Music with Roots in the Aether:
Philip Glass

From Robert Ashley’s
groundbreaking 1970s
opera for television series

The ROVA channel

Nels Cline on John Coltrane
with Larry Ochs on sax
(registration required)

David Arner, George Quasha, Charles Stein

Axial Music

At White Box on the Bowery, NYC
August 26, 2010

Plus,
from the 20^th annual Subterranean Poetry Festival
in the Widow Jane Mine
Rosendale, NY, August 28, 2010:

I managed to see the Art Ensemble of Chicago last weekend at International House in Philadelphia, and they were simply stunning in the depth, wit & beauty of their music. I House had sold every seat in the house, plus maybe 20 more, as people sat along the steps up through the rows of seating. The current line-up consists of founder Roscoe Mitchell on saxophones, drummer Famoudou Don Moye (plus a second percussionist sitting in whose name I did not catch), Hugh Ragin on trumpets & William Parker on bass & stringed African instruments. If it doesn’t take your breath away, you’re not breathing.

Videos of the Art Ensemble of Chicago

Some friends gave us tickets to see John Prine at the Merriam Theater Friday night & he did this tune in an encore, not with Iris DeMent but with Sara Watkins, the fiddler from Nickle Creek, who’d opened as a solo act. During his two-hour-long set, Prine of course did this following song, still one of my favorites ever.

Tucson Tonight

Marilyn Crispell & Ron Silliman

An evening of poetry & improvised music

Saturday, January 30, 7:30 PM

Recital Hall, Pima Center for the Arts

Pima Community College West Campus

2202 West Anklam, Tucson

$15 at the door.

Seating is limited to 120 people!
Phone 520-620-1626

Presented by Chax Press
with cosponsorship by
The University of Arizona Poetry Center and POG

There are some great, tho short, videos of Marilyn playing here.

Kate McGarrigle

1946 - 2010

Some say a heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it, you can't mend it
And my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is like that ship out in mid ocean

They say that death is a tragedy
It comes once and it's over
But my only wish is for that deep dark abyss
'Cause what's the use of living with no true lover

And it's only love, and it's only love
That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out
That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out

When harm is done no love can be won
I know this happens frequently
What I can't understand
Oh please God hold my hand
Is why it should have happened to me

And it's only love and it's only love
And it's only love and it's only love
Only love, only love
Only love, only love

Lyrics by Anna McGarrigle

Marilyn Crispell & Ron Silliman

An evening of poetry & improvised music

Saturday, January 30, 7:30 PM

Recital Hall, Pima Center for the Arts

Pima Community College West Campus

2202 West Anklam, Tucson

$10 for tickets at Bentley's & at Antigone Books,
or $8 from Chax Press
(if purchased from Chax Press directly, before the night of the event),
$15 at the door.

Seating is limited to 120 people!
Phone 520-620-1626

Presented by Chax Press
with cosponsorship by
The University of Arizona Poetry Center and POG

Marilyn Crispell has more than two dozen albums of music and has long been one of our great innovative performer/composers on the piano; John Pareles, in the NY Times, writes, "Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz." Crispell is a rarity in that she's not interested in hard bop, jazz/hip-hop, or fusion. Her style, with its slashing phrases, percussive mode, clusters, and speed, pays homage to Cecil Taylor (whom she reveres) but isn't merely an imitation...and her use of space, African rhythms, and chording also recall Thelonious Monk and Paul Bley, two others she cites as influences, along with Leo Smith.

Ron Silliman, it says here, is one of America's most consistently challenging and rewarding poets, with more than 30 books to his credit, most recently The Alphabet. The Times Literary Supplement opines, "Ron Silliman's ongoing long poem The Alphabet... mingles quotidian observation, linguistic-philosophical reflection, and street-level social critique to produce as vivid, systemic, and cumulatively moving an account of contemporary life as any poet now writing." Silliman's Blog, a weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics, has had over 2.5 million hits since its inception in 2002.

