What’s surprising here isn’t that there are so many wonderful moments. Given the line-up, you’d expect that. What you wouldn’t expect is for these guys to sound so cohesive, as if they’d been playing together for years.
Sun Ra All Stars (SR, keyboards; Don Cherry, pocket trumpet, vocals; Lester Bowie, trumpet; Archie Shepp, tenor saxophone, vocals; John Gilmore, tenor saxophone; Marshall Allen, alto saxophone, percussion; Philly Joe Jones, drums; Clifford Jarvis, drums; Famadou Don Moye, drums, percussion), live, Germany (Berlin), 1983
The Miller Theater made a mighty contribution to the daylong festival Make Music New York on Tuesday in the form of an expansive 80-minute performance of John Luther Adams’s “Inuksuit” (2009). Mr. Adams, who lives in Alaska, conceived this elastic percussion work as an outdoor piece for 9 to 99 players, and Melissa Smey, the theater’s director, went for the maximum, commandeering Morningside Park and inviting the percussion virtuoso Doug Perkins to lead a mega-ensemble that included So Percussion, the Percussion Group Cincinnati, the Proper Glue Duo, Mantra Percussion and students from music schools around the country.
Listeners walking through the park before 5 p.m. found small arrays of unattended drums, cymbals, xylophones and other instruments stationed along the park’s stairs and walkways, and conch shells, paper cones and rubber tubes scattered around the lawn where the performance was to begin. At 5, the 99 percussionists filed into the field, retrieved the smaller instruments and started the performance with gentle windlike sounds. They added graceful, eerie tones and harmonies by swinging the rubber tubes at various velocities; and they used sandpaper blocks and frame drums filled with bottle caps to create texture.
Gradually, the players dispersed through the park, making their way to the drum arrays. Your experience of the piece depended on where you were in the park, and most people walked around. (At one point I flipped a coin to choose which path to take.) But wherever you were, bursts of sound — loud, quiet, hard, soft — surrounded you.
There were sounds Mr. Adams may not have counted on. Birds and aircraft made their own contributions, as did camera shutters: at any moment, just about every player was being photographed by two or more listeners. And near the end of the piece, when the sounds were mostly the tactile ringing of xylophones and triangles, an ice cream truck added its cheerful melody to the mix (presumably not by design). But through the entire performance, I did not hear a single cellphone ring.
An odd planet, and those on it are odd, too.
They’re subject to time, but they won’t admit it.
They have their own ways of expressing protest.
They make up little pictures, like for instance this:
At first glance, nothing special.
What you see is water.
And one of its banks.
And a little boat sailing strenuously upstream.
And a bridge over the water, and people on the bridge.
It appears that the people are picking up their pace
because of the rain just beginning to lash down
from a dark cloud.
The thing is, nothing else happens.
The cloud doesn’t change its color or its shape.
The rain doesn’t increase or subside.
The boat sails on without moving.
The people on the bridge are running now
exactly where they ran before.
It’s difficult at this point to keep from commenting.
This picture is by no means innocent.
Time has been stopped here.
Its laws are no longer consulted.
It has been relieved of its influence over the course of events.
It has been ignored and insulted.
On account of a rebel,
one Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being who, by the way,
died long ago and in due course),
time has tripped and fallen down.
It might well be simply a trifling prank,
an antic on the scale of just a couple of galaxies,
let us, however, just in case,
add one final comment for the record:
For generations, it’s been considered good form here
to think highly of this picture,
to be entranced and moved.
There are those for whom even this is not enough.
They go so far as to hear the rain’s spatter,
to feel the cold drops on their necks and backs,
they look at the bridge and the people on it
as if they saw themselves there,
running the same never-to-be-finished race
through the same endless, ever-to-be-covered distance,
and they have the nerve to believe
that this is really so.
—Wislawa Szymborska, “The People on the Bridge” (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)
Scored for a flexible ensemble of between nine and ninety-nine percussionists, “Inuksuit” is intended for outdoor performance, and it had its première on a mountainside in Banff, Canada, in 2009. Adams at first resisted the idea of taking the piece indoors, because the interaction with nature was integral to his conception. After inspecting the Armory, though, he grasped its possibilities; the space is more a man-made canyon than a concert hall. He settled on a corps of seventy-six musicians, including five piccolo players. Arrays of drums, gongs, cymbals, bells, and numerous smaller instruments were set up on the main floor of the Drill Hall; atop catwalks on all sides; and in the hallways that connect to smaller rooms at the front of the building. In any rendition of “Inuksuit,” the performers are given four or five pages of music—the notation imitates the shapes of the Inuit markers—which they execute at their own pace. Musicians with portable instruments are instructed to move about freely. Prearranged signals prompt a move from one page to the next. The result is a composition that on the microcosmic level seems spontaneous, even chaotic, but that gathers itself into a grand, almost symphonic structure.
