all the critics love you in new york

If you read this blog regularly, you already know about this, but, yes, tonight is the opening of The Memory Thief in New York and San Francisco. I really hope you will support this excellent film. But don't take my word for it. Here is the review the New York Times just posted. More reviews are here and here.

There's been a lot going on in my world, very little of which I can really write about, but I will have some exciting summer/fall concert dates to post very soon.

Recent viewing:
"Life.Support.Music" - Heartbreaking and inspirational film about guitarist/living miracle Jason Crigler (disclosure: he is also my friend and collaborator) and his family. See this movie!

Recent reading:
Hank Shteamer's amazing interview with AACM luminaries Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis. This should be required reading for all musicians and all critics. Hats off to George, Muhal & Hank.

Recent listening:
Willie Nelson "Shotgun Willie"
Clara Haskil, Mozart & Scarlatti
Ry Cooder "Film Music"

public stoning

Thanks to the generosity of Skirl CEO and Claudia colleague Chris Speed (pictured above on a rest stop in Trinidad, CO), I'll be in quasi-residence at John Zorn's performance space The Stone from Sunday, April 20 through Friday 4/25. I'm describing the Tuesday gig first because that's the one with my most involvement as "composer," or "leader," or "the guy who writes the checks," or however you want to look at it:

Tuesday, April 22
8PM

Two Trios

Shelley Burgon, Trevor Dunn, Ted Reichman
Jorrit Dijkstra, Ted Reichman, Eric Rosenthal

The first trio will play a new piece I just finished a few minutes ago for organ, piano, harp, and bass vaguely inspired by Christian Wolff, Anthony Coleman and the Necks, and with a title so pretentious I can't even bring myself to write it in public yet. I will be joined by my estimable Skirl labelmates Trevor and Shelley.

The second trio will play improvised music for accordion, electronics, saxophone, and percussion. This band has been refining its concept over the last year or so through a series of gigs in the greater Boston area and will be making its New York debut on Tuesday.

At 10, we will be followed by the Skuli Sverrisson/Anthony Burr duo which is really really worth hearing.

Working backwards:

Sunday, April 20
8PM

Chris Speed's Yeah No
Jim Black, Ted Reichman, Chris Speed, Skuli Sverrisson, Cuong Vu

Are the names not enough? As the so-called NYC downtown scene atomizes before our eyes, rumor is this could be the Last Yeah No Gig Ever. So do what you need to do.

Thursday, April 24
10PM

Ben Perowsky Quartet
Ben Perowsky, Ted Reichman, Chris Speed, Ben Street

Where the barrel house meets the opium den.

and finally

Friday, April 25
8 & 10
John Zorn Improv Night
with Zorn and many other excellent musicians.

You know the deal......

Hope you can make it!

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I will be back in NYC in a couple of weeks for this exciting event on May 9:

for ernest bovine

Greetings from Wichita Falls, TX, home of "The Last Picture Show," a title of a Pat Metheney song, and I'm not sure what else.

I hope to see some of you at the Claudia Quintet shows in Texas, Arizona, and California. Details are available here.

Recommended ipod listening for an extended drive through West Texas during the "golden hour:"

Brian Eno "Pelisero Wine Promo CD" bootleg
Talk Talk "Wealth" from "Spirit of Eden"
Glenn Gould "Hugh Ashton's Ground" (William Byrd)
Bob Dylan "Highlands"

More to come eventually.... including important NYC screening information.....

monks, moods

Science confirms what hundreds of songs already knew.

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Had an intense time down in NY last week. The main purpose of the trip was playing the music of Meredith Monk with the Claudia Quintet plus Theo Bleckmann. In the concert, John and Theo's deep gratitude and respect for Meredith were so powerful that I found myself able to inhabit the music in a way which had been impossible in rehearsal. It's really hard music- not necessarily technically, but emotionally, mentally, vibrationally as the Braxtonians might say. Theo's performance was stunning- this music really lets him shine.

Then, on Friday I was working the merch table at the Andrew D'Angelo benefit at the Tea Lounge. Also very intense- and gratifying to see the place packed. Due to my fiscal duties, I didn't get to listen as closely as I would have liked. I did get to hear the Oscar Noriega/Chris Speed/Trevor Dunn/Jim Black quartet though- it was impossible _not_ to hear this band. Their urgency and, forgive the redundancy, intensity, reflected their actual day to day devotion to Andrew in a way that all the blogging and articles can't.

