premiere of his song cycle Undersong).

Anybody know what’s intriguing about Arlene?

Our friends at the Metropolis Ensemble will perform a new take on Stravinsky‘s The Rite of Spring called The Rite: Remixed  tonight at Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Composers Ryan Francis, Leo Leite, and Ricardo Romaneiro have reimagined the Rite of Spring as a piece for chamber orchestra and live electronics.   For those of you unfortunates who don’t live here in the Center of the Universe, you can hear the webcast live on NPR.org starting at 7:30 p.m. ET.   It’s part of the  Wordless Music Series, which you can find out more about in an hourlong pre-concert special beginning at 6:30.

Founded in 2006 by conductor Andrew Cyr, the Metropolis Ensemble performs and commissions new music from some of the most promising new composers today. The group itself also features the finest young chamber musicians around, performing new works alongside the most influential pieces from the 20th century.

Something called Deerhoof is also on the program.

Got four and a half minutes for a meditation on life, religion, and nature?

Our friends at Aguava New Music Studio have a new video by Susanne Schwibs, music by Cary Boyce, performed by Aguava New Music Studio and the IU Contemporary Vocal Ensemble directed by Carmen Helena Tellez. A DVD will be available very soon from www.aguava.com. The score is available from G. Schirmer’s Dale Warland Choral Series.

[youtube]gNn6BsXl_Sw[/youtube]

There are a handful of words that send me reflexively scurrying for the off button:  “Mozart,” “President Bush said today,” “Sandy Duncan,” “drum solo. ”  I loved it when Buddy Rich told Johnny Carson once that he never practiced “because it hurts my ears.”   Which, of course, is why I have to mention that the first of four upcoming concerts organized by Jason Kao Hwang at the Living Theater with RUCMA (Rise Up Creative Music and Arts) is called Drum Solos! and features drummers Newman Taylor Baker, Andrew Drury and Tatsuya Nakatani.  

Thursday, July 17, 10:30 PM

Drum Solos !
Newman Taylor Baker
Andrew Drury
Tatsuya Nakatani

The Living Theatre
21 Clinton Street (bet. Houston and Stanton; F to Delancey Street or J,M,Z to Essex Street)
Admission:  $10 / students and seniors: $7

Few operas I have seen have left as great an impact on me as Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten which I originally saw at City Opera in the early ’90s and just saw again in its current run at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival. (There are only two performances left and I’ve heard that the run is practically sold out. When I was there on Wednesday night there was a posse of desperate folks hoping they could wrangle tickets, but if indeed no official tickets are left and you haven’t seen it, join them and hope.)

For all the polemics about what works and what doesn’t work musically in opera, Zimmermann’s relentlessly rigorous and sometimes astringent 12-tone score–with nary a hummable melody for its entire duration–is extraordinarily effective. So much so, I think it should put to rest what to some has seemed like an anti-12-tone cabal in recent years.

Ironically, many folks who are otherwise sympathetic to dodecaphonic musings aid and abet this cabal by being so apologetic about such music, e.g. “it’s difficult, but” etc. Even David Pountney, stage director of the current production of Soldaten claims in an essay published in the program that 12-tone opera never really took off and that there are essentially only three important 12-tone operas: the present work, Berg’s Lulu and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. What about Montezuma or the operas of Luigi Dallapiccola?

I love minimalism (Einstein and  Satyagraha changed my life and I’ve seen three different productions of Nixon) and am also deeply moved by some neoromantic operas (Vanessa is heart-wrenching). In the world of dramma-per-musica, shouldn’t “by any means necessary” be the only guideline?

From composer Paul Laino.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSasEp1-j1Q[/youtube]

And don’t forget: the S21 concert submission postmark deadline is one week from today.  Fire me an e-mail; Pierrot or subsets thereof.