Lhasa de Sela

1972 – 2010

§



Kenneth Noland

1924 – 2010

Vic Chesnutt

1964 – 2009

Anthony Braxton, 12(+1)tet

A week ago Saturday night, I went out to hear some music. I wondered at the time if Kirby Olson, for example, would have preferred that I go hear Arlo Guthrie, one of America’s great folk troubadors, sing the songs of his fabled father, old commie icon Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, or if he’d prefer I go hear, say, some Ron Paul Republican. That’s a trick question, of course, since at this moment in history Arlo Guthrie is a Ron Paul Republican, even as he sings “Deportee” and “This Land is Your Land.” This was Arlo’s 40^th holiday season concert at Carnegie Hall, a series begun I believe when he was accompanying Pete Seeger & very much the image of The Kid, the character he projected iconically in the song & subsequent film Alice’s Restaurant. I used to see Guthrie at folk festivals tho the last time I’d heard him live was at a HARP concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, HARP being the quartet briefly composed of Holly Near, Arlo, Ronnie Gilbert (of the Weavers) & Seeger. That was 1985 & he still seemed very much The Kid then, at least alongside Pete (born 1919, the same year as Robert Duncan) & Ronnie (one month younger than my mother). In 1985, he would have been 38, not really a kid at all.

But it didn’t seem like it had been 24 years since I’d last seen him, perhaps because WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania station, plays Alice’s Restaurant every Thanksgiving right around noon & it’s been a staple of that holiday for us now for the past 14 years. It doesn’t take much more than that one song – all 18 minutes of it – one time each year not only to make Guthrie feel present, but likewise to freeze him in time, The Kid.

Now, however, he’s very much the patriarch, a very different figure from his own father, and the concert was in fact billed as The Guthrie Family Rides Again. There were, by my count, 14 different people on stage at different moments, not counting the sound tech, all but two of them blood relatives, and a couple not much more than two-years-old.

Functionally there were two or three centers on stage, of which Arlo was only one. Almost as strong in their presence were Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion (her singing partner & husband), who opened the show with a short set of their own. Sarah Lee has something unique to the Guthrie family, a voice to die for, and I can imagine a scenario of returning here in another few decades to hear her headline a show that contains an even larger gaggle of Arlo’s kids, grandkids and (by then) great grandkids. It will look a little like the old Coke “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial. But it might be pretty terrific.

The other real power center Saturday night belonged to Cathy Guthrie, who runs the family Rising Son Records label with her sister Annie. Cathy did just one tune from her Folk Uke CD (this being a duet she plays in with Willie Nelson’s daughter, Amy), but hers was the song – “Shit Makes the Flowers Grow” – I’ve been singing all week.

Those at least were the most visible focal points, tho I noted several times over the evening that for all of the guitars on stage, an awful lot of the music depended for its coherence on Abe Guthrie’s keyboards & that Johnny Irion, in addition to being Sarah Lee’s partner, is himself a good singer & a helluva guitarist.

In addition to songs by Woody & Arlo, Sarah Lee & Johnny, the Folk Uke tune, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, the evening even included one holiday tune co-written by Woody with his mother-in-law (Arlo’s grandmother), Jewish poet Aliza Greenblatt. In one sense, Arlo has stepped into the space left by Pete Seeger as he’s aged & mostly stopped performing, continuing the great American folk songbook – and this very casual hootenanny-style sing-along – everyone in a mostly full Carnegie Hall singing Shit in unison & on key – seems like a very natural extension of a phenomenon that’s hard to come by these days even at folk festivals.

Plus the work of Arlo’s sister Nora is bearing fruit. Nora has taken over managing Woody’s archives with the hundreds if not thousands of song lyrics just tucked in there waiting to be given some music & set free in the world. The Klezmatics, Wilco, Billy Bragg & Janis Ian are just some of the folks who’ve been entrusted to bring music to Woody’s lyrics and Arlo & family appear to be sampling them all.