A special highlight: the alto saxophone playing of Oscar Noriega, all too rarely heard at length. I can't wait for his Skirl record to get finished. I'm tempted to kidnap it and finish it for him, in a Teo Macero-esque (RIP) fashion.

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Lots of new stuff happening, and as usual, I'm not sure how much of it I will make public, or when, but here are a few future events that I _can_ talk about:

Wednesday, March 5

Jorrit Dijkstra - alto saxophone, lyricon, electronics
Ted Reichman - accordion
Eric Rosenthal - percussion

7:30
Audible Think
Gallery X, 169 William Street, New Bedford, MA

My only ongoing improv project, this has turned into a real band. Three (sometimes more) strong voices, points of view, positions. Negotiations, occasional agreements, but no backing down.

Saturday, March 8

Jason Crigler Band/Goats in Trees

Jason Crigler - guitar, vox
Monica Crigler - guitar, vox
Ted Reichman - accordion, organ
Richard Gates - bass
Dave Mattacks (!) - drums

6 PM
Atwood's Tavern
877 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA

I'm working on a bunch of stuff with the great Jason Crigler, some of which I will be telling you more about very soon. But in the meantime, I will be playing his songs with some truly spectacular musicians, including one of my all-time favorite drummers, Dave Mattacks. You know, the guy who played with, let's see, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Richard & Linda Thompson, Sandy Denny, John Martyn and God only knows how many other hipster mix tape favorites. I'm really looking forward to this. As a bonus, Atwood's is a highly pleasant place to spend some time- fine food and drink and a non-annoying, non-collegiate clientele.

Monday, March 10
The Theater of Cruelty
Anthony Coleman's Contemporary Improvisation Ensemble

I'll be playing with a couple of things, including the Dijkstra/Reichman/Rosenthal trio, as well as conducting and generally making a nuisance of myself.

Jordan Hall
New England Conservatory
Boston, MA

Claudia Quintet European Tour

March 15th Bergamo Jazz Festival, ITALY
March 16th Snow Jazz Gastein, AUSTRIA
March 18th A-Trane Berlin, GERMANY
March 19th Kaleidoskop K1, Copenhagen, DENMARK

Claudia Quintet Southwest US Tour

April 3rd Dazzle Denver,CO
April 4th U of Colorado Boulder, CO
April 5th High Mayhem Studios Santa Fe,NM
April 7th U of TX@Arlington TEXAS
April 8th NTSU Denton,TEXAS
April 9th Austin, TEXAS
April 10th Phoenix, AZ
April 11th UCSD San Diego, CA
April 12th The Stone NYC

Andrew D'Angelo

Some of you already know about this, but regardless, please help spread the word. And if you can, please give generously.

SAXOPHONIST ANDREW D'ANGELO HAS BRAIN TUMOR

On Friday, January 25, 2008 world-renowned saxophonist/composer Andrew D'Angelo suffered a major seizure while driving in Brooklyn, NY. Tests in the hospital revealed a large tumor in his brain. Andrew will undergo brain surgery at some point in the next few weeks. At this time, it is believed that the tumor is not cancerous, but this will not be confirmed until a biopsy is performed.

Andrew is providing updates on his experiences in the hospital via his blog at www.andrewdangelo.com.

Like many Americans, Andrew has no health insurance. A fund has been established to help with the costs of his surgery and recovery. Donations can be sent via PayPal at donate@andrewdangelo.com. We deeply appreciate any efforts that can be made to spread the word about Andrew's situation.

Benefit concerts are currently being planned for New York City, Seattle, Reykjavik, and Boston. More information about these concerts will be posted on www.andrewdangelo.com as soon as it is available.

western law

No year-end recap from this blog. I'm still trying to press on with some projects started in 2007, still catching up on records and movies I missed in 2007, still dealing with 2007 in general. But there have been some 2008 developments worth reporting:

The Claudia Quintet plus the great Mark Stewart recorded Mr. Hollenbeck's "Rainbow Jimmies" in the friendly confines of Brooklyn Recording. I spent an inordinate amount of time practicing this piece- it was pretty much the hardest music I've ever played. Plus, I wanted to make sure my performance met the standard set by Mr. Stewart (and of course, John and the rest of Claudia). There is no musician I hold in higher esteem than Mark. I am truly grateful that my career has crossed paths with his throughout the years. He is an inspiration on the technical, creative, and spiritual levels. As I told him at the end of the session, he is a force for good in the universe.

