Non-ECM Reviews

Lena Willemark album review

| Tyran Grillo

Click on over to RootsWorld magazine to read my review of a new album by Lena Willemark on the Swedish label, Country & Eastern. Readers will be familiar with her handful of ECM projects, including the popular Agram. Here she is joined by saxophonist Jonas Knutsson (also featured on Agram) and keyboardist Mats Öberg in a gorgeous folk-inspired program. I further encourage ECM fans to check out Country & Eastern. It is the brainchild of Bengt Berger, whose Bitter Funeral Beer album is among the best of ECM’s outliers.

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Yelena Eckemoff Trio review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My first review for All About Jazz is now up, and should be of interest to ECM fans. The album in question is the Yelena Eckemoff Trio’s Glass Song, for which the Russian-born pianist brings bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Peter Erskine together for the first time in a sparkling session. Check out the review here, and be sure to watch the promo video below.

Glass Song

Review of “The Arch” in RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

Please check out my latest review for RootsWorld online magazine regarding a phenomenal album entitled The Arch, which features Nils Petter Molvær, Bill Frisell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laurie Anderson, and tens of others in an unprecedented crossover project built around a core sound spun by the Eva Quartet (of the famous Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares) and late French composer, producer, and world music dot connector Hector Zazou. You won’t want to miss this one.

The Arch

A Mystery Twice Sworn: Alexander Berne and His “Abandoned Orchestra” Take on the Self

| Tyran Grillo

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Alexander Berne & The Abandoned Orchestra
Self Referentials Vols. 1 & 2

Innova Recordings
Released November 13, 2012

Upon first encountering Alexander Berne, you may feel tempted to know of the journey that led such a musician to the cavernous way station that is Self Referentials. I can tell you that Berne is a child of New York, where his fingers nourished themselves on woodwind keys, his lips on embouchure and reed. I can tell you that his work with jazz visionaries Billy Hart, Victor Lewis, and Cecil Taylor spun the backbone of his exploratory spirit, a spirit that led him to Belgium and a period of intense devotion to solo saxophone performance. This search flung him back to the Big Apple, forgoing the obligatory bite in favor of tracing the city’s hardened, pockmarked skin. In tow came a host of extended techniques, instrument design and development, and compositional fervency. All of this he continues to tie together with abiding interests in filmmaking and visual art, the latter of which informs every hand-painted cover of the present album’s 800 limited copies.

I can tell you that, in light of the music it designates, the title is intriguing for pointing not to the individual as worldly, but to the worldly as individual. To evoke this precept, Berne employs a variety of conventional and custom instruments throughout this multi-part opus (his third in as many years), refracting himself in the studio as the eponymous Abandoned Orchestra.

I can tell you that Volume I wavers with the breath that moves his art. Despite the physical augmentations thereof, the results are decidedly vocal in their unfolding. From the insectile coterie of “Far Afield Recording” and warped distortions of “Pulsationism (The Long Tick)” to the three-part “Sonum Onscurum: Headphonic Apparitions,” we find ourselves in a landscape at once industrial and verdant. Shawm-like undulations trade places with plucked strings and siren calls in a flowing admixture of whispering rhythms and inward, organ(ic) washes. Like a window covered by Venetian blinds, all that falls between stripes the ears with light and shadow. Lurking in Berne’s favored winds is a narrative piano, which threads the acoustic snippets of “Ruse (Fantastique)” with delicate pulse and runs through the fleeting recollections of “Hidden Memories: Plangent Wail” with the patter of feet on hardwood floors and dusty attics. “Transsublimination” seeks to unpack at least one of said recollections, visualizing it, if you will, in sound. It is a lonesome and skittering thing, morphing the keyboard’s monolithic insistence into throbbing bass.

I can tell you that the album’s first clear-cut allusion comes in the form “A Choir of Threnodic Winds,” this to Krzysztof Penderecki, if not also to Q. R. Ghazala. A glorious chorus of bellows, it is a prayer unrolled in a long tire track through the mud of experience. “Amphibiana,” for another, takes a page from the book of Bryn Jones (a.k.a. Muslimgauze), enacting a similar brand of semi-orientalisms with due process. “Of Fugal Melancholia” is among the more heartfelt tracks on the album, if only for being unaccompanied. Its Ryuichi Sakamoto-like cells of piano splice sunlight in repeated patterns of flash and shade. Of that shade we get reams in Volume II, the more ambient half of this matrix. Subtitled “An Unnamed Diary of Places I Went Alone,” it is a primordial flight response stretched to goopy pathos. Of its 17 parts, each designated by Roman numeral only, the poetic narration of late singer Jaik Miller (1970-2012) lends notable sanctity to Part IV. In this industrial fever dream, hazed by thinnest cloud in moonlight, we feel the sinews that have so far eluded us flex to the point of ambulation. Part VIII, with its mantra “I am,” is the ultimate self-referential of the collection and also its lushest. The drone is alive and well, it affirms.

I can tell you that while Self Referentials is certainly original, it is not fiercely so. This is not a detriment, for it pays loving homage, witting or not, to a roster of ethno-ambient greats, inspiring the warmth of nostalgia within those of us cued in to those streams and the breath of newness from the uninitiated to explore further. The creation of such a richly textured sound-world without the use of synthesizers or samples will be familiar to any Voice of Eye fans. One might draw lines of contact also to Scott Solter, Robin Storey (a.k.a. Rapoon), Alio Die, Vidna Obmana, Jérôme Mauduit (a.k.a. Désaccord Majeur), and especially Mandible Chatter. Taken on its own terms, this is a mesmerizing and unforgettable cabinet of sonic curios, a search that needs nothing to be sought. The only journey it harbors begins when you take the first step.

