Christian Marien’s “How Long is Now”

HOW LONG IS NOW / 40 Love / Goldrausch. The Lobster. Lilly / Dopperhertz. Phantome / Pouwl. 294 / Patterson Blues. Deésse (Christian Marien). The Landing (Delius-Stadhouders-Borghini-Marien) / Christian Marien Qrt: Tobias Delius, t-sax/cl; Jasper Stadthouders, gt/mand; Antonio Borghini, bs; Marien, dm / MarMade Records MMR 002

This unusual album came my way via snail mail from drummer-leader Marien, who was appreciative of my comments regarding his playing on Silke Eberhard’s most recent outing by her little band “I Am Three,” In Other Words. After sampling it I was glad he sent it my way. It sounds like a cross between techno-jazz and the Art Ensemble of Chicago—a strange but interesting mixture.

In face, the opening selection, 40 Love / Goldrausch, also contains a sort of Latin-esque beat, something the AEC never got into. Rhythmically speaking, Marien seems to be on a slightly different pattern than his bandmates, but what he plays remains steady in its own way: a sort of continuous sixteenth-note pattern under the complex and often interweaving lines of his bandmates. All of them are viortuosi on their instruments, but I was particularly struck by guitarist Jasper Stadthouders, who plays his instrument almost like plucked piano strings. There are no other words to describe it. You simply have to hear it to believe it. Reedman Tobias Delius alternates between straightahead playing and incredibly dense (and rough-sounding) sounds on his instrument while bassist Borghini keeps up a steady stream of eighth notes. Towards the end of this track, the volume gradually wanes, as does the intense tempo, until the music simply stops in the middle of one of Borghini’s plucked notes.

The Lobster opens with Mrien playing slower but fairly complex cymbal work. Delius, now on clarinet, plays relatively linear lines while guitar and bass meander around him. Despite the quirky tempo and meter, the piece manages to swing a little, but then it stops dead as Delius and Borghini, now playing bowed bass, engage on their own little dialogue. Marien offers this by way of explanation about his music:

Echteit Musik in Berlin found a new nomenclature, “real time,” to talk about music made entirely in the “now.” And Derek Bailey famously coined the tern “the NOW now” to discuss the absolute experience of presence that comes from improvisation. [Yet] Historically, records made “in the now” are documents to witness “after.” The band experiences “now,” and you experience “then.” The record you’re listening to, or about to listen to, or have listened to, isn’t presenting “now” for witnesses. How can it? It’s composed music. As playful as it is, and for all of its astounding qualities, it isn’t a music made entirely in the present because so many aspects are premeditated.

This rather surprised me. Just from listening, I had the impression that most of this music was improvised and just a bit of it written, but Marien insists it is the other way round. And yet he does manage to create contrasts in mood as well as structure. The third track, titled Lilly / Doppelhertz, is very much a rhythmically and melodically straight forward piece that almost sounds like an out-take from Stan Getz’ old bossa nova albums…at least, until the tempo gradually increases and Delius takes off into nooks and corners in the music that Getz never explored. Eventually, in fact, Delius starts to sound like Ivo Perelman, creating strange, abstract lines that are closer related to modern visual art than to music. Stadthouders’ guitar, however, keeps hammering out the note G until Delius behaves himself and comes back to tonality. It’s both a whimsical and a dramatic moment; knowing that this music is largely composed, one can thus admire what Marien has created, a musical structure with a split personality. Nor does the split stop there, for after a while in this techno-jazz groove, the music suddenly starts to resemble R&B for a few bars before morphing once again—yet the underlying harmony essentially remains the same. It’s the aural equivalent of being ina house of mirrors where each mirror reflects your image in an entirely different form of distortion, yet it is the same person being reflected.

Just as Lilly / Doppelhertz is the most structured piece on the album, the four-way collaboration The Landing is the most abstract.In this case, I seriously questioned how much of this was actually written out. Most of it sounds truly improvised into being. If it was written out, I’d like to see the score because my ears had trouble believing it. About a third of the way through, the tempo decreases and although the music still has some edgy harmonic elements, Borghini’s bass and even Delius’ tenor sax sounds more tonally consonant before the guitar again pulls both harmony and rhythm apart. I’m not so sure that this particular piece is “in the now” so much as “in the ether” or, as the late Bill evans once put it, “the universal overmind.” It sounds like the inner workings of a mind that is in fact somewhere else and not anywhere on this planet, even tentatively. It has a strange hypnotic quality about it that is completely unfamiliar, even a touch alienating, yet utterly fascinating because all four musicians are locked onto the same idea and place. If it is the music of Now, it is also the music of Elsewhere—or, as the old song once said, “Anyplace else but here.”

There are moments of wit in this music, too, but they are not laugh-out-loud moments. They are smile-to-yourself moments, a very German form of humor. The stamps that Marien affixed to this package bore the image of a German comedian who I had to look up online. Apparently one of his favorite jokes was to complain to his wife that his eggs were too soft and he wanted them firm—several times, in fact. To any other culture, this would not even be considered humor, just a domestic complaint, but apparently this gag had Germans rolling in the aisles. Stadthouders switches from guitar to mandolin on Phantoms / Pouwl, to good effect, as Delius again picks up the clarinet. Marien’s drums are much more subtle on this track; he allows the other three to dominate the sonic foreground as they weave an abstract but (again) essentially tonal pattern, this time mostly in 3 rather than 4 (or some other, more complex meter). Eventually, Stadhouders moves back to the guitar but Delius sticks to the clarinet as Marien’s cymbal work becomes busier and a bit louder in the background.

Not surprisingly, the next track is fragmented and discordant, an antidote to the previous one. At this point, I would like to praise recording engineer Tito Knapp for capturing the sound of the instruments in such a way that they sound as if they are right in your living room (or whatever room you listen in). There is none of the reverb that often seems to creep into so many jazz recordings and virtually all classical ones, yet the sound of each instrument is not entirely dry; it has some “juice” to it, at least enough to make every note ring like a bell. One of the highlights of this track is the bass-drum duo, which is altogether extraordinary. When the guitar and tenor sax return, the music becomes slightly faster and more intense, very, very gradually before easing off equally gradually. This is a quartet that doesn’t just play together; they breathe together.

The finale, Deésse, is possibly the strangest piece on the album despite starting quietly. It is the sonic equivalent of Alice feeling her way along the underground hallway in Wonderland, searching for a door she can use to escape but finding herself too large to get through it. Once again, the listener senses that some of this music is through-composed but discerning which parts and how much of it remains a mystery to the outsider—until the six and a half minute mark, when Delius, now on clarinet, plays a rather lovely melody in bossa nova time with the others supporting him admirably, and this shift in musical style happens so gradually that you aren’t even aware of it until you suddenly hear it. Truly, this IS music of the NOW. Or at least, the THEN.

There’s no doubt about it, strange things are happening on this CD, and you can participate just by listening. Very little of this music is easy, but it’s all very moving. As a little girl once said to Word Jazz artist Ken Nordine:

You can’t reach into in. Your arms are too long!

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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The Hottest Modern Trad Jazz Band

Before I get into the meat of this article, some background is necessary, and that is how the jazz world became too complex for the average listener who liked jazz but couldn’t follow the new styles and improvising patterns that evolved around the end of World War II.

All jazz fans know the story about how bebop divided jazz fans. From 1946 to 1950, the big swing bands that survived evolved in one of three directions: towards rhythm & blues, which had started around 1942; into a more progressive form of swing with more advanced harmonies; or towards bop itself. The R&B orchestras, among them Lionel Hampton’s, had the most followers, but for those who liked small-band jazz the majority of listeners fled to the “trad jazz” bands of Eddie Condon, Sharkey Bonano or Lu Watters. By the 1950s, “trad jazz” bands had become a cottage industry that dominated the landscape, in part because most of the big swing bands were gone.

And of course, the 1950s was the era in which rock ‘n’ roll evolved out of R&B, and this became the music of America’s teenagers, both black and white. But there was also the folk music revival, which attracted both some teens as well as some adults. In the early-to-mid 1960s, jug and washboard bands formed, mostly in the suburbs of Boston around the college campuses. The most famous of these were the Even Dozen Jug Band, which John Sebastian, Jr. was a part of, and Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, which included Geoff and Maria Muldaur. By the time I went to college in 1969, in New Jersey, nearly every campus had a local jug band that played there. Around that time, one such similar band broke into the mainstream, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and then in the early 1970s underground cartoonist Robert Crumb formed his “Keep On Truckin’” band, which then changed its name to the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and they became the hot new trad band among college students.

Of course, real “trad jazz” bands continued to flourish into the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, among them groups led by Bob Greene, Vince Giordano, James Dapogny and “Pam” Pameijer, some of them good and some of them stiff and klunky. The most popular such groups nowadays are Tuba Skinny and Carling’s Darlings, the latter led by a woman, trumpeter-trombonist Gunhild Carling, but there are several others from both the U.S.A. and especially England, where trad jazz has been a way of life ever since Chris Barber started his band in the early 1950s, but these bands never appealed much to teenagers/college students. They were and are now followed mostly by men in their 50s or older.

But time marches on, and with it changes in taste. In the 1990s, a band that had originally played punk rock picked up band instruments and turned them into a hot little swing band with the name Squirrel Nut Zippers, led by guitarist-singer Jim Mathus. But although they played some older tunes from the Swing Era, most of the Zippers’ repertoire was new material that sounded like old songs, and somehow or other they took off. Not that they could rival the Rolling Stones or the Who in popularity, mind you, but enough that their records and live appearances sold surprisingly well. I would personally credit SNZ with sparking the Swing Revival, which in turn sparked new interest among young people in not only the music but also in the looser, more difficult forms of dancing that went along with it like the Lindy Hop and the Suzie Q.

Into this atmosphere of revival, and a cultural shift away from washboard and jug bands towards swing as the new trad jazz, came a young Washington, D.C. woman named Naomi Uyama. At the age of 16 she became a national champion at the Lindy Hop, and she enjoyed the dance so much that she then learned other jazz dances like the Charleston and Black Bottom which had preceded it. There’s a wonderful clip on YouTube of Uysma and another woman dancing the Charleston, and very well, too. She performed these dances in 20 countries over the years

But Uyama had a dream to bring not just the dance steps of the swing era to a wider audience but also the music. Somewhere along the way she took singing lessons, and became a first-rate swing jazz singer, performing in New York with the Boilermaker Jazz Band and the Cangelosi Cards, and this sparked her desire to have a band of her own to play the music she loved with her as singer-leader. Thus she auditioned several young musicians who were interested in playing that style and formed her own small band, which she called her Handsome Devils.

If there is more to the story than this, I haven’t seen it mentioned online. In addition to touring with her Handsome Devils, the personnel of which has changed only a little over the years, she and the band have made three self-produced albums which are available on Bandcamp for streaming, and this is where we return to the topic of this article.