"Rainbow Jimmies" was commissioned by Bang on a Can (thus the difficulty). I'm not sure what the release plans are for it, but I think Claudia fans should be psyched- if you're into the math-y, complex side of Claudia, it's pretty hardcore.

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In film news, "The Memory Thief" has secured a distribution deal and will be appearing in US theaters later this winter/early spring. I will post precise information when it's available.

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Saw "No Country For Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood," which along with "The Assassination of Jesse James" form 2007's heroic trio of masculine post-Westerns. I'm still trying to organize my thoughts about the music in "There Will Be Blood." At the end of the movie, most of the conversations in the audience around me were about the score. That is pretty unusual and indicates how forceful the use of music is in this film, and how strong the music itself is.

A good experiment would be to see "There Will be Blood" with no music, or very little a la "No Country." In fact, you could cut the music out of "Blood" and paste it onto "No Country" and I bet it would work in some over-the-top melodramatic way. It would totally change "No Country," which left tons of aural (and other) space open, but I bet someone out there would think it was genius. The "Assassination" score is not as extreme as the other two. It is more generic. But in a strongly genre-oriented film it felt like a sensitive fit- an integrated concept rather than a self-conscious gesture, which is what some of "Blood" felt like to me. Not "No Country," which took an extreme position but carried it through with elegance.

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As I told you last time, we've been watching DVD's of The Wire over here. In a disturbing twist, our neighborhood has taken on a certain Wire-esque aspect this month. I am really hoping this trend does not continue.

sound and vision

Happy solstice to all.... Couple of things to talk about.

Finally saw "I'm Not There." Loved it. Probably the only film I ever saw that I could have kept watching for another two hours. Most amazing musical moment (out of many): the use of the "Fellini Casanova" soundtrack, my favorite film score of all time.

Been thinking a lot about "music supervision" largely because I was talking to some filmmakers about doing that for them (if you're in the market, I'm interested). Also because we've been watching DVD's of "The Wire," which is one of the most effective uses of the non-score score I know of. Another example: Jean Renoir's "The River," which uses Indian classical music (which we are supposedly hearing from a nearby house, though they give up on that ruse eventually), a girl practicing classical piano, and various other Bengali folk music to create an extremely rich musical experience that is entirely within the plane of the film's action. And can I just tell you that this film is very beautiful and you should rent it immediately? Especially if you were frustrated by another film which came out this year involving self-obsessed Westerners fumbling through India to a soundtrack of bits ripped off from other films and random 60's nuggets...

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Received my copy of Anthony Coleman's "Lapidation" on New World. Technically I can't really review it because I played on it and for a bunch of other reasons. But what the heck, conflict of interest is a pretty outdated concept in the music business, right?

I can review this CD with one word: FINALLY. Anthony Coleman (pictured above) leads a "complicated life," as The New Yorker's listing pages say. It took ages for this CD to come together, but it was worth the wait. Attendees of Downtown new music concerts have known that Coleman has been one of the strongest composers working in NY since the mid-late 80's, if not the strongest. There are composers who might look sexier on a grant application but there are very few who can put musical ideas on paper with the force of Anthony Coleman. I can remember many concerts where Coleman pieces made other commissions sound like sad assemblages of half-understood stock gestures.

Yes, Coleman is also informed by a bunch of stuff, you could even call his "influences" eclectic. But Coleman's music is not eclectic. Coleman writes actual compositions, with clear individual voices, speaking in the language of the individual piece. Sure, I can hear a lot of stuff: Central African horn music, Feldman, Ellington (and that's just in the first three minutes of the first cut), but it's filtered through the Coleman aesthetic and transformed into something else, at the service of an expressive goal. I know expression is not sexy among modern composers, but that's only because it's difficult.