In telling you all of this, however, I bring you no closer to the rewards of Self Referentials. The missing hyphen from its title is its key: when bonds between words are erased, pure expression remains.

(See this review as it originally appeared in RootsWorld Magazine, where you can also hear samples of Self Referentials.)

Admir Shkurtaj: Mesimér

| Tyran Grillo

Admir Shkurtaj
Mesimér

Admir Shkurtaj piano
Released 2012
AnimaMundi Edizioni

In the modest liner notes to his first solo piano album, composer/accordionist Admir Shkurtaj cites Béla Bartók (1881-1945) as a vital influence. The parallel is closely fetched, for each has mined the land of tradition for melodic ore and fashioned from it something altogether his own. Shkurtaj began his musical training in the Albanian capital of Tirana, but relocated to Salento—the heel of Italy’s boot—in 1991. There he studied composition (further under Alessandro Solbiati in Milan), even completing a degree in electronic music, and began exploring the local culture by way of his roots at the intersection of Balkan and jazz trajectories. The combination lends an archival air to this smattering of compositions by him and others among a hearty selection of folk song arrangements.

One can hear Bartók loud and clear in the Tarantella del Gargano. Its robust and complex flavors are all the more so for Shkurtaj’s delightfully jazzy touches, which also permeate Σeλφω (Selfo). The latter comes from Epirus, a region of northwestern Greece that borders Albania to the north, and in the present rendition yields a whimsical sound palette by threading scraps of the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto through the piano’s strings. Kali nifta undergoes similar preparation, using candles and fingertips to trace a jangling Balkan rumba. To to to is the album’s most poignant and recalls the work of Eleni Karaindrou, if not the other way around, while Comu è bellu cu bai pe’ mare and Cuccurucù lend oceanic playfulness. These experiments reach their pinnacle in the self-styled “musical screenplay” of Pizzica di San Vito. There is something of a tinkerer’s aesthetic in Shkurtaj’s playing that comes out especially in this piece. Like a child before a toolbox and a broken toy, he dismantles the music and puts it together in his own working fashion. The quality of his touch is also in strong evidence, perhaps bearing the torch of accordion virtuoso Giandomenico Caramia, to whom San Vito is dedicated.

Hyrje is the first of two originals and opens the disc resonantly. It is the compass for what follows, pointing to a world of intensely focused emotion. Pizzica di Santa Lucia is another fascination: random acts of pianism seek out the traditional Salentine dance that ends it. Works by two lesser-known composers round out the proceedings. Salvatore Cotardo’s are exuberant and crackling, approaching moth-like grace in the provocative dance of Aspro to chartí. Daniele Durante’s Luna otrantina trims the wick of nostalgia, trembling with contrasts as it fades with an impressionistic sigh.

Mesimér reminds us that tradition does not belong only to the past, as if we were somehow cut off from it over time. By virtue of its name, it continues through the reinterpretations of dedicated artists who recognize that where they’re going has everything to do with where they’ve come from. Performance is the most engaging form of preservation, and by virtue of his own Shkurtaj opens many doors. Such music is more than just another stamp for our internal passports. It is itself the journey such a stamp represents.

(See this review in its original form and hear samples at RootsWorld.)

Rockets in their Pockets: Blasting Off with the Hammer Klavier Trio

| Tyran Grillo


(Photo by Steven Haberland)

Formed in 2002 by pianist Boris Netsvetaev, bassist Phil Steen, and drummer Kai Bussenius, the Hammer Klavier Trio knows where it’s at. Little known outside their home base of Hamburg, one hopes that will change with the release of their sophomore album, Rocket In The Pocket. Netsvetaev is a keyboardist of many stripes, as comfortable plugged as he is un-. After studying piano in his native St. Petersburg, he worked with Joe Lovano, Dave Holland, Kenny Werner, and others to hone his craft. Steen was born in Hamburg, where he also earned his formative musical education, and remains an advocate for the local jazz scenes. He has studied with ECM great Kenny Wheeler, among others, and is a member of numerous touring groups. Bremen-born Bussenius is a drummer of fresh talent and insight, his future already secured through onstage tenures with John Abercrombie, Dave Liebman, Kenny Wheeler, and many more. He cites Jack DeJohnette and Paul Motian as major and lasting influences. Having already worked together before, backing the Wolfgang Schlüter Quartet, their experience with the legendary German vibraphonist has clearly left its mark, absorbing his penchant for compact turns of phrase and equally concise flights of improvisation.