I only came across Naomi and her band on YouTube a few days ago when writing my article on the swing arrangements of Eddie Durham, specifically her performance of his tune Wham (Rebop Boom Bam) written for and recorded by Glenn Miller’s Orchestra with Marion Hutton singing the vocal. Naomi’s performance is faster and fleeter than Miller’s, using only a quintet (at the time, she didn’t have a trumpet player, only trombone, clarinet/saxophone and rhythm section of piano-guitar-bass-drums). But this is a performance, and a recording, of very high quality. Naomi and her band aren’t just piddling around. They’re serious about their swing music, and because they have such a personal enthusiasm for it, they infuse all of their performances with an energy that is almost explosive.

Naomi’s singing voice is high, light and bright. My educated guess is that her biggest influences were probably Ivie Anderson and Helen Ward, the 1930s band singers of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, respectively, with a little bit of Ella Fitzgerald tossed in for occasional scat passages. She certainly fills their long-gone shoes admirably; the only other trad jazz band singer who comes close to her is Erika Lewis, who performs with the New Orleans-based band Tuba Skinny, which does perform a few songs from the 1930s but mostly repertoire from an earlier era. Listening to Naomi sing is an unalloyed pleasure not to be missed; she and Danny Bacher, a New York-based swing singer and soprano saxist, are so good that you can almost imagine 1930s bandleaders fighting with one another over their services.

From my own personal perspective, the emergence of both Uyama and Bacher is bittersweet. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I of course listened to contemporary rock music but was much more drawn to jazz and especially swing bands. I was ridiculed and ostracized by my peers because of this. They considered me a weirdo. I was mocked and occasionally beaten up for my musical tastes, thus I watch this new swing phenomenon—which does attract a surprising number of young people who find today’s pop music to be vapid—with mixed feelings. Why couldn’t there have been a swing revival when I was young?

But to return to Naomi and her Handsome Devils, they are as hot a band as you’re ever going to hear. Although their style is not exactly like that of Fats Waller’s small band His Rhythm, they play with the same kind of beat, that little “chunk-chunk” style of swing that I found so infections as a teen. And they are very good improvisers. Granted, none of them are on the genius level of Bunny Berigan, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden or Waller himself, but they understand how to improvise within the tonal system that preceded the bop revolution in a creative manner, and they listen to each other. Thus, as player A ends his solo and player B begins, he generally picks up where his predecessor left off. This, in itself, is an art. Most modern-day jazz musicians NEVER listen to the others in the band, in part because they don’t want to and in part because they can’t follow what their predecessor played because it’s usually a solo so convoluted that only a skilled music theorist can analyze it.

Unlike Squirrel Nut Zippers, Naomi and her Handsome Devils do not play originals, although she and trumpeter Mike Davis have collaborated on Little Girl Blues and Gone So Long, but their repertoire covers a wide range of Swing Era numbers. Included in their book are such tried-and-true songs as This Can’t Be Love, If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight, Goody Goody, Marie, Perdido, Dream of You and Shoo Shoo Baby, but also some earlier tunes like Red McKenzie’s Georgianna, Eddie Green’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and Maceo Pinkard’s old Dixieland chestnut Sugar, a suggestive blues in Lil Johnson’s Take It Easy, Greasy (a tune so obscure that even I had never heard of it before), and such early R&B tunes as the Sammy Price-Leonard Feather I Know How to Do It and Louis Jordan’s Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?

Moreover, Naomi and her band so not always play and sing these tunes in a conventional manner. In addition to the way they sped up Wham, they also sped up A Good Man to an almost breathless tempo that no blues singer of the 1920s would have dared to take. On If I Could Be With You and a few other songs, Naomi sings the rarely-heard opening verse before getting to the more familiar chorus. On one YouTube video (but not yet recorded by the band), they even perform a song well known to Louis Armstrong collectors but obscure to the rest of the world, the old Hot Five number Big Butter and Egg Man. You could have knocked me over with a feather, and I don’t mean Leonard (or Lorraine)!

The Handsome Devils’ arrangements, several of them written by Uyama herself, have a clean, open, uncluttered sound but are not musically simple or mindless. There is almost always something going on in the background, and if pianist Dalton Ridenhour cam sound surprisingly simple on some tracks, there are others (i.e., I Can’t Give You Anything But Love) where he channels his inner Joe Sullivan or Jess Stacy. Just about the only arrangement that did disappoint me was Marie, although the trombone and alto sax play the music sung by the band behind Jack Leonard’s vocal on the original Tommy Dorsey recording, but this track has some nifty scatting by Naomi, sometimes trading fours with her musicians, to compensate.

Bottom line: if you haven’t yet heard Naomi and her Handsome Devils, you really need to. This is a band that will captivate you and hold your attention; there’s more to them than what you may hear on the surface when listening to them. I guarantee it.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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New Eddie Durham Documentary to Air

WHAM REBOP BOOM BAM: THE SWING JAZZ OF EDDIE DURHAM / One-hour documentary by Kris Hendrickson; Loren Schoenberg, producer/musical director; scheduled to air on PBS TV stations beginning February 1

In his time, guitarist-trombonist-arranger Eddie Durham (1906-1987) was one of jazz’s brightest stars. He pioneered the use of the electric guitar in jazz (a hollow-body model) long before Charlie Christian and Junior Barnard and wrote swinging tunes and arrangements for the big bands of Bennie Moten (Every Day Blues, Oh! Eddie, Lafayette), Count Basie (Good Morning, Blues, Time Out, Jumpin’ At the Woodside, Out the Window, Don’t You Miss Your Babe? and Moten Swing) and Glenn Miller (Slip Horn Jive, I Want to Be Happy, Glen Island Special, In the Mood and Wham-Rebop-Boom-Bam), but then faded from the jazz scene as bop overtook swing. Nonetheless, for a period of time he was one of the top arrangers in jazz, on a par with Eugene Gifford (the pioneer of swing arranging for the Casa Loma Orchestra), Jimmy Mundy, Buster Harding and Eddie Sauter. Of that group, only Sauter continued to be a force in modern jazz since his writing was much more harmonically advanced than the others. Although drummer Cozy Cole revived Topsy in 1956 with a surprise hit record, Durham was virtually forgotten by the time he died in 1987.

This splendid documentary, in which jazz historian Loren Schoenberg, jazz professor Robert O’Meally, trombonist-educator Vincent Gardner, Durham’s daughter  Marsha, who writes under the name of Topsy (one of the inspirations for this documentary was her 2021 book Swingin’ the Blues: The Virtuosity of Eddie Durham) and sons Terrence and Eddie Jr., help to narrate, gives one a good overview of his life and career. One of the mor4e fascinating items in this documentary was the information that when he started out with his two older brothers (nearly a decade older than Eddie) in the “Durham Bros. Orchestra,” he only spoke Spanish because that was the language his parents spoke (he was born near the Mexican border in San Marcos, Texas), and because his brothers spoke English he didn’t have to learn it for a while!

Like so many jazz musicians of his time, black or white, Durham picked up things on his own and was essentially self-taught (the same was true of Artie Shaw, Wingy Manone and many others). An interesting aspect of Durham’s work that I hadn’t taken into account was that he adapted Southwestern jazz to the early evolving swing scene. The shift occurred during his stint with the Moten band, which didn’t want to swing or feature improvisation…but Durham pushed them into it, and this was what eventually became the Kansas City style: fast, hard-hitting swing tunes based heavily on the blues. This was Durham’s biggest contribution to jazz, creating fast, hard-hitting swing music with a strong core of the blues.

As the pioneer of the electric guitar—he first put an electric pick-up on a hollow-body guitar in the early 1930s—he brought what the narrators refer to as a “rural” sound into big city jazz, a essentially Texas sound. In this respect, the only other parallel he had in the jazz world was trombonist-singer Jack Teagarden (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Jack’s vastly underrated trumpet-playing brother Charlie).

Some of the Juilliard jazz students who are now playing Durham arrangements also speak in this documentary. A few were listening to Durham arrangements for Basie since they were youngsters without knowing his name, but most had to learn how to swing. This isn’t as ridiculous-sounding as it may seem. As Michael Zirpolo pointed out in his excellent biography of Bunny Berigan as well as on his website, most modern jazz doesn’t swing at all. Jazz musicians abandoned swing back in the 1950s, when Artie Shaw, Basie, Ellington, Goodman, Woody Herman and the Dorsey Brothers were still alive and playing because they considered it out-of-date. With the new harmonies coming into jazz, new ways of writing melodic lines and voicings, “swinging” was considered old-hat, thus most young jazz students simply don’t know how to do it unless they’re taught from the ground up.

For me, personally, I wasn’t all that happy about their bringing the Jimmie Lunceford band into the conversation. Although Durham did contribute a few scores to Lunceford (one of the best being Hittin’ the Bottle, which features Durham playing the first recorded electric guitar solo in jazz histor), I’ve never considered them a real jazz orchestra. They were what I refer to as a “bullshit swing band” that was more into visual presentation than good music.  (I’ve recently learned that most black jazz musicians of the time referred to Lunceford as “the world’s biggest square.”) The majority of their arrangements were cutesy and full of kitsch; moving up and down, throwing their trumpets into the air and catching them, was far more important to Lunceford and his audiences than the music. The only exceptions are the arrangements that Durham wrote for him in his time with the band, from the fall of 1935 through 1936.

Another interesting comment, from Marsha/Topsy, was that her father and his immediate family were “somewhat ignorant” of his real accomplishments because he never really took his work seriously. For him, it was just part of his job. He took pride in it and made money from it, but he never thought all that highly of it. He certainly never considered to be art because, in his day, jazz music was pop music, part of the commercial side of music. In those years, only Ellington was really thought of as an artist within the jazz-swing world.

We also learn about the Eddie Durham All-Star Big Band, formed from Texas-based musicians (some of them alums of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras), which is a full-time organization I hadn’t know about previously. They’re very, very good, and include several Basie charts not written by Durham. At Juilliard, Schoenberg, director of the Harlem Jazz Museum, dug up three unrecorded Durham charts such as Careless Love (a.k.a. Loveless Love). Schoenberg thought it was a good idea because the student band could “put their own stamp on it,” playing something that no previous swing band had played.

Later in life, for some unexplained reason, Durham switches from a standard 6-string electric guitar to a 12-string electric. I don’t know for a fact if he ever recorded with it, but he certainly did play it back in the 1960s when Phil Schaap gathered Durham Earle Warren and other old Basie-ites who had been forgotten and had them play in public once again. In an interview with Durham on the occasion of his 80th birthday, he said that he would “like to be remembered for helping to stabilize some of the things I thought was all scattered and mixed-up, and I put them together.”

A simple description of his work by a talented, modest man who did a lot in his time but whose work dated fairly quickly due to the emergence of bop and cool. Of course, Gifford’s and Harding’s work also dated quickly, and it, too was innovative. Jimmy Mundy, bless his soul, modernized his sound and so stayed relevant at least through the early 1950s when he wrote some astounding string arrangements for Charlie Parker. But it’s good to remember people like Eddie Durham because, in their time, they were important. Although one of the commentators use the word “genius,” I think that’s just a step too far (as it is with Gifford and Harding), but he certainly deserves to be remembered. This documentary goes a long way to restoring his name to the public consciousness.