On this and on last year's "Pushy Blueness" (Tzadik), at last the world at large can hear some of Coleman's chamber music. "Lapidation" is an absolute landmark CD. Anyone interested in modern composition and/or downtown music needs to check it out immediately. Now we just need a CD of his chamber orchestra piece "Latvian Counter-Gambit" and his string quartet. Who wants to give me a budget to produce it?

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Finally, extremely bad culinary news from Brooklyn: the Veggie Castle, one my all-time favorite restaurants, is gone. I'm very much not a vegetarian, but I loved this place: a Rastafarian health food joint in a former White Castle serving an encyclopedic list of medicinal juice concoctions named after their respective ailments. Just the concept would be enough to make it worth advocating, but more importantly, its food was delicious and it was a fun place to hang out in. I'm sad to see it go.

kreuzspiel

Brief recap- I went to Barcelona, played Wagner, came home and immediately got sick. I was more or less better by the time I got to Istanbul, where the Claudia Quintet worked like dogs for three days. You can read the US State Department's preview of what we did here. I'm trying not to dwell on the fact that Karen Hughes was probably involved with this somehow.

We spent much time drinking tea in Turkish high school principals' offices, which look like this:



and this:


I also got together with the proprietor of this excellent but sadly defunct blog. I met Volkan eleven years ago when I went to Istanbul for the first time with the Braxton sextet. As you may or may not be able to see on Volkan's videos, or hear on this hard-to-find CD, that was a magical, life-changing trip for me. This time was not so magical, but at least I was able to prove to Julie that they do sell giant sesame bagels on the streets of Istanbul.


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I was very saddened to hear of the passing of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Like any good student of Anthony Braxton, I went through a big Stockhausen phase in college, culminating in my senior thesis performance of some of the "From the Seven Days" pieces (somewhere there's a tape of that....). When I split off from the Braxtonian camp, I also drifted away from Stockhausen worship. Nowadays, I sometimes agree with Cornelius Cardew (isn't the web amazing?), but this year I started listening again to some of his early electronic music and it was stunning how fresh and powerful that stuff sounds to me. It will take a long time for the experts to sort out the long and varied career of Mr. Stockhausen (as AB would call him). But for now I'm sticking with the early stuff.

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I am grateful to Steve Smith for pointing out this amazing piece of work. It's high time that someone is trying to shed some serious scholarly light on this complicated mess called "downtown music." What's up there right now is a nice starting point. I actually found myself bizarrely moved. Mr. Cherches is discussing an earlier era of the music than the period I was involved in, but this earlier music was the stuff that in many ways inspired my interest in the avant-garde in the first place. Even though I love a lot of music that happened in NY post-1987, for me the ur-sound of Downtown improv will always be duck calls, that clattering Arto Lindsay guitar, Christian Marclay's records, and some grainy samples from an Ensoniq Mirage. People are talking about it as music history now. And that's cool, but it's bittersweet too.

kultur

Over the last few days I've gotten some much needed help from my friends in the effort to stay... inspired, for lack of a better word. This is my "thank you" post. So thanks, first of all, to Uri Caine, whose concerts next week have forced me to spend several hours a day practicing Wagner on the accordion, and listening to Wagner. Maybe because I've hanging out so much with this stuff, I've been having some especially good, or at least thought-provoking, experiences in the area of music's relationship to other arts. That has really been my main interest for the last few years, as I've been trying to build my skills as a film composer, so bear with me while I think some of this out.

My next thank you is to Rob Price, who sent me two excellent documentaries about film composers Bernard Herrmann and Toru Takemitsu. When I was writing the Memory Thief score, these composers (along with the RZA), were my main models. It's not even really fair to call Herrmann a model. If you're scoring a psychological thriller, which Memory Thief is, Herrmann is the guy you need to be thinking about, much as Herrmann was obviously thinking about Wagner in Vertigo, for example. Plus, as a film, the Memory Thief has certain obvious connections to Taxi Driver, which was Herrmann's last score and one of his best, so how could I not have that in my mind?