At 4 P.M. on a Sunday, thirteen hundred people assembled in the Drill Hall to hear the piece, variously standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. First came an awakening murmur: one group of performers exhaled through horns and cones; others rubbed stones together and made whistling sounds by whirling tubes. Then one member of the ensemble—Schick, perched above the entrance to the Drill Hall—delivered a call on a conch shell. With that commanding, shofar-like tone, the sound started to swell: tom-toms and bass drums thudded, cymbals and tam-tams crashed, sirens wailed, bells clanged. It was an engulfing, complexly layered noise, one that seemed almost to force the listeners into motion, and the crowd fanned out through the arena.
***
It is tricky to write about an event such as this. Because both ensemble and audience were in motion, no two perceptions of the performance were the same, and no definitive record of it can exist. Furthermore, anyone who ventures to declare in a public forum that “Inuksuit” was one of the most rapturous experiences of his listening life—that is how I felt, and I wasn’t the only one—might be suspected of harboring hippie-dippie tendencies. The work is not explicitly political, nor is it the formal expression of an individual sensibility, although John Luther Adams certainly deserved the ecstatic and prolonged ovation that greeted him when he acknowledged the crowd from the center of the Drill Hall. In the end, several young couples seemed to deliver the most incisive commentary when, amid the obliterating tidal wave of sound, they began making out.
As I mentioned on this date last year, the first time my wife Suzanne and I went out together (September 1974, Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), we saw the man who put the sui in sui generis.
How often do you get to say “Happy 100th Birthday”?
Well, here’s your chance.
As I learned the other day from WKCR-FM’sPhil Schaap, who’s been encouraging folks to send this guy a birthday card (I mailed mine yesterday), the oldest performing jazz musician, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, who plays at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100 on July 17th. Birthday greetings can be mailed (remember mail?) to 5543 Press Dr., New Orleans, LA 70126.
kaleidoscopic, adj. 1. changing form, pattern, color, etc., in a manner suggesting a kaleidoscope. 2. continually shifting from one set of relations to another. E.g., the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Art Ensemble of Chicago (Roscoe Mitchell, saxophone; Joseph Jarman, saxophone; Lester Bowie, trumpet; Malachi Favors, bass; Don Moye, drums), live, Europe, 1980s
Part 1
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One of my all-time favorite musicians—no matter the instrument, no matter the genre—is the guy playing bass. If I’m feeling down, he lifts me up. If I’m feeling good, he makes things even better.
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Part 2
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How many trumpeters play so many different colors?
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Part 5
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Part 6
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Avant-garde? Their use of polyphony recalls the earliest New Orleans jazz.
***
Part 7
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How many musicians not only roam so widely but swing so hard?
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lagniappe
more
Art Ensemble of Chicago with Fontella Bass, “Theme de Yoyo” (1970)
Who else (besides, of course, Bob Dylan) has played so many different roles so brilliantly?
Miles Davis (with Robben Ford & guest Carlos Santana, guitars), “Burn”
Live, Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey, 6/15/86
Listen to stuff long enough and it changes—or you do, anyway. Once I might have faulted this for being repetitive. But that’s a bit like faulting roast beef for being meat. Of course it’s repetitive. That’s part of what makes it soar.
• WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)
—Bird Flight (Phil Schaap, jazz [Charlie Parker])
—Morning Classical (Various)
—Amazing Grace (Various)
• WFMU-FM
—Mudd Up! (DJ/Rupture, “new bass and beats”)
—Sinner’s Crossroads(Kevin Nutt, gospel)
—Give The Drummer Some (Doug Schulkind, sui generis)
—Fool’s Paradise (Rex, sui generis)
—Transpacific Sound Paradise (Rob Weisberg, “popular and unpopular music from around the world”)
“It’s a fascinating time for Haitian music,” said Ned Sublette, author of “The World that Made New Orleans.” “Haitians voted for the music ticket [electing kompa singer Michel Martelly president]. You cannot deny the importance of communication through music in Haiti. And this is something New Orleanians know well.”
music clip of the day 