Since making their recording debut with 2008’s Now I Know Who Shot J.F.K., these young friends have sharpened their sound on Rocket, blasting off into the stratosphere with a set that is as hip as it is enjoyable. The attractive syncopations of “Hysterioso” usher us into the kind of mechanical precision and postmodern angst that one might come to expect from The Bad Plus. HKT brings its own swing to the table, what with the buoyant ground line and delicate array of electronic buggery, before ending like a record sped up until the cartridge goes flying off in search of other skies. These we get in “A Sketch In Dark Colours.” Against tight rhythm support, Netsvetaev provides enough to fill this puff pastry to bursting. His touch is beautiful, impressionistic, and decidedly futuristic, evoking streets awash with robots and automated traffic. “Suicide Train” is another rollicking exposé of urban ennui, only this time bartered into the hands of a frenetic ghost who seeks in said transportation a method to the madness. The keyboard dons an electric guitar’s clothing, while the bass is given its due frolic. The jam band aesthetic is smooth as scotch, yet distorted by a picture gallery of enticing modal variety. “Tekla” is a heaping slice of retro pie that looks to a more innocent time when we were content in following our minds rather than our hearts. Threaded by a watery bass, it sings to us with gentle remonstration. “Plan B” is a rubato mash-up of bold yet complementary flavors that swings its way into focus. “Play Me A Fugue” drifts in and out of a Baroque radio station with the swish of a whale’s tale. The drumming is bold, upright, and crisp. The title track walks a funky walk and talks a funky talk, rolling into the sweeping cinematics of “The Incredible Atmo” with unwavering aplomb. Steen switches gears to ARCO as Netsvetaev trails stardust into the night sky. The Steve Kuhn influence is palpable. “Take Fifteen” is a delightful slide into more boppish territory. Subtle and true to form, the trio excels here in its rudiments. Then, with a sweltering electric piano, “Desert Sun” kicks us back to seventies, with a mellifluous and oh-so-comforting sound. A fuzzy blanket in November. “Kaleidoscope” is a track of luscious textures and shapes, Netsvetaev exploring icicles in the highs. The set ends with “Harold Mabern.” Named for the great pianist and teacher, it is a jaunty ride through past and present on the way toward an as-yet-unknown vocation, of which music is but the first and necessary step.

If the music on Rocket is uplifting, then so too is the recording, which flies from the speakers with a life of its own. At once edgy and accessible, it should be the fun-seeker’s next destination. But this seeker wanted to know more, and to that end was fortunate enough secure an e-mail interview with Boris. Without further ado:

The press has located your work somewhere between Monk and The Bad Plus. Where would you yourselves locate it? What influences do you consciously bring into the music, and what influences have you discovered after the fact?

We get our influences from every type of music we come across. Of course, our main influence is jazz, but the influence of classical music (especially Russian music and music of the 20th century in general) is very strong. We use elements of rock, funk, hip-hop, and R&B, which are also strong. I can’t say there is a particular band or musician that has influenced our music. We’ve always worked on our own sound. We never wanted to be placed stylistically as “something influenced by…” We are the Hammer Klavier Trio. We’ve got our own sound.

How have you evolved as a band since J.F.K.?

Of course, we’ve grown much closer together as a band. Now that we’re using electric instruments (keytar, Rhodes, electric bass), our music has become funkier, harder, louder, but also much more variable. We’ve extended our sound palette, moving from straight-ahead jazz to modern beats and rhythms, so younger audiences can get into it more easily. We’ve also gone international, playing concerts in Rome, Saint Petersburg, and New York.

Tell me about the journey of Rocket In The Pocket from concept to recording to finished product. How do you feel it represents HKT and the future of jazz?

The recording session took place at Home Studios in Hamburg. It’s a legendary studio, famous for its rock and pop productions. The recording took place at night, which created a special atmosphere of mystery and inspiration. We had a special three-night deal with the studio: enough time to work out things in the way we wanted them to be. We even took an additional session to re-record some tunes we weren’t quite satisfied with. After the studio work was done and we had all the material, it took us some time to find a guy to mix it. Finally, our choice was Klaus Scheuermann from Berlin, and I must say, he did a really great job. Phil and I went to Berlin to oversee the three-day mixing process. We had a lot of fun working on it with Klaus, or, to be more precise, observing Klaus working on it. Once we had the master in our hands, we decided to wait until summer for the photo shoot (we wanted to have some outdoor pictures on the cover). Howard Mandel, a famous New York jazz writer, delivered some great liner notes for the CD, so we are very happy with the final product.

How do you approach playing in the studio versus playing live on stage?

It’s a different type of work. Live is more natural to everybody. There’s an audience you play for. You can build contact with it, interact with it. The presence of other people listening to you is inspiring and pushes you ahead. And if the people react to your music positively, it brings a feeling of a great satisfaction. The studio is different. You are closed in a hermetic box and you have to play for yourself. It’s really strange. It’s very difficult to develop the same energy as in a live concert. In fact, the nighttime recording session helped us a little to recreate the feeling of playing a club show. I really don’t care about it anymore. If you’re a professional musician, a good one, you have to be on 200% anytime you’re performing. Whether in the studio or at a jazz festival, it doesn’t matter.

When did you know you wanted to play jazz? Was there a defining event, listening experience, loved one, or instinct that drove you to this music?

By the time I grew up (it was in the 80s in Russia), jazz was not easily obtainable. My father had some LPs of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, but that was it. All through my childhood I studied classical piano and I didn’t really come across jazz music until I turned 14. It was 1992 when I entered the Rimski-Korsakov Music College in St. Petersburg to study piano and composition. At this school I met a new friend who was heavily interested in fusion music. He gave me some tapes with Miles Davis and Weather Report. Some months later I started taking interest in it more seriously and began improvisation lessons. At this time the political situation in Russia had changed. Jazz still wasn’t popular, but it became much easier to get recordings. Some of the new TV channels started broadcasting jazz programs from abroad. It was around May 1993 when I saw a video of the “Tribute to John Coltrane” with Wayne Shorter, Dave Liebman, Richie Beirach, Eddie Gomez, and Jack DeJohnette. This concert was a killer—the power of this music hit me seriously. And just about a week later I saw the John Coltrane Quartet on TV. This event changed my life completely. From this point I knew: this was the music I’d always wanted to play.

