Steven Bernstein Interview

May 11, 2010 — Mike

From Glowing Realm:

Steven Bernstein is a composer/trumpeter that lives in NY. He leads the amazing bands Sex Mob and Millennial Territory Orchestra, and has played with many many many great musicians currently including Levon Helm and The Swell Season. I first met Steven when he visited Richmond to record with Fight the Big Bull—the sessions that would eventually become All is Gladness in the Kingdom, out now on CleanFeed Records. I took an arranging lesson with him, something that only Matt White had done up until that point. I didn’t know much about him, outside of his Diaspora work and Sex Mob, but I realized that he was a kindred spirit in his love of film and improvised music with direction. The lesson went great, and led to another one at his home in Nyack, NY where we ate pasta and listened to music all day, and I learned way too much! Bernstein’s interest in Richmond has really helped our scene immensely and we can’t thank him enough (though we constantly try)!

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Coming to the ISSUE Project Room

May 11, 2010 — Mike
Giuseppi Logan performing at Local 269 in NYC ...
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From NY’s ISSUE Project Room:

05/12 @ 8pm – Wally Shoup with Nate Wooley, Reuben Radding, Andrew Drury + Breakway
Wally Shoup Wally Shoup plays unfettered, emotion-laden alto saxophone and has been involved in freely improvised music since the mid-70’s. His playing combines the grit of free jazz and blues with an ear toward lyrical abstraction, all at the service of creating coherent music in the moment. His early work in Colorado is documented on Scree-Run Waltz [...]

05/13 @ 8pm – Sam Ashley + Robert Van Heuman and Jeff Carey (SKIF++)
Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental, non-religious mysticism, one rooted in a “find out for yourself” attitude, an attitude he advocates in direct opposition to so many traditions. He has been an avant-garde witch-doctor for more than 40 years. For well over 30 years Sam has used this mysticism in [...]

05/14 @ 8pm – Giuseppi Logan’s 75th Birthday Bash + Befo’ Quotet + TAUOM
Giuseppi Logan Giuseppi Logan (born May 22, 1935) is a jazz musician originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who taught himself to play piano and drums before switching to reeds at age 12. At the age of 15 he began playing with Earl Bostic and later studied at the New England Conservatory. In 1964 he relocated to New [...]

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Musique Machine Reviews

May 11, 2010 — Mike

From Musique Machine:

Various Artists – Last Winter We Didn’t Sing
Last Winter We Didn’t Sing presents eight takes on the winter months, most choosing the guitar to distil an ambient Americana with hints of folk and country established by labels like Chicago’s Kranky and Thrill Jockey. Here, it is stripped down to the barest essentials leaving a sombre, resonant soundtrack that could be employed to accompany sympathetic scenes of rural traditions threatened by industrialisation or harsh weather.

Kyle Bobby Dunn – A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn
The title of this double-disc set is of course a nod to Benjamin Britten’s landmark work, but has about as much in common with that staple of middle-school music classes as your average RZA album does. I’m not sure I classify as “young” anymore (I hit 40 next year), but this still served as my guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, a New York-based composer of ethereal, slow-moving but ever-changing and ultimately lovely music.

Phill Niblock – Touch Strings
‘Touch Strings’ a two disc cd set that brings together over two hours worth of Phill Niblock’s distinctive & often sonical vast take on the drone genre. This great collection shows once more why he’s one of the most respected & celebrated practitioners’ of the drone form.

Hisegawa-Shizuo – Lift
In the brief poem in the booklet that accompanies Hisegawa-Shizuo’s Lift, we are introduced to an anonymous narrator who attempts to capture early sunrise in a hat – or so I interpret it – and finds himself successful – “perfect”, he mutters, before the poem unwinds into outright, abstract strangeness. As much as this surrealistic scene presents an all-out impossibility paired with downright absurdity, its surreal, imaginative grasp is certainly intriguing and strangely befitting of the musical work itself.

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So Percussion in Alabama

May 11, 2010 — Mike
Frank Zappa, Ekeberghallen, Oslo, Norway, Janu...
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From al.com:

Two Zappa works, “Be-Bop Tango” and “G-Spot Tornado,” will close the decidedly percussive show. Before that, Varese will get air time with “Ionisation,” an all-percussion classic completed in 1931, and “Hyperprism,” a wind and percussion piece completed in 1923.

Rounding out the show, and fitting nicely into it, will be three works by Paul Lansky, ASO’s composer-in-residence. Lansky worked with the New York quartet, So Percussion, in creating “Threads,” a 10-movement work that looks, on the surface, like a Bach cantata.

The quartet will be on hand to perform the work, which they recently recorded on the Canteloupe label for an August release. It may be the most soothing piece on the program.

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