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    Long Play Rises to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals

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    This weekend of concerts, organized by Bang on a Can, has quickly but assertively ascended to the rank of destination event.Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.And, based on the 15 concerts I attended during its second edition, which unfolded and overlapped in spaces around Brooklyn from Friday through Sunday, this festival by the Bang on a Can collective could even stand to get a little bigger.Capacity crowds amassed at Pioneer Works to hear Meredith Monk’s ensemble collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; at Roulette to hear the Philip Glass Ensemble; at the Mark Morris Dance Center to hear a new repertory group investigate music from the early 1990s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill. These in-demand sets couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to hear them, but with two or three other events always close by, nobody was truly left out in the cold.Before Long Play, Bang on a Can had spent three decades presenting one-day marathon concerts. But the scope of this organization’s ambition has reached a new level, and it is an untrammeled joy to experience.Meredith Monk, center, performing with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars as part of her set on Friday.Peter Serling @lotsopikturesFor example, on Saturday afternoon at Public Records, the JACK Quartet performed a version of “Prisma Interius VII” by the young composer Catherine Lamb. Previously conceived for violin and synthesizer alone, the piece was recast here for the dreamy, collaborative ability of the JACK players to hold precise microtonal harmonies. Staggered entries of droning pitches steadily created complexly sour motifs that tended to plunge downward. Where Lamb switches up her patterns with melodic ascents, the players savored the opportunity to make this often static music sing out.From there, you could race over to the big crowd forming at Roulette for Glass’s music, or stay put to enjoy Xenakis’s “Tetras” as well as “rag′sma,” by the JACK violinist Chris Otto. Although I’ve enjoyed those pieces on recordings, I felt a need to check in on the Glass Ensemble. The composer was present in the audience but no longer performs with this band, so this was an opportunity to hear the group’s veteran music director, Michael Riesman, lead younger players like the saxophonist Sam Sadigursky.When interpreting the composer’s landmark “Glassworks” album from 1982, the ensemble brought a bass-heavy thump that reflected real love for the “Walkman” mix — created in its time “for your personal cassette player,” a way for Glass to put his music in a useful dialogue with contemporary pop styles (a lesson that the Bang on a Can crew took to heart in their own careers).Conrad Tao, left, and Tyshawn Sorey playing the music of Morton Feldman at Roulette.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNext, at the BRIC House Ballroom, I heard a performance by the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who is known for his fusion of avant-garde jazz and London club music, but here stuck to flutes, as part of a serene South Asian-influenced quartet led by the vocalist (and sometime bassist) Ganavya. Call it another sign of an aesthetically confident festival: Here, artists are not required to stay in expected lanes.Early Saturday evening, Roulette hosted the symphonic, brawling, experimental, tuneful big-band music of David Sanford; slightly overlapping, in the BRIC lobby, was the Momenta Quartet’s presentation of Alvin Singleton’s string quartets. Sanford, one of my favorite living composers, conducted his own music, in which you can hear his taste for artists as wide-ranging as Helmut Lachenmann and Charles Mingus.

    A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordI stayed for Sanford’s entire set before watching the Momenta players handle the climactic, interlocking figures from Singleton’s third quartet with an acrobatic ease; after that, they brought Romantic feeling to the fourth. This varied sequence of music by two living Black composers, ecstatic on its own terms, also put the lie to claims that you’ll sometimes hear from bigger institutions that say they are retreating from “classical music” in an effort to appeal to new audiences.The composer Henry Threadgill, second from the right, was in the audience for a program of his music.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWhen programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center say such things — fewer string quartets, like Momenta, more electric bass, as in Sanford’s band — you can understand the point, and maybe even agree with it in principle. But with the Long Play festival, Bang On a Can replies: “Why not both, and why not back to back?”Also on Saturday night, I caught a performance at Public Records by the trio Thumbscrew, with Mary Halvorson on guitar, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. In addition to Thumbscrew’s own vibrant compositions, the trio also let loose a wild take on Mingus’s “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.”This kind of wide array was on offer all weekend. The next day, I traveled from a set of electronic music by the composer Ash Fure to a quartet performance led by the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.