What is the most memorable comment a fan has shared with you after a gig?

“You’re sexy.”

What do you say when someone asks, “What do you do?”

It depends on the situation. Usually, I say, “I’m a musician.”

Much attention has been paid to your youth. How do you think age affects, if at all, the way you think about music and perform it? What is your generation adding to jazz? What is it taking away?

I don’t think that age is all that important. Of course, time adds some maturity to your musical personality, but for me it’s important to stay young at heart. I think being young or old is a mental thing. Some people stay young for the rest of their lives, others turn old before 30. It’s difficult to say what kind of an impact our generation has on jazz, because there are so many different groups out there playing completely different kinds of music, but the main tendency is that there are more pop or hip-hop rhythms and sounds in jazz than there were even 15 years ago. Swing is slowly disappearing. Despite the fact that we all love straightforward swing, we have to go along with the times.

Please tell me about working with such a moving force as Wolfgang Schlüter. What have your experiences with him taught you about performing, music, and life?

Playing with Wolfgang has always been fun. He is a musician of exceptional recording and performing experience, and he is a great guy, too. Offstage, he is always good for a glass of wine, a good story, or both. He loves playing music, especially in front of an audience. Of course, his technique and feeling for the music and his instrument are exceptional. His sense of rhythm and timing is also phenomenal. If you see him perform, you know immediately: jazz is all about rhythms and groove. But there is something else. The past years have been unkind to him. First, he suffered a stroke that left him almost totally blind. Just a couple of years later, his wife died in a terrible car accident (he was riding in the same car). But none of this has stopped his will to play music. This is probably the most important thing I learned from him: if you really love music, it makes you so strong that you can overcome your destiny.

To learn more about the Hammer Klavier Trio, please check out the German promotional video below, or click on over to the official site here.


Pavanes from a Princess: Going Beyond the Blue with Tessa Souter

| Tyran Grillo


(This and Beyond The Blue cover photo by Joseph Boggess)

When Tessa sings
She dusts off her rings
Her baubles, bangles and beads
She takes to the stage
Irrespective of age
And emotes as if something she needs

All too often we throw jazz and classical music into opposite ends of a proverbial ring. In most circles the latter wins out, if only by the brute strength of its history. While time cannot be the sole criterion when evaluating the worth and self-sufficiency of any genre, it would seem to be primary in our hypothetical referee’s mind. Where does this referee come from? Do the black and white jail bars of his uniform manifest an equally divided worldview? Can anything in the audible universe really be so simple? We can thank the stars above that artists like Tessa Souter, whose voice blushes with an acceptance of life for what it may ever bring, are showing us just how limiting our quarantining of genres can be. For when those first strains of “The Lamp Is Low”—off her latest, Beyond The Blue—catch our cochlea unawares, we recognize the permeability between them, as if the most natural cross-fertilization in all of music. Set to Ravel’s Pavane For A Dead Princess, the song sashays into the night, flitting like the shadow of a hopeful sigh from behind a veil of melancholy. Only in that loneliness can we know the timeless truth of the singer as an artist in reverse, one who hands us the paints with which to render our appreciation visible.

Bridging this chasm of reflection from one end to the other is a personality that never falters in Beyond’s 12-song session, nine of which place Souter’s original lyrics alongside the tried and true. Each track takes a classical melody as its wings and cocoons at their center a body of stellar musicians: Steve Kuhn on piano, David Finck on bass, Billy Drummond on drums, Joe Locke on vibraphone, Gary Versace on accordion, and Joel Frahm on saxophones. With such a finely attuned thorax in the pilot’s chair, Souter’s luxuriance can catch those winds from long ago and flap them afresh like spring. Between the early light of “Prelude To The Sun” (a luscious reimagining of the second movement from Beethoven’s 7th) and the glistening bossa inflections of “Brand New Day” (based on Fauré’s op. 24 Elegy) Souter charts a journey of great emotional distances, all the while drawing a circle private enough to conceal in a teardrop.

What with Kuhn’s enchantment and Frahm’s mellifluous commentary, there’s plenty to love when that unmistakable voice (but never its spell) recedes. Potentially hackneyed motives can be nothing less than clay in such capable hands. “Chiaroscuro,” for one, pours Albinoni’s diluted Adagio into a mold of midnight and cracks open from it something bright and fair. Neither is the group afraid to call upon Debussy (“My Reverie”), Brahms (“Sunrise”), Schubert (“Noa’s Dream”), and even Rodrigo (“En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor,” throughout which Locke wavers like moonlit waters). And then there’s “Dance With Me,” which through the lens of Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances tells the story of a reluctant partner whose movements of the heart, while enough for the limbo of passion that scuffs the floors of a shared life, find themselves faltering endearingly in reality. That sense of closeness and twirl finds clearest life in Versace’s solo, a highlight among a string of fine contenders. Souter makes sure to include the delightful “Baubles, Bangles And Beads” (based on the second movement of Borodin’s String Quartet in D) in deference to past classical-jazz crossovers. Drummond and Finck make for an exquisite rhythm section here. The title track emerges from the dark, cold, and starless sky of Chopin’s e-minor Prelude (op. 28, no. 4) holding galactic light to its bosom and wishing upon itself as it streaks into a sleeping child’s heart. Souter adopts a sparse approach to these songs, bookending shelves of thoughtful improvisation with her gliding ways. Her sources imbue the results with something aged, so that even when we think we’ve never heard them before, their contours are undeniably familiar, the sentiments to which they conform and respond even more so.