My heartfelt thanks to Ben Payavis for providing me with a private Vimeo link in order to write this review. Since I no longer own a TV, I wouldn’t have been able to see this documentary any other way.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Matthew Shipp’s “New Concepts” Album

NEW CONCEPTS IN PIANO TRIO JAZZ / Primal Poem. Sea Song. The Function. Non Circle. Tone IQ. Brain System. Brain Work. Coherent System (Shipp-Bisio-Taylor Baker) / Matthew Shipp, pno; Michael Bisio, bs; Newman Taylor Baker, dm / ESP Disk’ 5085

When pianist Matthew Shipp sent me the sound files for his previous trio album, World Construct (ESP Disk’ 5059), I gave it a rave review, praising Shipp’s ability to ” coalesce the different elements” of a spontaneously improvised piece into musically coherent form, but in that album the abstract was more powerful than the overall form.

This one is entirely different.

New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz is on a par with what I consider to be the finest disc he has made with avant-garde tenor saxist Ivo Perelman, Fruition (ESP Disk’ 5070). How good is it? Shipp himself says, “This really might be the last trio CD because it really cannot get better than this.”

Clearly, this is an avant-garde jazz album that has across-the spectrum appeal. The music sounds through-composed, almost like some modern classical music, yet every bit of it was improvised on the spot. One will note, for instance, that instead of just numbering the takes as in Fruition, Shipp has given names to each of the pieces on this CD, as he did in World Construct. This, in itself, tells me that he thinks of this music as whole pieces of music and not just fragmentary experiments.

I have long felt that Shipp was headed in this direction. On all of his CDs with Perelman, for instance, it was always he who fed Ivo lines that had some musical form to them, and gradually the saxist moved more and more in his direction. Much of the music on this CD is soft and gentle; in the hands (and mind) of a lesser talent, it might sound like “ambient jazz,” one of the scourges of our time; but Shipp’s sense of harmony, and how the underlying chords play into the top line, is here at the level of Bill Evans at his most adventurous. (Listen to Evans in the three albums he made with George Russell, particularly New York, N.Y. and Jazz in the Space Age, as well as his most modern-sounding album, Loose Blues, for a good analogy.)

While Shipp takes his time creating exquisite long lines that have a superb inner logic and fascinating chord progressions, his partners, Bisio and Taylor Baker, weave their contributions in and around him in a way just as subtle, surprising and satisfying as the way Scott La Faro and Paul Motian did with Evans on Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Yet even after making such a comparison, one hears differences, for instance in The Function which sounds eerily like a lost Thelonious Monk composition (or, perhaps, Monk mixed with Herbie Nichols, the latter one of Shipp’s favorite pianists). Here, Bisio provides a walking bass line while Taylor Baker is all over the place rhythmically, which continually adds interest to the proceedings. Shipp’s single-note solo in the middle of the piece, however, sounds like no one but Matthew Shipp. Even when Shipp abandons the single-note lines and plays a succession of simple alternating chords, the listener stays riveted because you just don’t know where the music is going to go from there.

Non Circle opens with Taylor Baker playing a fairly complex pattern on drums, into which Bisio and then Shipp enter. This piece is closer in feeling to the music on World Construct, but it, too has more of an underlying structure. Here, Shipp seemed to be emulating Cecil Taylor a bit, giving us a complex structure that is missing walls and floors, but after his first chorus he grounds the music in a tonal (sometimes bitonal) manner, developing what he has just played ina more fleshed-out manner. Eventually he gets into a steady rocking rhythm while Taylor Baker continues to play complex, asymmetric figures behind him. Bisio’s bass moves subtly into double time, played so subtly that one must listen very carefully to catch everything he is doing.

Tone IQ opens quite abstractly, with sparse single notes and chords played by Shipp amidst querulous contributions from Bisio and tentative accents from the drums. Surprisingly, however, it eventually moves into a slow-moving but quite lyrical piece featuring bowed bass and Shipp delicately inserting soft notes and chords in a tonal environment. slowly but surely, however, the tonality slips into bitonal and atonal passages while the lyricism somehow manages to continue. Bisio then plays double-time passages in his instrument’s upper register while Taylor Baker envelops both bassist and pianist in cymbal washes. This is typical of the kind of high-level interplay that both captivates and challenges the listener.

There is so much going on in Brain Work, even in Shipp’s opening piano statement, that it would take a full paragraph to describe it, yet he never goes so far out that the listener cannot follow his musical train of thought. Despite the coherent conception presented here, Shipp’s lines are knotty and complex both melodically and harmonically. In Coherent System Shipp really goes out on a limb, yet always seems to be able to rein his mind (and fingers) back into an evolving thread of music. When he moves into double time, Bisio is right there with him, playing plucked single notes in the mid-high range of the bass. Taylor Baker, on the other hand, is more of an accasional commentator on this one, seldom intruding on the mind-boggling dialogue between piano and bass until about the midway point, when he contributes some military-sounding snare drum licks. Shipp eventually plays a passage that sounds somewhat Bach-like but for the shifting, ambiguous harmony. In such a way, the trio combines simplicity (and, sometimes, repeated patterns) with complexity (at times, so complex that it will take you tw or three listening to catch it all) throughout this set.

What a recording. The music on this completely improvised set is staggering and will simply blow you away; but I can just hear some jazz fans lamenting the fact that “it sounds too much like classical music.” Get over it. Jazz has been fusing to one extent or another with classical music since the 1910s. This is just a subtler, more modern manifestation of that fusion.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Silke Eberhard’s “In Other Words”

IN OTHER WORDS / Übershrungshandlung. Cordiale. Blues in Aspik. Kellerballade. Pattersson Blues (Christian Marien). Birthday Song. Fast Slow (silke Eberhard). Wait a Second. Mau Mau. Pleitereiher. Poem for Valentin (Nikolaus Neuser) / I Am Three: Nikolaus Neuser, tp; Selke Eberhard, a-sax/perc; Nikolaus Neuser, tp; Christian Marien, dm / Leo Records LR-939

This fascinating album is I Am Three’s third for Leo Records but, as it rturns out, the last one that founder and owner Leo Feigin will be connected with on the label that bears his name. Now quite old, Feigin will take, as Eberhard put it, his “well-deserved retirement.” Eberhard will assume responsibility for the sales and distribution of this album while others will henceforth take control of selecting CDs to release, creating cover art and booklets, etc.

I am, of course, very familiar with Eberhard’s work with her own trio as well as with her band, Potsa Lotsa (sometimes Potsa Lotsa XL), which consists of five to seven musicians, but up ’til now I was not familiar with I Am Three. Of course I immediately recognized this as a reference to Charles Mingus, specifically his Ballad from the Epitaph suite which is subtitled “In other words, I Am Three.” And as it turns out, the previous two Leo albums by I Am Three. After checking online, I learned that the first one was Mingus Mingus Mingus in 2016 (Leo LR 752) and the second Mingus’ Sounds of Love from 2019 (Leo LR 844), both of which were devoted to the great composer’s work (the second of these was essentially a showcase for Scottish jazz singer Maggie Nicols). On this album, however, I Am Three presents an entire program of originals although, in Silke’s words, “Mingus’ spirit still hovers over everything.”

It is symbolic of Eberhard’s generosity towards her sidemen that there are compositions here by all three members; in fact, they are more represented on this album than she is. Four pieces were written by trumpeter Nikolaus Neuser and five by drummer Christian Marien. In fact, it is Marien’s Übershrungshandlung which opens this recorded concert, a piece in odd, stiff meters over which Eberhard and Neuser improvise, sometimes in tandem, creating interesting chase choruses. To be truthful, however, this piece has much more in common with John Zorn than Mingus, but in Marien’s Cordinale there is more of a melody line, and this does somewhat resemble a Mingus piece, even to the point of suddenly slowing down the pace and stretching out the melodic line, a typical Mingus effect. In fact, the free-form improvisation, particularly by Eberhard who covers the full range of her instrument, resembles the kind of things Eric Dolphy did with Mingus, while Neuser’s trumpet channels the style of two Mingus soloists of the 1960s, Ted Curson and Johnny Coles.

Ironically, Eberhard’s Birthday Song is even further away from Mingus than Marien’s compositions, a real  post-modern piece in which she overlays two contrasting themes using variably-spaced notes in the trumpet line, which disorients the listener by blurring the meter. She also uses a fairly simple, repeated lick as her melodic cell, though of course between the constantly shifting accents and her own free-form solo (played a cappella) she takes the music in an entirely different direction than the form-oriented Mingus. The piece ends on a dissonance.

Blues in Aspik has the most Mingus-like vibe of the opening four pieces, a quirky but swinging tune that leaves a lot of solo room open while maintaining a fairly regular meter and beat. Neuser plays muted on this one, and very well too, but it is Eberhard’s solo that commands the most attention, an absolutely brilliant construction that is a complete composition in and of itself. What an excellent piece! Neuser’s Wait a Second opens with a scattered-sounding theme, and the stiff, mechanical beat that characterized the first piece returns, yet here all three participants interact in such a way that each of their contributions are of equal value and make a whole piece out of their differing fragments. Indeed, Neuser seems to be the instigator in this one, playing little licks that give form to the piece as well as taking a tip from Eberhard’s wild excursions to go out on a limb himself. Yet the two horns also find a way to interact with each other using a little seven-note riff. When Neuser plays some distorted, squealing sounds on his trumpet, Eberhard responds with some puckered clacking sounds of her own. This is pretty wild stuff!

Fast Slow opens with a quirky but melodic theme, broken up by Neuser’s congested-sounding squeals on trumpet before resuming the pace. All of the music sounds of a piece, and although there are passages that are clearly improvised it’s those in-between ones where the effects seem to be pre-planned which puts some doubt in the listener’s mind as to how much is written out. Mau Mau has a somewhat Latin vibe about it, and again the theme is brief, sounding like two fragments pushed together. Neuser’s solo on this one is really excellent as well as surprisingly lyrical and cohesive, and Eberhard responds in kind. Marien also has sa couple of rare solos on this one.

Because of the interweaving of structured moments with improvised ones, this music is difficult to put into words. It’s better to just listen to it and appreciate it as it goes by your ears. With that being said, Kellerballade is a surprisingly lovely piece with a melody that’s almost (but not quite) memorable, and within its slow 4 meter one hers the music emerge almost as a sequence of eighth notes, an illusion caused by the way Neuder and Eberhard interact. Again: is this passage improvised or written out? Without seeing the score, we have no way of knowing for sure. Both horns plays distorted sounds in the middle of Pleiteriher that makes it almost sound like electronic music—whether intentionally or not, I’m not certain.