Herrmann's language, based on the manipulation of thematic material, i.e. old-school, hard-core composition, is more or less out of favor in film music today. The rigorous insistence on conceptual unity, the constant reiteration, the rhythmic intensity, these things can feel old-fashioned. Plus, when you don't have the luxury of an orchestra to provide the cushioning and psychological distancing we associate with classic films (i.e. make it feel like a movie), you can only take the Herrmann concept so far. It is a paradox that the smaller the instrumental ensemble on a film score the more presence it has in the mind of the viewer. A solo instrument feels like a character, a voice. One has to pay attention to it. An orchestra feels like ambience - we are so accustomed to it in films that we almost ignore it. It works subliminally.

When I hit that wall in the course of writing the Memory Thief score, Takemitsu's music came to my rescue. At times, his music does the opposite of the classic Hollywood score. The pieces that I was hearing were solos for traditional Japanese instruments or percussion and they sounded more or less improvised: rhythmically free, painfully dissonant, and powerfully intimate. The music crosses an invisible barrier: it feels more like narration than an abstract psychological fourth dimension. This inspired me to pick up the electric guitar, detune it, and improvise through the scene that was giving me the most trouble: the painful retelling of the father character's Holocaust experiences (I then went back and shaped it into something more like a composition than an improvisation). I chose to meet painful intimacy with painful intimacy.

So even though I haven't written any film music in a little while, these fine DVD's reinvigorated my hunger for that: the intellectual give and take between the other dimensions of the film and the music, the collaborative process with the director and editor, the participation in a multidimensional art form.

Which brings me to my last thank you, to Anthony Coleman for suggesting I check out the program of short Beckett works ("Words and Music," "Cascando," "...but the clouds...") happening at Harvard this weekend. For me, this evening of theater was deeply, deeply problematic on some levels, but as examples of the awareness of the multidimensionality of artworks, the interconnection of word, voice, music, structure you could not ask for much more. Unfortunately, the production, including a lengthy pre-performance lecture, added some layers of information that probably took away from the power the pieces might have had if experienced in their original forms (radio and tv). This was unavoidable given the nature of the thing, but the concept, in all of its recursiveness, came through loud and clear. The thing looks inside of itself to draw out the inner conflict and outside of itself to explore the connection (or lack thereof) to... whatever: the writer, the composer, the audience, the universe, what have you.

These works leave the musical component open, and as such, I think the composer has a very tough job. Beckett puts the composer in the same position as Cascando's "voice," struggling in the dark. When music is incorporated into a multidimensional space like film or theater, it becomes the composer's job to meet the thing without preconceptions. The basic assumptions have to be challenged right away- what is the language of the piece? What is the form of the piece? It may or may not be my language and it is almost never my form. There aren't really any wrong answers, but in the course of the collaborative process with the director or ideally the writer, one hopefully arrives at some sort of conclusion, much as the guy in "Cascando" struggles to finish his story. I'm allowed to disagree with the choices the composer and the director made in this case, but I am thankful they attempted to perform this daunting task.

On the other hand, Richard Wagner avoided all of these pesky problems... bully for him. I'd better get back to work.

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Further listening:

Morton Feldman's version of "Words and Music" is here, via Other Mind's radio show.

If you want to hear an BBC broadcast of what I think is the original "Cascando," click here.

smoke gets in your eyes

I'm breaking the silence to let you know that an excellent band from Europe called The Story of Modern Farming (above) will be playing tonight (monday) in NYC and later this week in Chicago. I urge you to check them out. I heard them in another bizarre but mostly wonderful night at Brookline High School last week and I was deeply impressed. I've been following their work for about a year now and I think singer/keyboardist/electronics manipulator Jessica Sligter and saxophonist Louise Dam are huge talents. Elements of deep jazz skill intermingling with mostly quiet yet dissonant electronics in the service of intense spaced-out songcraft, plus sax solos. The sort of thing that probably shouldn't work, yet it does. Best new music I've heard in a long time. Info is available at their myspace page.

Other interesting news:

We were in Southern California during the big fires a couple of weeks ago. Julie took some dramatic photos from the 5 freeway on the way up to LA from SD.



I'll be in Hyde Park on November 19 with Jorrit Dijkstra and Eric Rosenthal, plus my old friends Aaron Gelb and Peter Boolos (aka Pleasant Street).