“Safe as milk” is how Souter, in a nod to Captain Beefheart, characterizes performing with her new bandmates for two live sets at this year’s Rochester Jazz Fest. Joined by guitarist Tom Guarna, bassist Sean Smith, and drummer Willard Dyson, Souter and company astonished those lucky enough to squeeze into the small venue from a line that trailed for blocks out the doors. They won us over from note one with the classic “Make This City Ours Tonight” (off Souter’s third album, Obsession), jumping right into the deep end as if the music couldn’t wait to sustain her.

Both sets featured a hefty selection of new tunes, “The Lamp Is Low” being a reigning favorite. In addition to the attractive rhythm support, it cinched the talents of Guarna, a musician’s musician whose skills had everyone in awe whenever he took a solo. In combination with Souter’s own brand of liquid mercury, the group’s full sound shaped the air, circulating like breath itself. This feeling of respiration pervaded the surf guitar vibe of “Prelude To The Sun” and further the smooth lines of “I’m Glad There Is You,” during which Souter pointed appreciatively to her bandmates as she sang the words “extraordinary people.” Guarna alone joined Souter in celebrating Burt Bacharach with a sweet rendition of “The Look Of Love,” the first of the evening’s dedications, which also included “Brand New Day,” written for Japan’s tsunami victims and featuring Guarna’s most stellar turn of the show.

Not to be overshadowed, Smith grabbed some spotlight in his heartfelt contributions to “Baubles, Bangles And Beads” and “Chiaroscuro,” while the ever-patient Dyson brought much to “Beyond The Blue,” “En Aranjuez Con Tu Amor,” and “You Don’t Have To Believe” with a caravan of sandy textures and shakers. Dyson also unleashed a memorable statement in “Alone Together.” Candy for the ears.

During an informal sit-down the morning after the Rochester sets, which came hot on the heels of a Blue Note Jazz Club album launch party and sold-out Russian tour, I asked Souter whether or not she has noticed a difference in audience reception across places and cultures. “The Russian people seemed to be very emotional,” she told me,

so afterwards you got a lot of people coming backstage in tears, because their emotions were so close you could practically see them through their skin. Perhaps it’s because they’ve had such a traumatic history that’s quite recent. I’d say for me—and I haven’t been to a huge amount of places—everywhere’s the same and different. Music seems to be very universal and audiences are very universal.

With this in mind, I couldn’t help but comment on the confidence she exudes on stage, seemingly internalized to the point of becoming second nature:

For me it’s all about being in the moment. When I walked into the room [in Rochester] I nearly burst into tears, because I could feel the expectant vibe. I was right on the edge. It’s overwhelming. I get subsumed, I don’t even exist. Confidence is important. It gets you past being self-conscious. For example, the first time I saw Billy Elliot I thought it was a nice movie. But then I watched it after I’d become a performer and it was an entirely new experience. There’s a moment when the boy is being interviewed for the ballet school. One of those posh guys says, “Why do you want to be a dancer?” and he says, “Because when I’m dancing I disappear,” and I thought, yes, that’s exactly what happens. So what you’re seeing is not just me, it’s us.

Does this affect how you sing the “sad” songs?

There’s always an element of sadness in a love song, even a happy love song, because one day it’s going to end, if only when death do us part. Somehow, you have that realization. I was thinking: Why do people always love the sad songs? Are they unhappy? But I realized because it’s sort of real, that even when you are happy there is a poignancy to how lucky we are.

Maybe it’s just part and parcel of the form, but it seems that in jazz people are constantly reconfiguring themselves in relation to others. One year you may be playing with a completely different band from the last.

One thing about jazz is that it’s just so free. Because each person brings a unique personality to the bandstand, it means that every time you play the same music with someone different, it’s a completely new experience. Like the band last night. It’s new for me. Tom had to remind me it was only our third gig together, but I’m blown away by what they all do.

Judging by audience reactions, she wasn’t the only one. This assured quartet set Rochester’s happening east end abuzz with adoration for a voice that needs no spoonful of sugar to make its medicine go down. As my wife and I left the venue I couldn’t help but smile, because, knowing that we’d be in attendance, Souter had been gracious enough to dedicate “Little Sunflower” to us and to the baby boy due to change our lives come the first week of September. And in the end, the creation of life is what her singing is all about.

Love doesn’t only live in dreams. It’s here.

Creating and Un-creating: A Conversation with Cayenna Ponchione

| Tyran Grillo

A rumble. Subterranean where there can be no ground. A calling from within where there can be no within. Is it a voice? A sleeping giant? The rolling pulse of marimbas. Something familiar, daunting all the same. Metal, touched to the skin of darkness, rolls like an ice cube down our backs. Suddenly, marimbas pronounce themselves ephemeral, morphing into glockenspiel and drums. A primordial froth, foaming at the mouth of something soon to be sacred. Finding itself as it goes along. Notes and staves invisible, but there. Like Braille across out space, they stand. A specific method of becoming, ever enveloped by a breath of destruction. Wrought, perhaps, in a filigree of swirling gasses and dark matter, in which there is only the emptiness of an embrace. Shape, size, and color—the peeling skin of sound. There is only inception, for nothing has ever ceased. The watery depths of a vibraphone give us our first taste of brine, finding in its habits an incalculable emotion. Each of these gestures is a cluster of numbers, elements, and intent, not so much divine as introductory. These deep build-ups reveal massive clouds of energy, imploding as much as exploding, as if searching for a primary spatiotemporal juncture in which to beat to the rhythm of all that animates it. A ghost in stardust. A child of orbit. Ring of fire. Singing tension. Birth.