My only complaint about In Other Words is the brevity of the disc. At just a little over 36 minutes, the could have easily out at least two or three mote tracks on the album. Perhaps they recorded other pieces that they chose not to use. I will sya, however, that the rather un-poetic-sounding Poem for Valentin, with its rumbling Sing, Sing, Sing=like drumbeats with Neuser playing in an echo chamber (Eberhard doesn’t enter until halfway through, and she seems to be just making musical commentary on what Neuser is playing( makes for an effective closer.

There is just one other thing I’d like to mention. Listening through headphones, one hears Ebeerhard’s also sax clearly in the right channel while Neuser is in the left, but here and here one also hears a sort of subliminal line also played by Eberhard in the left channel as well. These moments were surely overdubbed after the session was over, but they attest to her desire for perfection that she thought these little comments needed to be recorded. Overall, then, a fascinating release.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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The Jazz Genius Cincinnati Finally Honored

In the February 17-23, 2010 issue of City Beat, it was announced that for Black History Month the Cincinnati Public Library would have a program honoring tenor saxophonist and composer Frank Foster in addition to drummer-pianist-composer-jazz educator George Russell, both of whom were born in the Queen City. But there was one major difference between them. Foster was one of the first inductees into the Cincinnati Jazz Hall of Fame. But it took six more years for George Russell to finally be admitted.

Why?

Because, according to Those Who Run Things, “he didn’t spend the major part of his career here in Cincinnati.”

I got this answer twice, once when I contacted them directly and the second time when I asked Lee Hay, who hosted jazz and blues radio programs on WVXU, the radio station of Xavier University, to ask them for me. Sadly, neither Hay nor the jazz programs are with WVXU any longer.

Unfortunately, this is the way Cincinnati has always been, but those who move here to live and work aren’t warned of it in advance. I came here as a young music critic applying for an opening at the Cincinnati Enquirer for that position, only to be told at the interview that if they knew I was from out of state they would never have set up the appointment. This is a city that operates like a small town. Locals divide themselves into small groups depending on what High School they attended. “Outsiders” like me are only accepted if they graduated from one of the two local universities, U.C. or Xavier. I graduated from Seton Hall University in New Jersey, THE ENEMY to all U.C. basketball fans. This made me a social pariah, and I had no local contacts.

But I’m not writing this article to carp about my personal struggles, only to use them to illustrate why it took so long for George Russell to be inducted into the Cincy Jazz H.O.F. He wasn’t considered a “real” Cincinnatian because he left here as a young man to make it as a performer in The Big Apple, struggled for years on the East Coast while writing his magnum opus, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953), spent most of the 1960s working in Europe, and ended up teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music for more than 30 years. In the Queen City’s view, this makes him a non-Cincinnatian. When you become a world citizen, Cincinnati figuratively shuts its doors in your face. Good riddance, get lost, you’re not one of us.

Russell had a relatively unhappy childhood and adolescence, struggled to find a place for himself in the world, and eventually chose music because it pulled him in both emotionally and intellectually. He was the illegitimate son of a white father and a black mother who put him up for adoption, raised by a nurse and a chef on the B & O Railroad (Bessie and Joseph Russell), young George went to high school in Cincinnati while listening to big bands on the radio as well as the famed riverboat orchestra of Fate Marable, a legendary figure who had, in the late 1910s, hired the teenaged Louis Armstrong and taught him how to read music. Russell taught himself how to play drums and sat in with local bands like that of A.B. Townsend, for which he wrote his first arrangements.

During this period, Russell also heard pianist Spaulding Givens, who later changed his name to Nadi Quamar, play Debussy’s Nocturnes for him. To quote from my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond:

For the first time, Russell said, be could hear in his mind’s ear music that inhabited more than one harmonic base at a time. Debussy’s music, with its ambiguous and sometimes mixed harmonies, pulled him out of his “comfort zone” just as Debussy and Stravinsky did for Bix Beiderbecke in the 1920s. Moreover, as one who would become an excellent arranger as well as a composer, Russell got his first taste of music that was scored in an entirely different way from both the jazz and earlier classical music he had heard. Yet according to Russell—and this may very well be true—he learned the most about arranging from his high school friend Harold Gaston when they were both patients at the tuberculosis ward of the Branch Hospital in Cincinnati. Russell survived his bouts with TB; Gaston and his family, alas, did not. Yet there is no question, from reading about him from different sources, that Gaston was an exceptionally fine and well-schooled musician. He played bass, and very well—it was said that after the death of Jimmy Blanton, Duke Ellington wired him and invited him to join his orchestra, but the fatally ill Gaston had to decline his offer—thus there is no question but that Gaston had the kind of formal training in music that young Russell only acquired in spurts.[1]

When he was 19, Russell contracted tuberculosis and had to spend a year and a half in a sanitarium. Being bedridden with note much else to do, he began listening more carefully to the jazz improvisations he heard on the radio, and noticed that some musicians, such as Coleman Hawkins, improvised in a vertical fashion, moving up and down on the scale as the proceeded, while others, like Lester Young, improvised in a more linear fashion, which Russell called “horizontal” playing. A few, like bebop pioneers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, combined these two approaches. This got him thinking a bout their note choices and the scales on which their playing was based,

It took him several years to formulate these thoughts into a music theory, but he kept on playing with it in his mind as he worked as a drummer, first for Benny Carter’s band and then for Earl Hines’ before taking his first steps as a composer-arranger. His first major work was Cubana Be, Cubana Bop, a two-part opus written for and recorded by Dizzy Gillespie’s big band for RCA Victor. In 1949-50 he wrote three other arrangements that he considered seminal to his work: a very modern version of Juan Tizol’s famous Caravan for the Charlie Ventura band, a reworking of the pop tune Similau for Artie Shaw, and another original piece, A Bird in Igor’s Yard, for the short-lived big band of clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. Because they had some popularity and clout with the record companies, Caravan and Similau were released soon after being recorded, but A Bird in Igor’s Yard was considered so strange that it wasn’t released on record until 1972, by which time Russell was already teaching at the New England Conservatory Jazz Studies department.

After Lee Konitz recorded another of his seminal works, Ezz-thetic, in 1951, Russell dropped out of sight for five years. Unable to support himself writing the occasional arrangement, Russell took a job as a store clerk at Macy’s on Fifth Avenue in New York just to keep himself going, yet it was during this period that he finally formulated his thoughts on music and improvising by using the Lydian mode rather than a conventional Western scale as his basis. The one big difference is that the Lydian scale replaces the usual half-step from the third to the fourth note with a full step. In the C scale, then, one plays not F but F#. Some musicians bristled at this and considered it unnatural, but it shouldn’t have been because, essentially, a sharped fourth is really the same in one’s ear as a flatted fifth—the seminal note of most bebop improvisers, who used that note frequently in their improvisations. (Trad jazz musician Eddie Condon, a member of the old school which only used flatted thirds—the so-called “blue” note—once quipped, “We don’t flat our fifths. We drink them.”)

Russell eventually reworked and refined his theory, to which he gave the grandiloquent title The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, by 1958. Putting it as simply as possible, Wikipedia describes it thus:

Russell builds a prototype chromatic scale starting on the Lydian Tonic by stacking fifths, skipping the interval between the seventh and eighth tones, and placing the skipped tone at the end for having the lowest level of tonal gravity. Using C as the Lydian Tonic yields the following 12-note scale with enharmonic respellings: C, G, D, A, E, B, F♯, G♯, E♭ (D♯), B♭ (A♯), F (E♯), D♭ (C♯). Thus the Lydian Chromatic Scale and all its derivatives contain only Pythagorean intervals.

Russell posited that tonal gravity emanates from the first seven tones of the Lydian mode. As the player ventures further from the Lydian tonic however (and further up the circle of fifths), the tonal gravity shifts. For example, if notes further up the circle of fifths (e.g. ♯2/♭3) are used, the tonal gravity is probably shifting.[2]

If you, as a lay reader, find this confusing, don’t feel badly. It took quite a few professional musicians years, even decades, to digest and assimilate this into their playing, and in fact there are still some (but not many) professional jazz musicians who consider the Lydian Chromatic Concept somewhat restricting because it is a somewhat esoteric formula, but the number dropped significantly decade by decade as free jazz and “new jazz” became the norm rather than the exception.

In the beginning, it was only a handful of jazz musicians who “got it.” The least well-known of them nowadays was alto saxist Hal McKusick, the first to record more than one Russell composition on an RCA Victor album in 1956. This album was approved by Jack Lewis, hired by RCA as their jazz A&R man, who really enjoyed progressive jazz. McCusick included some non-Russell compositions on the album, but the bulk of them were written by George: The Day John Brown Was Hanged, Lydian Lullaby, Ezz-thetic, Jack’s Blues, Ye Hypocrite Ye Beelzebub, Miss Clara and Livingstone, I Presume. Lewis liked them so much that he offered Russell the chance to make his own album, originally issues as “The Jazz Workshop.” This was the coming-out party for Bill Evans, to whom Concerto for Billy the Kid was written, along with Round Johnny Rondo, Knights of the Steamtable, Fellow Delegates, Witch Hunt, The Sad Sergeant and The Ballad of Hix Blewitt. Musicians loved these albums but they didn’t sell well. Lewis, still in control at the time, signed Charles Mingus next to record his now-classic album Tijuana Moods, but this time RCA put their foot down. They fired Lewis and sat on the Mingus tapes for five years, only issuing the album after Mingus had made albums for Columbia and Atlantic Records.

Yet Russell’s RCA album introduced one of the most influential pianists of the 20th century, Bill Evans, to the world. Aside from Evans and McKusick, the musicians who adopted the Lydian Chromatic Concept in whole or part included John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Miles Davis, whose groundbreaking album Kind of Blue featured entirely modal music—not to mention Evans himself as a member of his current group. The late jazz educator David Baker taught the Lydian Chromatic Concept in his classes at Indiana University and wore out numerous LP copies of Kind of Blue, which he considered THE seminal album of modern jazz, and Miles Osland, who still teaches jazz at the University of Kentucky as Director of Jazz Studies, wrote to me that

Early on in my jazz education (Jazz Theory courses in the ’80’s with the great Ladd McIntosh), I was exposed to the Lydian Chromatic concept. Basically, I have utilized those concepts and integrated them into my own “Linear and Vertical Concepts for the Contemporary Saxophonist” – a two volume book published by Dorn Publications.[3]

Here are some other testimonials from prominent musicians:

When you get a whole band to play like that, it’s some of the most beautiful music you can have in the world. If you could sit down and write stuff like that out…well, some people do, like George Russell. He wrote stuff that was incredible.
—Rashied Ali, drummer, January 2003

The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I’m considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I’ve been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method–we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry.
                                                                          —Toru Takemitsu, Swing Journal interview, Tokyo

Surpasses any musical knowledge I’ve been exposed to.
                                                                        —Ornette Coleman[4]

And here is an actual postcard from Eric Dolphy to Russell:

Ironically, many of the members of the Cincinnati Jazz Hall of Fame were influenced directly or indirectly by Russell and/or Bill Evans, one of his prize pupils. Russell changed the sound of jazz in the late 20th and early 21st centuries forever. His influence is all-pervasive and inescapable. In his lifetime Russell was awarded the 1990 American Jazz Masters Award by the National Endowment for the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and numerous European jazz awards.