I'll be in Barcelona playing Wagner with the Uri Caine ensemble November 23-25.

I'll be in Istanbul with the Claudia Quintet in the first week of December.

More soon, I hope....

scenes

Been having trouble getting back on the blog routine after my recent travels, but there were a few blogworthy moments and/or concepts, so I will report them in quasi-list form:

First stop was NYC, where I played solo at the Stone. We also celebrated our anniversary in style at Al Di La, an extremely fine northern Italian restaurant from which we used to live upstairs. Now that I'm not biased by that, I still think it's pretty much the best restaurant in NYC, easily equal to similar places in Italy. And though food and Boston-bashing are two subjects I want to avoid on this blog, it is a fact that dinner at this elegant restaurant costs the same or less than a meal at the many mediocre beer/burger/pizza/pasta places with giant HDTV's that proliferate in Boston.

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Next I headed to Paris, where I was assigned the task of facilitating the union of the enigmatic Shivaree and this fine group of Frenchmen, for the performance of an R. Kelly song and a David Allan Coe song on a Canal+ show also featuring Amy Winehouse and headlined by Vanessa Paradis. This went pretty well- hopefully the results will be on youtube pretty soon.

The drama surrounding Amy Winehouse is pretty remarkable, but thankfully, so is the performance she puts on. Whatever her issues might be (intentionally or not, her mumbled responses to the perky hostess (who I just realized was Charlotte Gainsbourg's buddy in "The Science of Sleep") were cringe-inducing) she is clearly in control of her art, both as a singer and as a theatrical performer. And her band is insanely good.

This seems like the appropriate time to mention Sasha Frere-Jones's bizarre, problematic, but not exactly _wrong_ article in the New Yorker and point out that even though Davendra might not sing an R. Kelly song, Shivaree did- it's right there on the myspace page. And I can't remember ever seeing or hearing a five foot tall English girl more into the classic pre-drum machine R&B aesthetic than Amy Winehouse.

Since I started venturing into it as a listener (in the mid-80's) and as a player in the (mid-90's), the world of indie rock has grown into a fascinating system of social and business dynamics, which I think would be well worth exploring in a New Yorker article, but as far as I can tell it hasn't ever been a hotbed of funkiness. Being bummed out by its lack of groove is like being bummed out by classical music's lack of improvisation.

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This is not a total digression. Immediately upon returning from France, I was thrown into a car by Slavic Soul Party and brought to Randall's Island, where SSP was participating in the big Arcade Fire/LCD Soundsystem show, which was presented to me as a jet-lag cure. It didn't work - I felt like a grumpy old man the whole time (see above paragraph) and did not make it to the headliners.

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We then embarked on the Claudia Quintet tour, which was excellent, thanks. We were joined by the great Gary Versace, who totally kicked ass on the organ. Keyboard players don't get to play together very often, so it was a thrill for me to get to hear him every night.

Some tour moments:

Visiting the exquisite city of Charleston, SC. Not having traveled very much in the South, it was awesome to see this town... I would love to go back and look around more extensively.

Driving through Rocky Mount, NC on the 90th birthday of Thelonious Monk. Of course, we didn't know we were doing this at the time, but maybe some of the Monk vibrations penetrated the walls of the van while were were cruising up the highway.

Walking through the audience after the second set at Cornelia Street and being told, in a thick New Jersey accent, "I never knew the accordion could be so.... sexy." Thanks.

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I'll be in Southern California next week. More later.....

easing the bite of it

Just a reminder - Saturday night (9/29) 10PM, I"ll be playing solo at the Stone. Piano, electronics, maybe a little accordion. Seriously, it's a very little accordion, a semi-functional student model. I'll play some of the increasingly controversial drone/drum machine pieces I've been working on plus some stuff from "My Ears Are Bent" and maybe some extremely rarely heard solo piano music I wrote many years ago. And probably a David Allan Coe cover or two.

I might also be sitting in with Mr. Curtis Hasselbring's band in the 8PM set. Hey, it's a Skirl-fest...

And speaking of David Allan Coe covers, then I'm heading to Paris to play in a star-studded (seriously) TV broadcast with the always entertaining Shivaree plus some radio stuff...

Then the Claudia Quintet tour.

So you might not hear from me for a while.