This is what Cayenna Ponchione’s music feels like. As distinct as her name, it breathes. Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, Ponchione pursues a life of conducting and composition imbued with fervent dedication to the orchestra as a site of creation. Having directed a number of ensembles in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, she has also amassed a growing body of sonic territories. Among them is, appropriately enough, The Creation, a work for percussion that won the 2003 Percussive Arts Society Composition Contest and garnered international recognition for her compositional accomplishments. As a marimbist herself, Ponchione is invested in the world of reverberation, and in shaping its amorphous possibilities into music one can admire and develop into life experience. For more, check out her site.

To hear The Creation, check out samples and buy the CD at Capstone Records.

Ponchione is currently at Oxford, where she hopes to complete a Ph.D. that will enable her to expand a personal mission of community music-making. Before she hopped across the pond, she was kind enough to take time out of her schedule and sit down for a conversation on her work and beyond.

Just hearing the title, The Creation, I cannot help but think biblically. I also think Haydn. Yet when I listen to the piece, the narrative possibilities of something out of nothing slip away in favor of a more immediate, visceral effect. Were there any images, texts, or pieces of music that you had in mind while bringing this piece to fruition, or did it emerge, as well it probably should, from a blank slate?

There was a piece of music that I heard—the Bloch Schelomo for cello and orchestra—by the Utah Symphony at Abravanel Hall. That would have been 1996. And when I heard that piece, I saw the creation of the earth unfold in dance. That visual stayed with me for a long time. When I went to write this piece, it wasn’t as musically inspired as it was—I don’t even want to say philosophically, because it’s kind of fantastical—just musing on the concept of matter, and the concept of matter as being quite transient, that without vibration, without motion, matter doesn’t exist. And so, I toyed with that, played with the notion of being able to hear that vibration just like you hear the vibrations of sound, and imagine what the creation of the world would have sounded like.

Building on the first question, clearly the title is a multivalent one, and for me seems to vocalize, if you will, the process of its own becoming. The compositional process is, of course, nothing if not creative. How do you see the medium and the message intertwining in The Creation?

For me, if I understand your question correctly, this was a very important aspect of the work. I wrote it based on a tone row, and I manipulated that tone row not simply abstractly but in ways that were personally connected to the subject matter—spiritually, intuitively choosing facets of the tone row, choosing different inversions and blocks for each of the four parts, which converge into the creation of the sphere, the explosion, water, and then from water the fire and the ice. In thinking about those through my personal experience, I used them in ways that reflected that.

One might say it takes boldness to compose such a piece, that to set oneself to the task of evoking the immensity of earthly existence into a formative, if not formal, piece of music. Yet after listening to it, it becomes clear to me that it’s not really about boldness at all, but rather about humility. Would you agree with this and how do you see yourself in relation to this music?

I think I wrote it at a time when there wasn’t much differentiation between myself and my surroundings, where I end and the rest of the world begins. It’s rather vague, so in that sense I didn’t feel that it was “bold,” though I probably should have. And in terms of humility I felt like it was more an extension of my own experience as opposed to a capturing or statement of an external topic. In hindsight, I never expected that people would pay enough attention to the title, despite being exactly what I wrote about. The whole title is a creation, a sonic manifestation. Had I known that a lot of people would be playing it all over the world and thinking about it in different ways…. The title is so culturally loaded and means some very specific things.

Can you talk about the structure of the piece and what part improvisational elements, if any, play in its performance?

Actually, there is a very small amount of improvisation involved. It’s set up in four parts, and each is linked and borrows from the others in one way or another. The only point at which there is improvisation is when the sound implodes on itself. The beginning is, if you can imagine, little particles of sound colliding with each other and building. When that all starts to swirl around and gives us a big implosion, the fallout is completely improvised and is meant to shatter and decay, and from that we get the earth.

In what respects did your choice of percussion over, say, winds or strings influence the genesis of the piece?
Unfortunately, it’s a very boring answer which is: as a percussionist, and at that time in my life, that is what I was capable of writing for, and those were the forces that were at my disposal. So it never actually occurred to me in any other form than percussion. In the end, the piece couldn’t have been written for any other instruments. There’s just nothing about it that’s transferrable. It has everything to do with the timbre and using the instruments in their idiomatic fashion.

If we wanted to be nitpicky, we might say that, with no one around to hear it, the creation of the universe would have been silent. Where does one even begin to imagine it sonically?

That’s fun! To be honest, where I imagined it sonically—and there is a very clear picture of this—was to hopefully do it one day with dance. To me, the universe before the Big Bang in the “storyboard” of this particular piece, was a silent space; a vaporous, undulating mass without any direction that, by happenstance, started to collide with itself. Why I ever mused on such things is beyond me (laughs), but at the time they were very important for me.

To me, the piece’s final, drum-laden passages don’t come off so much as upheaval as organization, for somewhere in the resounding chaos of any creative process there is a dedication to order and familiarity, which in turn nourishes the beauties of an indeterminate world. How do you see, hear, and/or feel their sudden cessation?

