It must have been a comfort, when she was dying, to be able to say to her son, whose trumpet she’d heard since he was a little boy, these are the songs I want you to play at my memorial service.
Dave Douglas Quintet* with guest Aoife O’Donovan (vocal), “Be Still My Soul” (words by Katharina A. von Schlegel, adapted by Aoife O’Donovan, music by Jean Sibelius, arranged by Dave Douglas), recording session (Be Still, 2012)
*DD, trumpet; Jon Irabagon, saxophone; Matt Mitchell, piano; Linda Oh, bass; Rudy Royston, drums.
Conlon’s music has such an outrageous, original character that it is literally shocking. It confronts you. Like Emerson said of Thoreau, ‘We have a new proposition.’
This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives . . . something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best of any composer living today.
Conlon Nancarrow, an expatriate American composer whose frustrations with the limitations of live performance technique led him to compose almost exclusively for mechanical player pianos, and who was widely regarded as one of the few truly visionary composers of the century, died on Sunday at his home in Mexico City. He was 84.
Mr. Nancarrow, who was a jazz trumpeter before he turned his attention to formal composition, was fascinated throughout his life by the complex relationships that resulted when competing rhythms were set against each other. His best-known works, the more than 40 Studies for Player Piano, dazzle the ear with torrential figuration, thick counterpoint, colliding meters and melodies that draw on everything from blues and Spanish music to the spiky abstractions of free atonality.
***
Mr. Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Ark., on Oct. 27, 1912, and undertook his musical studies at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music from 1929 to 1932. He later studied privately in Boston with Nicolas Slonimsky, Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against Franco with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and upon his return to the United States, in 1939, he became involved in the growing new music scene in New York, both as a composer and as a critic for the magazine Modern Music.
His stay in New York was brief, however. In 1940, when the United States Government refused to renew his passport because of his outspoken Socialist views, he moved to Mexico City. He became a Mexican citizen in 1956. Until 1981, when he attended a performance of his music in San Francisco, he had returned to the United States only once, in 1947, to obtain a machine for cutting his own piano rolls, the long paper strips that drive player pianos.
Mr. Nancarrow’s interest in mechanical pianos can be traced to the mid-1930’s, when he found pianists unable to play works like the Toccata for Violin and Piano and the Prelude and Blues (both composed in 1935) at the speeds or with the clarity that he demanded. Soon after his arrival in Mexico City, he bought two Ampico player pianos, which he modified by covering their hammers with leather and steel straps in order to make their attacks sharper.
He also began composing directly onto piano rolls, and for about four decades he composed exclusively this way. But with the renewed interest in his music that began in the 1970’s and picked up speed in the 1980’s, he became acquainted with virtuosic young players like Ms. [Ursula] Oppens and Mr. [Yvar] Mikhashoff, and pioneering new music ensembles like the Arditti Quartet, in England. Reconsidering his attitude toward live music-making, he began accepting commissions for piano, chamber and orchestral works, and produced a series of vivid scores that includes the rhythmically vital and texturally vivid ”Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra,” the ”Three Canons for Ursula” and the String Quartet No. 3.
The great thing about the 21st century is that it’s so easy to leave.
Count Basie Orchestra (Don Byas, tenor saxophone; Harry “Sweets” Edison and Buck Clayton, trumpets; Freddie Green, guitar; Jo Jones, drums, et al.), “Dance of the Gremlins,” “Swingin’ the Blues,” 1941
David S. Ware, saxophonist, composer, bandleader
November 7, 1949-October 18, 2012
“Mikuro’s Blues,” live, Europe, 200?*
*****
Live, Lithuania (Vilnius), 2007*
**********
lagniappe
reading table
“Variations On A Text By Vallejo”
By Donald Justice (1925-2004)
Me moriré en Paris con aguacero …
I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,
A day that nobody knows or remembers yet,
And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers
And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood
And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,
While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,
Rest on their shovels, and smoke,
Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.
I think it will be on a Sunday like today,
Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,
And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;
And I think it will be a Sunday because today,
When I took out this paper and began to write,
Never before had anything looked so blank,
My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday;
And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,
Looked up at me, not understanding,
And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.
Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after awhile the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.
*****
*With Matthew Shipp (piano), William Parker (bass), Guillermo Brown (drums).
Here’s another take on a piece we listened to the other day.
Alfred Schnittke (1934-98), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (excerpt); A Far Cry with guests Nelson Lee (violin), Meg Freivogel (violin), and Andrus Masden (harpsichord, prepared piano); live, Boston, 2009
*“Darn That Dream,” “Lullaby of the Leaves,” “Expressions,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” “Tivoli Gardens Swing,” “Ghost of a Chance,” “Imagination,” “Tangerine.”
Duke Ellington Orchestra, Bunny Briggs (dance), Jon Hendricks (vocal), “David Danced Before the Lord with All His Might,” live, San Francisco (Grace Cathedral), 1965
**********
lagniappe
reading table
And David danced before the Lord with all his might . . .
music clip of the day 