Sadly, the CJHoF wasn’t the only organization to ignore Russell. When Russell made a bid to have his latest composition performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Program in the early 1990s, director Wynton Marsalis refused on the grounds that the music was fusion, and he hated fusion. Although I agree with Marsalis on the corrupting influence of fusion on jazz—as Roy Eldridge put it, “The jazz beat goes somewhere…the rock beat stays somewhere”—the fact that George Russell was a jazz genius automatically demanded that his music get a hearing.

Happily, someone at the CJHoF finally woke up and realized that Russell was worth including. I have a hunch that some of the former inductees who admired Russell and learned from his theories finally convinced them to put him in.

It was about time…and the Lydian Concept.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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[1] From Baroque to Bop and Beyond by Lynn René Bayley, 2016 p. 267.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_Tonal_Organization

[3] Miles Osland, email to the author, January 15, 2014.

[4] Quotes taken from https://www.georgerussell.com/lc.html

Nancy Van de Vate, the Neglected Composer

Although you can look her up on Wikipedia and get a brief overview of her remarkable life and career, and although some of her pieces are available for free streaming on YouTube, the late Nancy Van de Vate is pretty much a non-entity in not only American but international concert halls but for the rare performance of one of her works by the forces of some conservatory or music college, yet this remarkable dynamo not only composed a large number of works in every genre except the symphony but was also one of the leading lights of fairness for women in both musical academia and the acceptance of their works on the same level as those of male composers.

Google her name and you’ll find some of the nastiest and least appreciative things said about her music. On “Hey! It’s the Nancy Van de Vate Thread!” from 2009, you’ll see such thoughtful insights on her deeply felt and brilliantly conceived music as

snyprrr: I imagine she’s drearier than Penderecki & Pettersson’s love child. I’ve only heard awfully bleak things about her music to the point of wondering now how depressing it could be.

karlhenning: The one piece of hers I have heard did not invite me to seek out more.

jowcol: The only one I recall off the bat is her “Chernobyl” which was paired with some work by Penderecki.  Similar sound world– not so dense, but it struck me as being appropriate to the subject.  It struck me as fairly good, but I didn’t feel the need to try more.

snyprrr: come on- we can come up with a better title TOGETHER! How does one say her name? Vate’s Crate? Vate’s Batty Cave? Vate’s Chat? Vate’s Bait?

I refuse to just …. ahhhhh…. something…. anything but name rank and serial number…

Born Nancy Jean Hayes into a middle class family in Plainfield, New Jersey on December 1930 (the 30th, in fact…by rights she was almost a January baby), Nancy took to music early and easily. One of her high school classmates was jazz pianist Bill Evans, who she remembered as a wonderful musician who everyone admired despite his being rather socially aloof. She studied piano on a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music and theory at Wellesley College, but her marriage to Dwight van de Vate, who became a philosophy professor at various universities, made her postpone some of her education to be a housewife.

In the beginning, this was fine by Nancy. With her husband making money as a teacher, he gave her the freedom to continue her music education and get her degree, although she did provide him with children which she also had to raise in addition to keeping house. (Funny that male composers never have these obstacles to their careers, huh?) She began writing music around 1956, although, being a woman and one without a name or reputation, she couldn’t get her works performed or recorded. As her husband moved around in his jobs at various universities, Nancy naturally had to move with him (and the kids), earning her master’s degree at the University of Mississippi and her doctorate at Florida State University. While at Mississippi, they experienced the Medgar Evers incident first hand when the young black student and civil rights activist was murdered at his home in Jackson, Mississippi in June 1963. It made an indelible impression on them, turning both Dwight and Nancy into civil rights activists for life.

Yet as time went on, the marriage soured. Dwight began physically and verbally abusing Nancy at various times for what seemed to be unprovoked incidents, and eventually he became annoyed by her trying to get academic positions in music departments that equaled his in prestige. When one university continually refused to consider her for a teaching position, claiming they had no openings but every year hiring a man for positions, she sued them for sexual discrimination—this at a time when such lawsuits were exceedingly rare because women were supposed to just shut up and take it without complaint. Indeed, her case was so unusual that it hit the front page of newspapers; this in itself embarrassed Dwight and made him resent her all the more. To make a long story short, Nancy eventually had enough by 1976. After 24 years of marriage, she divorced him and left to pursue her own career.

It’s difficult for us today to realize just how daring, and scary, such a move was for a woman in the 1970s. After all, didn’t we have feminism by then? Yes and no, It existed, but all feminists were branded as antagonistic lesbians by the dominant male society. A woman’s place was in the home, cleaning, cooking and raising children, even if she was a brilliant composer. Nancy was the first to break the mold and, furthermore, she founded the League of Women Composers in 1975 and served as its chairperson until 1982 (by which time the word “International” was added to its title).

Shortly before she divorced Dwight, Nancy and the children moved to Hawaii for a year, where she was first exposed to the gamelan and music of the Pacific islanders. Eventually she taught at the University of Hawaii. Although her earliest influences as a composer were Brahms and Bartók, she kept herself open to other influences as well. From the late 1960s through the ‘70s, she attended seminars on electronic music and the use of pre-taped sounds which also influenced some of her later work, such as the theater piece A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum. Eventually. she was also influenced by Stravinsky, Penderecki and Ligeti, yet she always retained a lyrical element in much of her music. All of these influences gave her work a much more varied quality than that of other composers, even other women composers. She was one of those very rare musicians who had more than one compositional “voice,” yet in a way this also held her back. With so many varied influences, she was never able to “brand” herself musically. In the course of one year, for instance, she was able to turn out a Ligeti-like piece alongside one with a Brahmsian feeling and yet another with Pacific Island sounds. Such diversity in her style delighted those who could appreciate these differing moods, but this is one reason why her output was often neglected. Performers don’t often understand composers who are as diverse as she was.

Of course, I am condensing a great deal of Van de Vate’s life and career in order to give the reader an overview while saving space. For those who discover her music and would like to know more about her life and career, I strongly recommend Journeys Through the Life and Music of Nancy Van de Vate by Laurdella Foulkes-Levy and Burt J. Levy (Scarecrow Press, 2005) for the full picture of the life and career of this amazing woman.

In the early 1980s she met and married Clyde Smith, a Navy officer whose open and rather jolly personality complemented hers perfectly. Although Clyde’s musical taste prior to meeting Nancy was primarily Country and Western music, he became an astonishingly apt pupil who came to appreciate and understand the much more complex music his new wife was writing. Now living in Europe, Van de Vate began recording some of her works using the money she made from teaching plus a few grants she was able to win along with some of Clyde’s money, mostly in Poland where she formed a close working relationship with the excellent conductor Szymon Kawalla. Even after she and Clyde moved permanently to Vienna, where she eventually started her own record label, Vienna Modern Masters, she continued to rely on Kawalla as much as she could because he was so passionate about her music and brought out its feeling with great clarity.

True to her mission to promote as many modern composers as she could whose work was not being performed anywhere, Nancy did not limit Vienna Modern Masters to her own work. She started a series of CDs entitled Music From Six Continents and recorded a large number of pieces by others (this series eventually encompassed 30 volumes). She also occasionally devoted entire CDs to composers whose work she admired, such as Israeli composer Tsippi Fleischer. In general, her taste was excellent, and Clyde Smith’s long experience as a Naval officer made him the perfect business partner for her and her label. Nancy was devastated by Clyde’s death in the late 1990s, but doggedly continued running VMM entirely on her own.

It was during this period, the early 2000s, that I first learned of Van de Vate in a book on women composers. Looking her up online, I ran across the Vienna Modern Masters website on which she sold her recordings (it’s no longer up), clicked on “Contact,” and sent her an enthusiastic email. To my amazement, she wrote back, and this was the beginning of a nice long-distance friendship that ended abruptly in 2008 because I supported John McCain for president instead of Barack Obama. Of course, I had no idea at the time about her experience in Mississippi or her having marched in civil rights protests, although I always supported the full integration of black Americans and would certainly have supported a black candidate whose background was more politically substantial than Obama’s. But the point is that Van de Vate liked me and even called me on the phone twice all the way from Vienna, which really impressed me.

One of her complaints was that American composition pupils who went to study with her in Vienna often disrespected her. Having no idea of her background, compositions or who she was, they treated her brusquely, as if what she had to teach them was of little or no value. That enraged me as much as it did her, but even at that late stage her music was virtually unknown in the United States. Many of the performances that did take place were initiated by her close friend, soprano Michelle Vought, and that was the other bone of contention between us. Although I respected Vought for her excellent musicianship and particularly for her unflagging support of Nancy’s music, I just didn’t like her singing voice. She had, to my ears, an unpleasant timbre, and her diction was very poor, but because they were so close Van de Vate used her on most of her recordings that had a soprano part in the music.

I did, however, re-contact her by email in 2022 after I finished my book, Opera as Drama II, in which I included her opera All Quiet on the Western Front as an excellent modern example of drama through music, and received a quick reply from her than she was very pleased and would be writing more later. That second email never arrived, however, since she was gravely ill and, like her late husband Clyde, did not burden others with her personal problems. Although she was in her nineties, I was still shocked when she died in July 2023 at the age of 92. She always seemed to me to be the Energizer Bunny of composers, someone whose vitality and resoluteness were so strong that I was certain she would live to be 99!

But the saddest thing about her life is her continuing to be ignored by classical performers and even by record labels. Naxos has an extensive series of CDs by American composers, yet nowhere in that series is a single PIECE, let alone a complete CD, by Van de Vate. She is the composer who doesn’t exist as far as the world is concerned, and that is a grave injustice. Even in as early a piece as the Variations for Chamber Orchestra (1958), there are things that grab the listener’s attention, not least of which are the tempo changes ad the way the theme changes. In Van de Vate’s keen mind, she was able to incorporate the theme statement and the first two variations into a continuous section by itself. The third and fourth themes then form the second part of the work, with Variation V comprising the larger part of the third section. The Journeys book I cited above gives some excellent score examples of just how complex this music is, including numerous shifts back and forth between 6/8 and 5/8 even in the theme statement:

As the book points out, triads in E—but not E major, rather E in the Aeolian mode—accompany the theme with subtle chromatic shifts. This then blurs the modal boundary at the end of the theme:

By the time Van de Vate reaches the fourth and fifth variations, however, the changes in the theme are no longer subtle but completely transform it, the way a great jazz improviser might: Here are the beginnings of the last two variations:

I rush to point out, however, that despite this and later complex passages in her music, Van de Vate was never a purely cerebral composer. On the contrary, she often berated “academic composers” for writing complexity for complexity’s sake. For her, the music had to be expressive no matter what its form. Without human emotion, she felt, writing music was nothing more than a technical exercise. Even when pondering her next step in a composition, she always went with what she felt was more expressive rather than what seemed more logical. This is one reason why her music is so great; it always spring first from within her innermost feelings.