Was it the best folk concert I’ve been to in recent years? Hardly. And I could imagine a concert just with Arlo’s kids that would really cook. Looking around Carnegie Hall, as staid a room as there is for music (albeit with crystalline acoustics), I realized that the majority of the audience there may have been my age, but not the vast majority. There were an awful lot of 30-somethings, which suggests that this music may just well survive its embodiment as a soundtrack of the ‘60s. And it wasn’t that this year. There was no singing of “Alice’s Restaurant,” with Arlo giving voice to Officer Obie calling him “Kid.” Just one story about Woodstock & nobody would have known that it was Arlo’s 40^th year at Carnegie Hall if Sarah Lee hadn’t stopped everything toward the end to note it “since it seems obvious you’re not going to bring it up.” Any other performer would have used that occasion to set up a week’s worth of interviews in The Times & god knows where else so that the place would have been more than just mostly full. But that wouldn’t have been Arlo Guthrie, which is just what this great large gaggle of song turns out to be.

Toshi Makihara

Jack Krick is an old friend, a one-time colleague of mine at IBM, the primary volunteer these days responsible for updates and expansions to the Electronic Poetry Center, and a resident in a large old craftsman-era masterpiece of a house maybe half an hour south of here. About once every month or two, Jack has evenings with readings & music. On Saturday, Colin & I headed down to Jack’s to hear the latest installment. We didn’t get to stay the entire time, but did get to hear Ryan Eckes & Kim Get Lin Short give great readings. You can read some of Eckes’ Common Sense series, which he read from, by clicking the link under his name.

There was also an amazing performance by master improvisational percussionist Toshi Makihara. Makihara tackles the drums with the inventiveness of a Cecil Taylor or Jimi Hendrix – anything the equipment can do is fair game. He’s played with everyone from John Zorn, Nels Cline, Eugene Chadbourne (who is to the electric rake what Makihara is to the drums), William Parker, Amy Denio & Thurston Moore. On Saturday he used everything from his feet to blank CDs wedged into a spring (stretched over the drum) to a slinky as he played three, or maybe 3.5 pieces on the little green side drum he uses in his his Solo365 project, about which more below. Makihara explained that while most drummers add drums to expand their range, the sounds they can achieve, he has lately been trying to do so the other way, by expanding what he brings to the drumhead. He also commented that he thinks of the drumhead as a stage and that his work with dancers – he has been collaboraing with the Leah Stein Dance Company for over twenty years – informs how he understands this space.

You can get a great sense of all this by checking out Makihara’s YouTube channel. He’s currently putting up roughly one improvisation every day this year – I haven’t found one yet that didn’t totally transport me – which by now is turning into an amazing body (pun intended) of work! Here’s a piece he recorded earlier last Saturday:

How does it feel?

Ali Akbar Khan

1922 – 2009

Anthony Braxton’s score for saxophones & contrabass clarinet

I found myself in the curious – indeed, unprecedented – situation on Saturday evening of coming away from an Anthony Braxton concert feeling disappointed. Was it the room? The chapel of St. Mark’s church in Philadelphia – not to be confused with its counterpart in New York City – is a Gothic Revival masterpiece built in the 1840s, but with some of the most uncomfortable pews imaginable & pillars right in the sight line between much of the audience & the musicians. Was it me? It had been my sixth straight day of work &, tho I’d gotten in a session in the weight room at the Y in the morning, I was tired, feeling rushed & had to settle for a theater district parking garage ($26 for 81 minutes or more) to get to the event on time.

Was it the music or the musicians? Braxton himself was not playing, but conducting, and the two pieces entailed nothing but brass – No. 103 for seven trumpets & No. 169 for brass quintet (two trumpets, French horn, trombone & tuba). The former in particular made me realize just how little trumpet goes a long way, unless perhaps Miles Davis is handling it. Even with the great Taylor Ho Bynum in the mix, it didn’t feel as tho Braxton was fully exploiting the possibilities of the instrument, and tho there were some tremendous moments – including one solo that didn’t sound like a trumpet so much as a landing jumbo jet – my sense when it concluded was “wait, wait, there’s so much more to be done.” Costumes made especially for this piece by Rosemary Kielnecker – green pullover court-jester shirts, black capes, “Zorro” masks (3 of which had to be worn under glasses to unintended comic effect) & caps – did not contribute to the musicianship & frankly paled as theatrics in the context of the heavy handed architecture of the room.