It’s actually interesting you ask that, because I hadn’t realized until you mentioned it that it’s very organized at the end. The section is called “Fire and Ice” and my intention was for it to be much more disruptive. I think part of the issue there is that the way I had written it requires a precision of execution which then leads it to sound pretty tight and, on the other hand, I think that inadvertently I wrote it that way because I do find that I am most comfortable in order and structure and that for me, intuitively, that encapsulated my need to finish the piece. But I’m not sure that I understood the last part of that question.

Well, for me, the drums at the end stop quite suddenly. They leave the listener in a state of suspension, and I wonder how you feel about the ending.

Oh, wow, I didn’t know it was sudden! I know it’s coming (laughs). It’s interesting. I think about this from time to time, listening to one’s own music. I don’t know that I hear my own music, because it’s already there, the image is there, and it’s hard to hear it objectively. There’s a marimba solo piece I wrote before this and play more frequently than any of my other pieces, and I recorded it about a year or so ago, and I went back to listen to the recording and thought, it’s just too fast. Why is it so fast? I’d slow it down and we’d record it, but it was still too fast. And I think part of it is because I already know it. It’s hard to hear it as I play it and then experience it basically for the first time. I just can’t do it. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I remember hearing Copland play his own reduction of Appalachian Spring on the piano, and everything was much too fast. Not to compare myself to Copland, I don’t mean to, but I just mean the notion of the author—there’s just no element of surprise, and you’re just getting through it even though there’s a different experience that might be happening on either side.

Have you had much feedback in terms of how this piece has been received, whether right after a performance or in more prolonged discussions?

I never expected that anybody else would hear this, and I’ve gotten really great feedback. People find it to be, frankly, rather profound: it’s just a beautiful piece, they love this image, even technically just well balanced and enjoyable musically. One of the most touching things that happened is that when recording this piece at the University of South Florida, there was a young man who was in that percussion department who did not play in that piece, but who was there the entire time we recorded it. I think he was a freshman that year and so the upperclassmen played. But he absolutely fell in love with it. And he e-mailed me maybe nine months ago and said, “I’m putting together my graduate recital at the University of Boston in marimba performance and I want to program your piece because it has affected me so much as a musician and conceptually. He’s actually really interested in Carl Sagan and extraterrestrial concepts, so this was particularly interesting to him and very close to him as he developed as a musician, and there’s really no greater honor than to have someone say that. So it was quite special for me. I went out last March to Boston for his recital and it was very well done and clearly a very special moment for him. Probably one of the highlights in my life as a composer. It was really quite cool.

I also really love the piece. There is one moment close to the end that I find particularly effective, during which the drums rise up and stop and there’s a gap, only to re-congregate for a final passage. There is something resonating in that gap. I don’t know if it’s a tubular bell or—

It should be a chime, yes.

I adore that moment, and I’m wondering if you could talk about it a little bit and whatever intentionality lies behind it.

I have to say I don’t recall my specific thought for that, and I apologize because I’m sure there was something. I would guess more than anything that it had to do more with balance. Actually, when I write, being a percussionist, I don’t think melodically or harmonically in the same sense. I really think of flow and balance and structure, and if there’s a pitch contrast, again that has to do with where you’ve come from and where you’re going and what’s needed, so certainly if there wasn’t an extra-musical aspect to it, it’s just that there was a need for a breath before we went on with so much sound.

It occurs to me that Xenakis often used percussion to evoke cosmic forces, and I’m wondering if you feel there is anything particular to percussion in this regard.

Yeah, well it’s certainly less earthy than a wind instrument, which is connected to the breath, and even the contact that one has with a string instrument or a piano, and just the notion of a vibrating string in and of itself, whereas with percussion, the sound of clanging metal together, it’s almost industrial. The concept of percussion music came with the Industrial Revolution. Not to say that there weren’t percussion instruments earlier, and certainly in other cultures percussion has played a large role, but the concept of percussion the way we hear it now in Western art music is definitely all post-industrial, and so I think there is perhaps a connection there and a fascination with what’s beyond.

Can you talk more about the instruments involved?

It’s two five-octave marimbas, two sets of log drums, vibraphone, at least two or more break drums, lots of tam-tams, gongs, cymbals, a couple of bass drums, glockenspiel, crotales maybe, triangles, lots of toms. So during the section in the middle, the two solo marimbists go to play the two solo tom parts. It’s basically them with the two log drums and the backup at that point. The vibraphone plays a large role in Water, as do the cymbals in the gongs. Pretty straightforward. And in the beginning I’m using more of those metallic, spacey sounds with different sizes of triangles and glockenspiel. I’d love to be able to hear it with a different pair of ears, because I know how things tie together at the end from the different players, and it’s very intentional, and I don’t know if it sounds more continuous than it was meant to be. It is meant to be one gesture, but it’s supposed to be a gesture with a whole lot of different aspects from different players and different instruments.

You and I have talked in the past about your position as a conductor and how that may or may not change the ways in which music is perceived by the audience behind you. Could you describe the effect of your gender, as you see it being perceived, on audiences and how, if at all, these perceptions influence your work as a composer?