Thus, in such a later, more complex and Ligeti-influenced piece as Distant Worlds (1985), she went with what moved her most, not what seemed the most logical or most complex. It was her feelings, not just her mind, which led the exploding tone clusters of the orchestra to morph into an expressive passage played by the solo violin. The Journeys book details this sort of thing in such technical terms that only someone with a doctorate in music could really understand what on earth they’re talking about, i.e.:

this (016) trichord sounds, melodically and harmonically, a pitch aggregate that she varies in three prominent patterns: 1) m2 + P4 (F#-G-C); 2) its inversion, P4 + m2 (G-C-C#); and 3) A4 + m2 (G-C#-D). In addition, we might remember the importance of the “x” motive in both Adagio for Orchestra and Concertpiece. Here it appears in measure 8 in the prime form (Q-C-B), followed by variants in measure 10 (C-B-C-Eb) and measure 11 (Bb-A-C).

If you can follow this convoluted description, congratulations. You are a True Academic. But I don’t give a rat’s behind what tertiary anything or m2 factors there are in the music. It’s just plain interesting in and of its own just by looking at excerpts from the score:

And as I’ve said, Van de Vate never really abandoned tonality even when she tweaked it. Returning to an essentially tonal base in her 1997 opera All Quiet on the Western Front, she makes her effects not through harmonic complexity but through her manipulation of the lyric line, breaking it up, as she did almost 40 years earlier, via constantly shifting meters. Here, however, she also adds passages which are outside the tonal center (the fourth bar in the example below) as well as shifting volume levels and accents, crescendos, diminuendos and, in the 11th bar of this example, the written instruction to sing “almost without vibrato” for dramatic effect:

In these various ways, Van de Vate was able to create her own sound-world, one that sometimes resembled the composers who influenced her without ever copying them. Her music was always interesting and often moving. Nothing she wrote was ever perfunctory.

The bad news is that Vienna Modern Masters, as a physical CD label, no longer seems to exist. The good news is that it has apparently morphed into Vienna Masterworks, and from what I can tell, most if not all the recordings of her music are available on YouTube for free streaming. I highly recommend that you listen to the following works, listed here out of chronological order just so you can gauge how wonderful and highly diverse her music was:

Distant Worlds (1985)

Gema Jawa

Chernobyl

Concertpiece for Cello & Small Orchestra (1978)

All Quiet on the Western Front

Dark Nebulae

Four Somber Songs

In the Shadow of the Glen

Journeys

Katyń

Krakow Concerto

Music for Viola, Percussion & Piano

A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum

Piano Concerto

Pura Besakim

Songs for Four Parts of the Night

Trio for Horn, Violin & Piano

Variations for Chamber Orchestra (1958)

Viola Concerto

Voices of Women

Where the Cross is Made

Happy listening, and I do hope that you appreciate her music as much as I do!

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Ehnes and Davis Play Stravinsky

STRAVINSKY: Violin Concerto.* Scherzo à la russe. Orchestral Suites Nos. 1 & 2. Apollon musagète / *James Ehnes, vln; BBC Philharmonic Orch; Sir Andrew Davis, cond / Chandos CHSA 5340

This isone of those “sleeper” discs in the sense that it is being pushed because star British violinist James Ehnes is the soloist in Stravinsky’s Violin concerto whereas the real star of this show is conductor Andrew Davis, the star pieces being the fairly rare jazz band version of the Scherzo à la russe and the still somewhat uncommon Orchestral Suites Nos. 1 & 2.

The biggest drawback to these orchestral pieces is that Davis, like so many British conductors (Simon Rattle among them), like to lay their Stravinsky at slower tempi than those he wrote them in. This isn’t too much of a problem in Apollon musagète or the Violin Concerto, but some of the dance pieces in the orchestral suites, particularly the “Polka” ad “Galop” in Suite No. 2, aren’t  fast enough. Otherwise, however, the pacing is good and Davis scores over many of his competitors by bringing out details that often pass unnoticed in faster recordings by other conductors. This is especially true of Apollon musagète but also of the Violin Concerto.

Although I prefer Gil Shaham’s insouciant way with this concerto, Ehnes is really quite good. The difference is in the sound profile of the recording. Shaham’s recording is mic’d in a forward manner, with every detail being caught as sharp as a razor blade, while Chandos is one of those labels (and unfortunately they are many) that just loves to drown its orchestras and soloists in a sea of reverb. If you buy this album as a download, however, run it through your audio editor and speed it up by just 1%. This will remove some of the unwanted ambiance around the orchestra and soloist and give you a much more sharply-etched recording.

Prior to getting this album for review, I was unaware that the Scherezo à la russe was originally composed in 1943 for Paul Whiteman’s radio orchestra in a jazz band version. Had I known that, I would surely have included it in my book, From Baroque to Bop and Beyond, An Extended and Detailed History of the Interaction Between Jazz and Classical Music. By that time, however, Whiteman was no longer leading the corny-sounding band that played in the 1920s and ‘30s (minus a few great jazz soloists who enhanced his elephantine sound), but rather a surprisingly sleek, well-groomed band of professionals who could, and did, play a wide variety of styles. Unfortunately, no recording of the Whiteman band playing this piece seems to exist; I’d be interested in hearing it if it did.

Since most of this music is quite familiar to most of my readers I’ll bypass a detailed description of it. It’s clearly a good disc to have around since it combines several Stravinsky pieces that, with the exception of the violin concerto, really don’t get recorded all that often, and Davis avoids the heavy-handedness of many other conductors.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Lyatoshynsky’s Symphonies Reissued

LYATOSHYNSKY: Symphonies Nos. 1-5. Symphonic Ballade, “Grazhyna.” / Ukrainian State Symphony Orch.; Theodore Kuchar, cond / Naxos 8.503303, 3-CD set

I’m embarrassed to say that I not only missed these recordings when they were first issued in the early 1990s (although, at that time, I was broke and only working part time for the National Federation of the Blind) but also when this boxed set was released in late 2022, and I don’t know how I missed it since I always look for recordings by Theodore Kuchar. He likes to kid people that he’s just a run-of-the-mill conductor, but not only this set but several other recordings which I’ve praised glowingly over the past 15 or so years attest to his first-rate qualities. Kuchar usually gets well under the surface of the music he is conducting, and these semi-rarities by Boris Lyatoshynsky (1895-1968), a noted Ukrainian composer little known outside his native country, are no exception.

The composer is described online as having written symphonies in the manner of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. While this is true to a point—his early symphonies, in particular, are even more tonal than the first three symphonies of Prokofiev—it is not the whole story. Even in his first symphony, written in 1919, uses a surprising amount of rising chromatic harmony and other dissonances that put it more in line with Scriabin than Rachmaninoff.

Theodore Kuchar contacted me via email and told me that Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), who was also a Ukrainian composer—born in Kiev, director of the Kiev Conservatory, and Lyatoshynsky’s principal teacher—wrote a work that strongly influenced his pupil, the Symphony No. 3, Op. 42, “Ilya Muromets” (1911). I listened to that symphony, in an excellent recording by JoAn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and it does indeed have several features in common with Lyatoshynsky, particularly the use of rising chromatics, so I can hear the influence, but Lyatoshynsky took the harmonic daring to more extensive levels and pushed them both musically and emotionally in a tighter, more dramatic and less lyrical manner that is closer to Scriabin (who had died only a few years before his first symphony) than to Glière’s work. The reason for this difference, however, is that although Glière was Ukrainian, he was educated in Russia, thus his music and artistic sensibilities were more Russian, whereas Lyatoshynsky was much more deeply embedded in Ukrainian culture and its folk music.

Indeed, the opening of the first movement has a restless, unsettled feeling about its opening that Glière doesn’t even hint at, and even when Lyatoshynsky “settles” the tonality there are frequent subtle but noticeable changes of key. And Kuchar handles these masterfully, weaving them into the fabric of the performance as if they were no big deal. Of course, modern ears are now used to much more than this, but in 1919 this piece must have evoked a furor. The liner notes point out that although the music does indeed resemble Scriabin, Lyatoshynsky clearly had his own way of dealing with themes and their variants which, at that time, was actually closer to the Romantic model than Scriabin’s works. Some of the transitions between sections sound a little abrupt, but this seems to have been intentional; Lyatoshynsky was apparently “distressed by this period in history,” thus this symphony is “an artistic description… mostly inspired by the life-confirming tragedy of the times” despite its “refined polyphonic structure.” I simply found the music arresting, particularly in the way Kuchar conducts it, emphasizing its rough edges while simultaneously creating a “long line” that one can follow with ease. The movement ends with a thrilling coda played in double time by the flutes and brass which eventually slows back down for an appropriately “serious” conclusion on an A major chord.

The slow second movement starts out as one might expect, but even here things become turbulent, although not as unsettling in harmony, within a short period of time. Things settle down enough for a slow, moody bassoon solo in its low register, followed by more chromatic movement in the strings and winds, playing together and separately. Then, suddenly, we are back into upward chromatic movement, this time with the cymbals crashing and the flutes screaming in their upper register. Interestingly, the third and final movement opens up on a much more positive note with triumphant-sounding trumpets, and although there are clearly several quick harmonic shifts in this movement (as well as chromaticism), the overall vibe seems more positive, possible suggesting rather than celebrating a possible end to their struggles. A couple of minutes in, Lyatoshynsky does seem to be channeling Tchaikovsky with a soaring string melody, but with a fanfare of horns and trumpets the music and mood shift into something faster, almost manic for a few bars. When the tempo increases again, Lyatoshynsky ramps up the tension by using more chromatic movement and pitting one section against the other, sometimes in contrasting meters.

Following the symphony, we jump ahead 36 years to his 1955 “symphonic ballade” Grazhyna, written to honor the centennial of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’ death. This piece inhabits a subtler, more sophisticated sound-world; Lyatoshynsky’s sonic “fingerprint” is still recognizable but here the overt brashness of his younger days is moderated by more pastel orchestral colors and less clashes of primary colors. Harmonically, however, it is much more conservative than much other Ukrainian and Russian music of the time (to say nothing of such Polish-born composers as Weinberg, Bacewicz or young Penderecki). Yet there are some nice surprises in store for the listener, such as the sudden arrival of a peppy but somewhat galumphing theme initially played by basses and cellos before rising up to the high winds and brass. I’ve very rarely encountered a composer who grew and changed styles in wuch a manner; normally, composers who evolved from the 1910s into the 1950s and ‘60s overhauled their earlier approach entirely, adopting newer and often more radical methods of writing. Lyatoshynsky, however, remained true to his earlier self without becoming too radical in approach. The composer of the first symphony is still clearly recognizable in Grazhyna. Midway through this piece, he even heightens tension via upward-rising key changes although some of them are subtler and better-integrated into the score than the jumpy chromatic passages in the first symphony. And yes, there is still a certain kinship here (musically, not in terms of nationality) to Scriabin.