    ANIMAL_LONGPLAY from Ash Fure on Vimeo.Though visually arresting, an environment combining art installation and avant-house-music light show, Fure’s new concept — a kind of thumping club from hell — seemed starkly limited as musical matter compared with thrilling past chamber works on the album “Something to Hunt.” Half an hour later, at BAMcafé, Brennan’s quartet interpreted languid-then-convulsive pieces like “Space for Hour,” from her recent album “More Touch”; her electronically outfitted vibraphone playing belongs in a conversation with the Ash Fures of the world.

    More Touch by Patricia BrennanFrom there, I enjoyed the first 75 minutes of a radical yet sensitive take on Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories,” with Conrad Tao on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. This is originally a piano solo, yet Sorey’s skittering cymbal work was closely attuned to the score, his floor toms tuned to highlight the densest chordal moments in Tao’s interpretation of the notated material.I would happily have stayed for the final minutes but needed to rush to hear a band playing the music of Threadgill’s Very Very Circus outfit. The guitarist Brandon Ross, the tuba player Marcus Rojas and the drummer Gene Lake were all veterans of that ensemble; here, they brought works like “Little Pocket Size Demons” to life in the company of younger players, including the guitarist Miles Okazaki.From left, Brandon Ross, Marcus Rojas, Yosvany Terry, Gene Lake, José Dávila, Ron Caswell and Miles Okazaki performing Threadgill’s music at the Mark Morris Dance Center.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThreadgill isn’t likely to play the Very Very Circus music himself again, but he was in the audience on Sunday to appreciate the birth of a new repertory band in his honor; he soaked up applause from his seat, just as Glass had.The weekend was so rich, it hardly mattered that Sunday night’s planned closing set, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had to progress without the participation of the group’s sole remaining founder, the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who tested positive for Covid-19 before the gig. Hutchings bravely stepped in on short notice, and the potent, anchoring work of the percussionist Famoudou Don Moye recalled some of his first recorded performances with the group, after he joined in the early 1970s. Hutchings didn’t try to sound like Mitchell, but instead gave listeners a taste of the brawny, insistent tenor sax sound that we hadn’t heard the previous day in his appearance with Ganavya.Such is the strength of Long Play. When a veteran headliner has to drop out, there’s still something else to savor. And when a veteran like Meredith Monk does hit the stage — as she did for Friday night’s opening concert — she is apt to bring a new vigor to vintage works like her “Tokyo Cha Cha,” which she performed, complete with choreography, for nearly 20 grooving, ethereal minutes.Pray that this festival continues, and that it expands. It should become a destination event; and if it does, it’s going to need some bigger rooms — or a bigger schedule — to serve a public that is already showing that it wants to hear all of this music. More

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      Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz

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      A group of artists are reimagining the 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” for Bang on a Can’s Long Play festival.Bang on a Can had big plans for 2020.Before the pandemic started, this classical music collective was busy planning its most ambitious festival yet in New York City: a three-day event called “Long Play,” with acts stretched across multiple venues in Brooklyn.In moving beyond their storied, single-day marathons, Bang on a Can was signaling new ambitions, and was going toe-to-toe with other major avant-garde bashes like the Big Ears Festival in Tennessee.Of course, those designs were plowed under. So Bang on a Can reacted nimbly and quickly by commissioning artists from those scuttled dates to write solo pieces that were premiered online. Those “pandemic solos,” as they have been called, became a tradition of their own. (Some of them showed up as programming last year at the collective’s summer festival.)Still, there was a sense of something lost.“We had this gigantic idea of how to expand the marathon into Long Play,” David Lang, the composer and Bang on a Can co-founder, told The New York Times in April 2020. “I’m sure we’ll do that again, should the world ever get back to normal.”Now, it’s normal — enough — for another go at it. Long Play comes to New York City this weekend at seven venues in Downtown Brooklyn, from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. There are familiar names on the lineup, but also ones that suggest Bang on a Can has its ears open to the work of younger artists. (Friday night’s sets by Jeff Tobias and the Dither guitar quartet offer some of that generational variety.)The festival won’t be a retread of the 2020 program. “Mostly, this is new stuff,” Lang said in an interview. And a sparkling highlight comes at the close, on Sunday night: a thorough, multilayered reimagining of the saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album “The Shape of Jazz to Come.” The performance will feature a band led by Coleman’s son, Denardo, who held the drum chair in his father’s groups over several decades (including in “Haven’t Been Where I Left,” a piece the elder Coleman, who died in 2015, wrote and sometimes performed with the Bang on a Can All-Stars).Denardo Coleman, left, and Tacuma during a recent rehearsal.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesThis weekend’s take on “Shape” will also include a 20-person ensemble, conducted by Awadagin Pratt and playing new arrangements of all six compositions from the album. These have been written by a dizzyingly varied roster of artists — including the vocalist and electronics virtuoso Pamela Z (who arranged “Lonely Woman”) and the orchestral and big band composer David Sanford (who took on the boppish “Chronology”).“There are all these threads that go through the festival,” Lang said. “Threads of young composers, and threads of dead composers. And threads of modernist music and threads of free jazz.”The idea is for audiences to be able to follow their own stylistic predilections. “But all of these threads lead to this piece, and to this concert,” Lang noted. “We designed some of the concerts to interfere with other concerts; nothing interferes with this concert.”To prepare for this festival climax, Denardo Coleman has been rehearsing his own core group of players on a weekly basis. On a recent afternoon, in a modishly designed living and rehearsal space near Penn Station in Manhattan, he drilled the group, now called Ornette Expressions, through the album’s six tunes, twice.The performers come from different generations: Ulmer, left, played wth Ornette Coleman in the 1970s, while Moran didn’t get to know him until the 2000s.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAlthough the music comes from “Shape,” the musicians come from different generations. The guitarist James Blood Ulmer and the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma both played with Coleman’s father in the 1970s. In an interview after a rehearsal, Coleman said that the ensemble’s pianist, Jason Moran, hadn’t made his way to Ornette Coleman’s home until the early 2000s; he was already a leading light in the contemporary jazz scene, and quickly built a rapport with one of the great melodists of the field’s avant-garde.Filling out the ensemble are two up-and-coming musicians: the saxophonist Lee Odom and the trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr. The first time they all played one of the compositions, “Peace,” they hewed somewhat closely to the original, an emotionally complex work that manages to be at once mournful and finger-snapping.After a break — and after Moran had to leave — the tune took a turn, with Roney plugging his trumpet into a wah-wah pedal. This time, his electric trumpet lines wove around Odom’s acoustic, prayerful alto sax playing: even more searching and heated.Roney, on trumpet.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“We’re doing our arrangement right now,” Denardo Coleman said after the take was over, though he added that “it may not be that way” at the concert on Sunday. It’s likely to turn out different because the day of that rehearsal, he had only just received the finished arrangement. And much of the balance between his group and the sinfonietta was yet to be hashed out.In a phone interview, Z said “everybody was asked to write for this sinfonietta.” There was “a little side note,” she added, saying to “also please leave space for Denardo’s ensemble to jump in, here and there.”When arranging “Lonely Woman” — perhaps Ornette Coleman’s most famous melody — she brought the work in line with her own electronic music. “I played with the music the same way that I play with sampled sound. I really stretched it out, and I compressed it.”Odom on saxophone.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesUlmer on guitar.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesStill, her contribution is entirely acoustic — unlike many of her solo sets. “It starts out with really high harmonics on the strings and bowed vibes,” Z said. “And the first time you hear the melody, it’s played a quarter of the speed that it’s supposed to go, being played on a tuba. So I just had a lot of fun, playing with time in it.”That’s exactly what Denardo Coleman was hoping for. “The way my father would have approached it would have been that everybody had equal participation,” he said. “Meaning he wasn’t just the leader and everybody was there to make him sound good. If you had an idea, you could take it.”Hence, Coleman said, each arranger’s freedom in working with the original tunes.“It wasn’t as if we said ‘OK, just orchestrate the song the way it is,’” he said. “They may reconstruct, deconstruct, turn it inside out, something else. The tune — the composition — is just a starting point. That just leads you into some other territory. And that other territory is what it’s really about.” More