The second piece was truncated – lasting roughly half the length of the hour described in the program (and without the use of swivel chairs specified in the original composition). It was, however, only the second time Braxton has been able to mount this work with the intended instrumentation (there is a version for four saxophones around, recorded in Slovenia in 2000, that I would love to hear), and the presence of Jay Rozen on tuba was a delight all its own, playing the instrument like a percussionist, dropping pie plates into the bell, hitting notes you feel deep in your spine. In part, I’m sure that the abbreviation of the piece was done in order to get through it before the great tower bell of the church tolled ten – Jack Krick & I noted what an impact the bell would have had an hour earlier had it not rung during the intermission.

Ultimately, tho, I think the primary problem with the event on Saturday was the contrast from the night before, when I heard Braxton performing with his Falling River Quartet in what might have been the best single concert I’ve ever heard him give. The location was a relatively small performance space in the Settlement Music School south of the South Street entertainment district. The quartet consists of Braxton on horns (saxophones & contrabass clarinet), Erica Dicker on violin, Sally Norris on piano, much of which she plays standing up & reaching into the guts of the thing in the manner of Cecil Taylor, & Katherine Young on bassoon.

Seeing Braxton emerge on stage, a 63-year-old African American music legend, looking positively avuncular with his signature cardigan sweater & John Lennon glasses, followed by three young white women, none of whom appears yet to be 30, brought up every memory I had of watching Chuck Berry & Bo Diddley performing with local backup bands. I recall one band at some no-name club at Fillmore & California in San Francisco in the late seventies looking positively embarrassed at having to perform what amounted to the same beat over & over with nary a chord change from one Bo Diddley ditty to the next. Even backed by Johnny Otis’ excellent band, Chuck Berry used other musicians as pure backdrop – he might as well have had a tape. The concert at the Settlement Music School could not have been more different.

For one thing, Braxton did not play the star. If you closed your eyes, you heard an exquisitely balanced quartet, every one of them startlingly good instrumentalists. The piece they played – which I hope they release on CD – was a composite of four differently numbered charts using the highly graphic scoring system Braxton has evolved over the years (by contrast, the score for the 1983 composition No. 103 the following night was essentially conventional in its notation). Cumulatively, the piece had some moments of astonishing lyricism, reminiscent of Steve Lacy’s work with Michael Smith, and situated itself almost perfectly on the midpoint between free jazz & contemporary “classical” music. I’ve never heard a piece that was so perfectly both without lapsing into an either/or. Possibly this has to do with Braxton – he’s long been an advocate for a music that did not worry about categorical constraints (and has sometimes been dinged for this by jazz purists, tho I once saw him perform an evening of duets with Sam Rivers at the late lamented Keystone Korner in San Francisco’s North Beach where he held his own with the old school sax man just fine, thank you). And it may just be that the current generation of younger musicians have simply gotten beyond this. Katherine Young’s website notes her work with rock bands, not something many bassoonists are wont to do. But Katherine Young’s bassoon was as spectacular as Jay Rozen’s tuba a night later – she’s one musician I’d happily go to hear an evening of solo performances by. So it might not be “the current generation” so much as these musicians here. Dave Brubeck never had a group that performed so in synch with one another. So while there were moments when I would watch Braxton himself play – you really notice what huge hands he has when they’re grappling one of the smaller saxes – this was not an evening about a great performer but rather a great ensemble. And it was one of those evenings that reminds you just why music is both wondrous and important.

Ars Nova Workshop, which is bringing the Philadelphia music scene into the 21^st century, sponsored both events, charging $35 to hear the Falling River Quartet, a fee that got you into the evening of brass pieces at the church for free, while charging $10 for those who only sought to hear the latter. ANW certainly got its values right.

  
L-R: Scores used by Sally Norris (piano), Katherine Young (bassoons), Erica Dicker (violins)

Thursday, April 24^th & Friday, April 25^th

All at the CUE Art Foundation
511 West 25^th Street, Ground Floor
(between 10^th & 11^th avenues)
New York, New York
212.206.3538

 

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Cynthia Miller

Paintings

Curated by Ron Silliman

Opening reception:
Thursday, April 24, 6-8 PM

The show will be up through May 31
Gallery hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6
Closed Sunday & Monday

Catalog available

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Words + Music, 6:30 PM, Friday, April 25^th

Ron Silliman
Charles Alexander
James Fei

 

images © 2008 by Cynthia Miller