Symphony No. 2, written in 1935-36, needed to take a more covert approach to Ukrainian resistance. By this time, Stalin had already invaded the Ukraine and purged much of its population; at the same time, as part of th Soviet Union, the Ukraine had to toe the Communist Party line in terms of musical conservatism (Stain called it “Socialist Realism.”) Lystoshynsky failed co compromise with the new directives; this new symphony still had too much “strange” harmonic movement in it for them, and I would go so far as to say that the brash themes in the first movement were a form of musical rebellion against Stalin’s purges. As the liner notes indicate, this symphony is “filled with deep pain and flashes of protest, yet, equally clearly, showing the composer’s love of life and his ideal of artistic and ethical responsibility towards his own people.” This is the kind of “social justice through music” that I like and admire because it is abstract and can be applied to almost any struggle that mankind encounters at any stage in history. Since it is not tied to a specific event, it is timeless, and that should be the goal of all music.

Although there is some chromaticism in this symphony, Lyatoshynsky has clearly moved away from the model of Scriabin…perhaps, in part, due to his underlying hatred of what the Rossuain Soviets did to his country. Ukraine was for centuries a part of Russia; their peoples are cousins; yet it was often a strained relationship. In the second movement, attention is drawn to a snaky, repeated melodic line played by the bassoon (this seems to have been a trademark of Lyatoshynsky’s music) under an orchestral episode that grows more and more turbulent.

As Kuchar stated in the liner notes:

It is difficult to find a Ukrainian musician who is not familiar with Lyatoshynsky’s Third Symphony, written in 1951 and revised in 1954, a work that represents a typical illustration of continued Party criticism. The symphony, which was first performed in 1951 at the Congress of Ukrainian Composers in Kiev, is the most frequently performed and recorded of the composer’s five symphonies. The first performance caused a great sensation, but the Soviet censors still forced the composer to rewrite the last movement, changing the original concept and removing the epigraph “Peace will defeat war”, if he hoped to see it performed again. After a long period of indecision, the composer offered a revised version, but only after a further revision did the Party permit a performance. In its new form the symphony was performed in Leningrad in 1955 by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Evgeny Mravinsky, and subsequently in Moscow, Kiev and other cities throughout the Soviet Union. Although the symphony was accepted, after revision, the four years separating the two versions, the second of which is heard in this recording, proved very damaging to Lyatoshynsky.

I wondered why Kuchar recorded the revised version of the last movement rather than the superior first version. The answer, as it turns out, is more logical than you may think. Maestro Kuchar explained to me that, as it turns out, this specific disc containing the Second and Third Symphonies was not only the first one he Kuchar made of Lyatoshynsky’s music but in fact his debut recording for the Marco Polo label owned by Klaus Heymann, which later morphed into Naxos. Kuchar knew about the different endings but, after making inquiries, discovered that the only edition currently available had the revised ending, and time was of the essence in getting the record made. In such ways commerce affects art, and I surely can’t argue with Kuchar’s decision to go ahead with the Third Symphony using the score they had available. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend that you also listen to the recording of this symphony with the original ending as recorded by Kyrill Karabits and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on Chandos CHSA 5233. And here is but one example of why I prefer Kuchar as a conductor in most of the music he has recorded. Despite the more interesting last movement, which I will gladly concede, Karabits’ performance of this work, while clearly good in terms of tempo and forward drive, just misses the visceral impact that Kuchar brings to the table. Even the inner voices are not only clearer but have more “bite” in Kuchar’s performance. But of course we must also listen to Karabits to hear the original last movement.

The musical style and language used in this symphony is clearly in line with the first two but, as in the case of Grazhyna, there is a better integration of both themes and rhythm in a less episodic whole. Lyatoshynsky here combines more melodic lines, albeit sad ones in the minor, with his harmonic daring, although I personally felt that even in the first movement he was at least trying to tone down his harmonic clashes to some extent. Nonetheless. the music is deeply moving, and after that sad theme the tempo jumps up a couple of notches as edgier and more dissonant themes introduce themselves. By now, we are familiar with Lyatoshynsky’s style of orchestration, pitting low and high instruments against one another to create timbral as well as musical tension, but it is still very effective music. Like its predecessors, it makes a huge emotional impact, particularly at a point past the middle of the movement where all hell breaks loose. Obviously, the new Khruschev regime was trying to be a shade less repressive than Iron Joe’s in allowing this symphony to be performed, but Soviet sensibilities were still rather conservative and, no matter how you look at it, this symphony was anything but.

With that being said, my own feeling is that the politics surrounding this symphony and its initial rejected by the Soviet censors is what makes it stand out in the hearts and minds of Ukrainian musicians. It’s not really that different from its predecessors despite the fact that Kuchar pulls out all the stops and makes it sound almost as emotionally overwhelming as Mahler, but a great symphony it most certainly is. The one movement I felt was rather different in tone and feeling from its predecessors was the second, slow one. Here, Lyatoshynsky is subtler and more mysterious in his choice of themes and their presentation. The orchestral colors are more muted, the overall effect being more haunting than dolorous. Of course, this in itself may have been his way of compromising with the Culture Bureau’s demands. Prokofiev did similar things towards the end of his life, leaving his close friend Mstislav Rostropovich to “correct” things after he was gone and present his “real” movements in their stead, but we only have one version each of the first three movements. But I’m not saying that I don’t like this second movement. On the contrary, it’s remarkable and deeply moving, but its tone is different from its predecessors despite a similar outburst of very dramatic music in the middle section. Here, the composer uses a repeated four-note motif played by the horns, and the top line of the music reaches a climax that sounds as if the composer’s spirit has been broken and he is giving in to pressures beyond his control. When he returns to a lyrical melody, it is more like the earlier symphonies and less mysterious.

Th scherzo is marked “Allegro feroce,” and Lyatoshynsky means it. This is a truly grotesque piece that would have made Berlioz proud. One can almost imagine hopped-up witches or demons swirling around his feverish head as he wrote it, albeit with some equally strange quiet moments, as if he had temporarily found refuge before they again caught up with him. Alternating meters make their way into the contrasting themes, and here his rhythm is subtler, too, pitting opposing metric feels against one another as the music continues. A strange waltz played by flutes and piccolos also makes an appearance before the tempo and tension are ramped up again for the demons to chase him to hell and back.

Turning to the Karabits recording, we hear the original last movement, titled “Allegro risoluto ma non troppo mosso – Poco meno mosso, ma sempre allegro – Maestoso assai – Più tranquillo ma sempre allegro – Poco meno mosso, marciale assai – Maestoso – Trionfante” and running 10 ½ minutes. This opens with trumpets playing a quirky theme in 3/4 time, into which flutes and trombones make their entrance. The violas play a repeated motif against high winds, then we get another of Lyatoshynsky’s strange melodic interludes. Rumbling tympani underscore the orchestral crescendo, which leads to a rhythmic passage before the composer moves things around like chess men on a board, creating a mosaic of sound. The snare drum underscores some passages in a manner similar to the Shostakovich Seventh, but no one would ever confuse Lyatoshynsky for Shostakovich or vice-versa; they had entirely personal ways of constructing their material. Oddly, I felt that some of the brass passages echoed the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, whether intentional or not. Chandos’ engineers, who tend to prefer what I feel is an overly-roomy sound with lots of reverb, tend to underline the visceral impact of this music, but you can clearly use your imagination while listening. This original last movement more the title “Peace Will Defeat War,” but this was removed in the revision.

The revised fourth movement, titled “Allegro risoluto” and running a little over 11 minutes, also opens with trumpets, but here playing a somewhat more conventional tune in 4/4 that sounds much more enthusiastic and less quirky. Indeed, most of the opening section of the revised fourth movement is played ina peppy and quite steady 4, and the music is clearly more conventional harmonically. All is fun and vodka at this musical party; even the slow themes are in the major and sound more optimistic. It’s still a good piece of music, but it’s clearly not as dramatic either musically or emotionally. Yes, there are some tempo changes, but they’re not as frequent and, when he does change tempo, he stays in the new one for quite some time, projecting more happy, valedictorian music. Yet it is still recognizable as having Lyatoshynsky’s musical fingerprint. It’s just not as edgy or challenging as the original. Considering that the third CD in this series runs only 57 minutes, Kuchar could clearly have put the original last movement onto that disc (or, perhaps better, put the original last movement on CD 2 and the revised version at the beginning of CD 3). Considering that Ukraine officially broke off from Russia/the Soviet Union in 1991, around the time that Boris Yeltsin became the first President of Russia, it should have been possible to record the original fourth movement at these 1993-94 sessions.

Moving on to the Fourth Symphony, this was written in 1963, one year before Leonid Breshnev and Alexei Kosygin, working in tandem as Chief Secretary and Premier of the Soviet Union, took over from Khruschev who in that year reinstated the old-school musical dictates of the Stalin era. To a certain extent this didn’t interfere too much with Lyatoshynsky’s creative process. He had always been essentially tonal despite his penchant for Scriabin-like rising chromatics and other harmonic dissonances along with his whirlpool-like concept of scoring, Even so, the bitonal brass opening of this symphony was something more modern than anything he had previous attempted. Although in line with the Third Symphony, the Fourth was clearly a step forward stylistically, reaching for a different form of expression. Much of the first movement is moody, emphasizing low winds and strings, and only occasionally resolves itself harmonically. Yet being his own man, Lyatoshynsky adapted these more modern composition techniques to his style; he wasn’t trying to emulate Ligeti or Penderecki. In Kuchar’s skilled hands, both the letter and the spirit of the music shoot out of one’s speakers like jagged blades. Even when one section of the orchestra seems to be reaching for tonality, another section (brass or winds) enters into their discourse with fierce interjections using rootless chords and conflicting tonalities. The result is that harmonic dissonance continues unabated in this opening movement, but just taking the music on its own terms shows a sense of structure that is closer related to Stravinsky than Ligeti or Penderecki—and this at the time when Stravinsky himself was deeply immersed in his last period, which was essentially the 12-tone system of Schoenberg adapted to his own style.

Towards the end of the first movement, the harmony finally resolves itself, only to be taken into quiet, mysterious realms with soft string tremolos and forlorn-sounding winds (English horn and clarinet, it sounds like). The second movement, following the first without pause, opens in much the same manner with low basses and winds. The liner notes tell us that this movement leans on Ukrainian folk tunes, but to my non-Ukrainian-trained ears it still sounds dissonant and unsettled. A solemn chorale theme is passed around the orchestra, yet there are still some surprises, such as the sudden emergence of high percussion (chimes etc.) with harp, playing an almost celestial-sounding interlude into which strings and winds enter as well, thus even Lyatoshynsky’s orchestral palette was expanded in this symphony. Considering its uncompromising modernity, I was surprised to learn that this piece received very positive reviews from music critics, who compared it favorably to Shostakovich, Bartók, Honegger and Szymanowski although, as I have just said, it strikes my ears as being closer to Penderecki and late Stravinsky. I certainly don’t hear any influence of Shostakovich, Bartók or Szymanowski in it, as much as I admire those composers. This is a different mode of musical expression, as one can extrapolate from the third and last movement where Lyatoshynsky finally takes his new dissonance and merges it with a strong, fast rhythm. Despite the overall loudness of this final movement, it has none of the positive feeling of some of his previous last movements; in fact, it is even more unsettled and unsettling than the original ending of the Third Symphony. Towards the end, there is a sudden and unexpected moment of silence before low, edgy strings introduce the harmonically congested, almost anguished final section, which Kuchar brings out splendidly. Lyatoshynsky was very lucky that his symphony premiered just in time to be free of government rebukes or censorship, both of which, as noted above, were just around the corner once again.