I think it doesn’t influence my work as a composer, only because even though I’ve thought of myself, as I’ve mentioned to you, only recently as a “female” conductor and that it hadn’t occurred to me. Being behind the screen of a composition, I don’t feel gendered and I don’t have a sense at all of how my gender might be perceived through the music that I write, and perhaps I should. You know, I was just looking through old pictures today. This moving process for me is insane. I was just in Alaska in August for a week, and I shipped the last five boxes of my childhood possessions to Ithaca, and they’ve been sitting in the living room, and before I can even pack I have to clear out the living room, so I just had to unpack these boxes I had packed thirteen years ago. It’s striking, but one of these photo albums I pulled out was from when I was in junior high and there’s a picture of me wrestling because I was on the wrestling team. And I was just thinking, yeah, I actually did that. And at the time, although some said to me, “You shouldn’t being doing that, you’re a girl,” I just thought they were old-fashioned and that I would be whatever I wanted, so of course I could do this. And it took me a long time to understand that people might see me differently. The more I’m aware, and I think the more I become a woman instead of a girl, I think that certainly changes, and dealing with a wider range of generations as an adult. So now when I engage with people in their 50s, 60s, 80s, they’re engaging with me as a woman, as an adult, as opposed to when I was a teenager or even in my early 20s, when they were engaging with me as a kid and I was engaging with them, again as this separate thing. And so I think in that way we conceptualized each other differently. But as for composition, I don’t feel any gender. And as for percussion, I also don’t feel any gender. I spent most of my life doing things that guys did. I mean, the percussion sections were all boys. They were all dumb boys and I was always section leader because somebody had to keep them in order (laughs)! And on the wrestling team I was already around guys. I had two older brothers and I wanted to do everything that they did. I had girls that were my friends, it wasn’t that. So, maybe I should think about this. I actually have another piece that I have to write for Tennessee Martin’s new music building, and I was thinking about this today as I was reflecting on this piece a little bit and trying to conceptualize what I want this to sound like, and now I have to think about what I have to sound like coming from a girl (laughs). What are they going to think at Tennessee Martin? I hope this answered your question.

Yes, well I think it was an ineffable one to begin with. On the one hand, it’s so arbitrary as to not even be worth asking. On the other, I often think about this issue in relation to myself as a countertenor and one who likes to “sing high.” When I create my choral music and people hear it, they invariably ask, “Is that you singing the high parts?” as if it’s not conceptually feasible that someone of my appearance or attitude would embark down that vocal path.

I made an embarrassing boo-boo the other day. I was speaking with a vocalist who was a woman, and I had asked if she would be willing to sing some Dichterliebe. And she says, “But I don’t sing Dichterliebe.” And I said, “Oh, is it the wrong voice?” And she says, “No, it’s a men’s role.” I knew that (laughs), but it never occurred to me there would be a reason why she wouldn’t sing the song, and I was actually really embarrassed. But when I reflect on it I realize it was just because you sing songs that are suitable for your gender. I sing Beatles songs all day long, you know? (Sings: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…”)

Yelena Eckemoff: FORGET-me-NOT

| Tyran Grillo

Yelena Eckemoff
FORGET-me-NOT

Yelena Eckemoff piano
Mats Eilertsen double-bass
Marilyn Mazur drums and percussion
Recorded August 17 & 18, 2011
STC Recording Studios, Copenhagen, Denmark
Engineer: Andreas Hviid
Mixed by Rich Breen, Burbank, CA
Produced by Yelena Eckemoff

Readers of between sound and space will, I hope, be familiar with Yelena Eckemoff, who has been skirting the ECM fringe for some time now in her working relationships with such artists as Peter Erskine and, most recently, Marilyn Mazur. The latter provides a crisp and delectable palette to the Russian-born pianist’s latest effort, FORGET-me-NOT, which also features Tord Gustavsen recruit Mats Eilertsen on bass. From the breathy clusters of “Resurrection of a Dream” it is clear that Eckemoff has written yet another distinct chapter in the storybook moods of her compositional development. Against a backdrop of twittering percussion and arco haunts she carries us through this slick opener with equal parts style and fortitude, riffing on the ether with her most unbound pianism yet. Mazur is splendid on cymbals amid a bevy of colorful kin, Eilertsen firm yet sensitive, soloing as if in memory of the lullaby that brought us here. Thus set, the album’s tone moves in shades through the child-like wonders of the title track to its densest dramas in “Welcome a New Day.” Along the way Eckemoff treats us to not a few surprises, of which the crumbling edifice of “Maybe” paints perhaps the most intriguing. The punctilious “Sand-Glass” further hones the set’s serrations and leaves us prepared to dissect the delightful little groove that is “Five” (in both title and number). Eckemoff’s classical roots come to the fore in “Schubert’s Code.” Making its timid entrance onto a stage draped with patterns of the nineteenth century, it nevertheless sparkles with clear and present reflections and showcases a real feel for detail. “Quasi Sonata,” on the other hand, rolls out the retro on a smaller scale and feels most like fleeting reminiscence. The pleasant dissonances sprinkled throughout “Seven” (in title but not in number) also bring us into the unexpected, a place where cascades and stepwise chains share a drink and a smile, while the more erratic “Trapped in Time” brings us into a swing to remember, replete with Mazur’s solid rim hits and spiraling energies.


(photo by Nicola Fasano)

FORGET-me-NOT is an album without borders, a gallery of animate snapshots that float on the wind. Its fluid transitions hang like a necklace from the neck of a mother who stares through the window of her past and finds a thousand songs to sing. Let’s hope this is a sign of things to come for an artist who continues to add feathers to her wings with each new release.