His Fifth Symphony (1965-66), as its subtitle “Slavonic” indicates, was based much more on Slavic music. This, of course, means a more tonal center (despite his usual use of bitonality and harsh chord juxtapositions) which could have been interpreted by the Soviet censors as a concession to their demands. After an edgy opening section, Lyatoshynsky introduces the first of several Slavic themes, quite tonal at first before transforming it in his own way, here also including some interesting cross-rhythms. Once again, as in his previous two symphonies, the composer was reinventing himself. This work, with its very clever juxtapositions and overlays of tonal and non-tonal music, was clearly another stem forward, and it is a shame that he died just two years after composing it since he might yet have given us another symphony in an entirely different style.

Perhaps the strange, eerie and (for Lyatoshynsky) thinly-scored second movement is the most radical of all. Here, one can clearly hear the “Slavonic” folk theme played by the winds, but the swirling dissonant ambiance he wraps it in completely changes its sound and form. This, in turn, leads into an ominous passage played by low horns with percussion and low strings which then increases in tempo and volume, only to pull back once again while flutes and clarinets (a Lyatoshynsky trademark sound) take it into more ethereal realms. Only in the last movement, which opens with the French horns playing a folk theme forcefully, followed by other sections of the orchestra, is the music finally in a regular 4/4 and, at least for a while, set to normal tonality, but this soon changes as we move into the slower development section where pizzicato celli and other effects shift the theme into something very different.

Boris Lyatoshynsky

The point is that Lyatoshynsky was my kind of composer, one who reacted to the musical trends of each era in which he wrote and thus evolved his style. So here we have all five of his symphonies neatly packaged and, for once, programmed in the correct numerical sequence. (I hate it when a series of works, whether symphonies, concerti or string quartets, are put on CDs out of order, forcing the consumer to play them in the proper order by skipping around.) But except for the occasional live performance, where are these symphonies, or the many other modern works like them, in our present-day concert halls? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re nowhere. Yet orchestras are still giving concerts of the tried-and-true (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler), playing this old crap to death for audiences which are growing increasingly bored by it all. The music of Lyatoshynsky should be played at least once in a while, but even more modern composers are given short shrift as well, one more example of why the classical music world has become nothing more than a rotting corpse of old-timey music which, good as it is, needs to be the music you hear only once in a while in live concert.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Kopatchinskaja Plays 20th Century Music

POULENC: L’Invitation au Chateau: IV. Mouvement de valse-hésitation; VIII. Tempo di Boston; XI. Tango; XII. Trés vite et trés canaille; XIII. Tempo di Tarentella; XVI. Fallement vite et gai. Bagatelle in D min. Clarinet Sonata. SCHOENFIELD: Trio for Clarinet, Violin & Piano. BARTÓK: Burleske. Contrasts .NICHIFOR: Klezmer Dance* / Patricia Kopatchinskaja, vln; Reto Bieri, cl; Polina Leschenko, pno. *add Ilya Gringolts, vln & Ruslan Lutsyk, bs / Alpha 772

This CD is titled “Take 3” as it is apparently the third album on which Kopatchinskaja plays with clarinetist Reto Bieri, but as I explained a couple of years ago, I was pretty late in discovering Kopatchinskaja and so missed its two predecessors. As it turns out, “Take 2” was even more interesting in terms of little-known composers than this one, having featured the music of Jorge Sanchez-Chiong, Giuseppe Giamberti, Heinrich Ignatz Franz Biber, Heinz Holliger, Laurence Dreyfus and Bieri himself, and even I have never heard the music of the first two or Dreyfus.

On this disc the odd man out is Şerban Nichifor (b. 1954), a Romanian cellist, composer and educator. The others are, compared to its predecessor, very well-known names in the classical field. Poulenc’s L’Invitation au Chateau, however, is noe of his lesser-known works, incidental music for a play by Anouilh, and like so many European composers of the late 1920s/early ‘30s, it tries to be “hip” by including that red-hot American dance, the “Boston”—which, as I’ve said before, was popular in the U.S.A. for perhaps a year and a half in the very early ‘20s. As soon as the Charleston and Black Bottom came around, the “Boston” was about as popular in America as a horse and buggy.

The reason I chose to review this disc, however, was that Kopatchinskaja and Bieri are playing Bartók’s Contrasts, and I wanted to hear how their performance compared to the original recording, which featured Bartók himself, Joseph Szigeti, and the much-maligned Benny Goodman. As it turns out, however, it’s the Poulenc suite, excerpted here and broken up so that the various movements appear in various places throughout the album, that is the centerpiece of this recital. It is, perhaps, not as weird as one might think to hear this music played by Kopatchinskaja who, regardless of the era in which a piece was written, resolutely sticks to straight tone. After all, many French violinists of this period (like Henry Merckel and Jacques Thibaud) played everything with either a very faint vibrato or none at all even into the 1930s.

After the first Poulenc excerpt, however, the trio virtually explodes in Paul Schoenfield’s Klezmer-influenced Trio, and all three participants jump into the fire feet first and give it everything they’ve got. I may be wrong, but I think this piece is even more difficult to play than Schoenfield’s even more popular Café Music; at least, it sounds so to me, particularly the explosive first movement, but even the tricky, offbeat rhythmic patterns of the second are hard to follow. It must have taken even these seasoned professionals some time to get this music right, but that they do and it is both challenging music to follow (check out those microtonal violin slurs in the second movement!) and enjoyable at the same time. Of the three, I think I was most impressed by pianist Polina Leschenko. You just wouldn’t automatically think of a Slavic pianist sounding so much at home with this obviously American music, which at times has more of a jazz rhythm than a klezmer one. (But then again, the klezmer-jazz connection is frequently ignored in jazz histories, leaning as they do almost exclusively on the black American side of the music.) By the way, this second movement is labeled “March,” but if you can actually hear a march in it, drop me a line and let me know where. The third movement, “Nigun,” opens with a soft, slow clarinet motif played in the chalumeau register, over which the violin enters plaintively, playing almost on the very edge of the strings, creating a sort of dissonance, with the piano then entering very low in the bass range. It’s all very low-key, somber and mysterious, a far cry from the first two movements, despite louder sections that come and go. It’s a very strange piece, showing a rather different side of Schoenfield’s talent. The fourth and last movement, “Kozatske,” speaks for itself. Oh brother, doe it speak for itself! In fact, this has to be the fastest kozatske I’ve ever heard in my life, not to mention one of the most rhythmically tricky and challenging.

After Schoenfield we get a fair amount of Poulenc, three more movements from L’Invitation, the Bagatelle for violin and piano, and the Clarinet Sonata, but I have to tell you, hearing Poulenc’s lyrical, airy waltz (and yes, this is the piece he titled “Tempo di Boston”) right after Schoenfield’s “kozatsky” is like listening to pianist George Winston after a hot session by Art Tatum. By contrast, the Bagatelle is a surprisingly fast, almost violent-sounding piece for Poulenc despite his use of a melodic line and almost-but-not-quite consonant tonality. It has more in common with Schoenfield than you’d think. And the L’Invitation excerpt which follows, the 28-second “Follement vite,” is almost as strange, including laughter from our clarinetist. while the Clarinet Sonata inhabits a sound world sort of in between tonality and atonality, French enthusiasm and Yiddish klezmer in its own strange way…or, at least, this is the way Bieri plays it. I have an alternate performance of this work by clarinetist Ronald Van Spaendonck and pianist Alexandre Tharaud on Naxos that isn’t nearly as rhythmically explosive as this one.

We finally arrive at Contrasts after a few more short pieces, and yes, the overall vibe is considerably different from the original recording. In fact, I can’t think of any other performance of this piece I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard close to a dozen, that sounds anything like it. Without completely disregarding Bartók written score, this trio seems to have taken it apart and put it back together again in such a way that the rhythm, even in the first movement, is less steady and regular than usual. Although Benny Goodman was a clarinetist who played some klezmer as a youth before switching to jazz and then to classical music, not even he made the clarinet part sound as “edgy” as Bieri does here, and Szigeti’s very Hungarian-flavored violin playing, which was exactly what Bartók had in mind when he wrote it, sounds rather tame compared to what Kopatchinskaja finds in the music. Their performance almost sounds like a free fantasia based on Contrasts. Is it faithful to the score? No, not entirely. Is it valid? As long as you take the title of the piece seriously, yes it is, for they certainly do fond “contrasts” galore in it. Yet what dark, interior world they found in it, and themselves, for the slow second movement (“Pihenő”) remains something of a mystery to the listener. Suffice it to say that they’ve created an entirely new piece out of Contrasts using the same notes with the same note values but constantly suspending or compressing the tempo—and in fact, any feeling of consistent rhythm—in its presentation. I’m not sure that Bartók would have liked it, but I think he would have understood it. Let’s leave it at that. In any case, they made their work far more difficult by pushing the envelope of this music while in rehearsal, going so far beyond the mere notes on the page that they somehow arrived in a different universe. They almost make Bartók sound like Ligeti. Poulenc’s little “Tango” somehow sounds like a short nap to rest their jangled nerves after pushing themselves through Contrasts.

Nichifor’s Klezmer Dance, the closing selection, naturally fits into the overall vibe of the album which is to tie European classical music, and particularly classical music allied to Eastern European dance forms, There is some talking and clowning at the beginning of this piece; I don’t know if it is written or ad-libbed; but they certainly have fun with it, adding a bass which plays so deep in its range that it almost sounds like a contrabass. The tempo increases chorus by chorus until they exhaust themselves in a mad dance, yet they never fudge a single note. Wowza kazowza!!!

A strange quality of this album is that, although none of the performances drag or are in any way dull, the program somehow seems longer than its announced playing time of 66:41. I think this is because the listener is so deeply involved in not only every minute but every second of these remarkable performances that time tends to stand still while you absorb all that is going on. It’s a strange phenomenon and one that I can’t recall having experienced in listening to any other album, jazz or classical, but I did get that feeling while reviewing this CD. The musicians involved all bring the music to life in such a vivid manner that you can’t take your ears off it, not even for a few seconds. It demands, and receives, your constant attention. Even the Bartók Burleske, though (again) not a familiar piece, sounds somehow different, so much so in fact that you hang on to every note, trying not to miss any of it as long as it’s playing.

And that in itself is a recommendation for this recording, where even a piece as familiar (at least, to me) as Contrasts sounds fresh and new.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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