Z, Pamela

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares189 Views

    Review: A Pianist’s Inheritance Inspires Little Masterpieces

    by

    Adam Tendler’s program of works that he commissioned from 16 composers after the death of his father is emotionally involving and musically rewarding.When the pianist Adam Tendler received an inheritance — really, a manila envelope stuffed with cash — it did not take him long to think of a smart way to put it to use.Weeks after his father’s death, and being handed that money, Tendler began to commission new piano solos around the theme of inheritance. As he recalled in an essay for The New York Times, he realized that by doing this, he could both process his grief as well as fashion a program that could live on in his creative practice.It’s a touching and sagacious concept — though hardly one guaranteed to be an artistic success. The classical world has seen a number of similar, small-scale commissioning initiatives since the beginning of the pandemic; even when they draw some of the brightest names in the field, as Tendler has done, the result has often seemed frustratingly diffuse.But Tendler’s project, “Inheritances,” registered as emotionally involving — a musically rewarding and tightly plotted 80-minute set when he performed the collection on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York. It was presented in collaboration with Liquid Music, the group that helped the pianist develop the show over multiple years.Nearly every one of the 16 composers on the bill responded to Tendler’s prompt with an A-game effort. Missy Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine” opens with nervy, high-register oscillations that give way to grave bass interjections, before making space for a more relaxed treatment of melody in its middle section. But the score isn’t a simplistic journey toward acceptance: Some of the initial mechanistic churning returns at the close.Other composers reveled in similar ambiguity: music that suggested some arc of understanding, while also observing the persistent notes of friction in a relationship. In its opening bars, Scott Wollschleger’s “Outsider Song” includes sustained-tone airs of mourning, stark prepared-piano pitches and bursts of extended technique. So far, so typical, you might think, at least when it comes to post-John Cage experimentalism.But before long, Wollschleger’s piece works a gorgeous changeup by allowing its more striated tones to flower into full motivic passages, beautiful on their own terms even as the overall harmonic world remains somber. Call it a small masterpiece — a term you might also apply to Timo Andres’s “An Open Book,” which moves between contrapuntal strictures and more free-associative lines with casual discipline.It was a joy to hear so much good music from so many contemporary artists — and in such quick succession; “Inheritances” moves fast, and without an intermission. Just as I was fully appreciating the dancing qualities of Angélica Negrón’s aesthetic in “You Were My Age,” the rug was pulled, giving way to the melodic gifts of John Glover’s “In the City of Shy Hunters.” When Christopher Cerrone’s hypnotic and meditative “Area of Refuge” ended abruptly, without the kind of closing, inventive flourishes I’ve come to treasure in his music, I glanced at the program notes and learned that it was written shortly after his own father’s unexpected death.If any piece appeared less distinct than what had come before, that was largely on account of the strong standard set by this cohort. Throughout, you could hear some artists plying familiar ground with assurance. That was the case with Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much,” which relied on her practice of looping, editing and phasing samples of someone’s recorded voice — here, Tendler’s — to create motifs.Some composers took risks, as Marcos Balter did when punctuating the more abstruse edges of his piece, “False Memories,” with select, dreamy sequences of jazz-chord harmony. His program note said that this idiom was not usual for him, but that’s no reason for him to stop pursuing the line of thought in future pieces; the result on Saturday was transporting.It would have been enough for Tendler to perform these discrete compositional languages persuasively and call it a night. But there was also a sense of true dramatic stakes. The piece “hushing,” by inti figgis-vizueta, played out over archival video of Tendler as a child; the intense chordal pounding of the piece had the feel of eerie, silent-film piano accompaniment. And I teared up when Tendler spoke directly about his father over Darian Donovan Thomas’s gently reflective work “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers.”Tendler’s concert, by the end, amounted not only to a display of contemporary compositional force, but also a true show. The 92nd Street Y date was a one-night affair, but I hope that additional audiences can experience the live version of “Inheritances” — and that Tendler chooses to close the book on it with a recorded album.Adam TendlerPerformed on Saturday at the 92nd Street Y, New York, Manhattan. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Composers Give New Shape to Ornette Coleman’s Jazz

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Pamela Z Manipulates Voices in a Virtual Tour of Times Square

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPamela Z Manipulates Voices in a Virtual Tour of Times Square“Times3” is the latest work by a veteran composer, vocalist, multimedia artist and “wild virtuoso.”“Times3,” a collaboration between Pamela Z (photographed here in San Francisco) and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle, is part of a pandemic edition of the Prototype festival of music theater.Credit…Andres Gonzalez for The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021The composer, vocalist and multimedia artist Pamela Z was supposed to have a good 2020. She started the year in Italy, as a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, working on a new performance piece that was to have its debut in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.The piece, “Simultaneous,” was to capitalize on the strengths Ms. Z, 64, has developed over a long and celebrated career. It would deploy her classically trained voice, her subtle (and sometimes humorous) layers of projected images and her skills as a live manipulator of media — especially her theatrical use of gesture controllers, wireless devices that let her physical movements affect sound.“I consider my instrument really to be the combination of my voice and the electronics,” she said in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco. “As a performer, I’m not just singing and then putting some effects on that. And I’m not just making electronic sounds. I’m actually simultaneously singing and speaking, and, in real time, sampling and processing and treating my voice to create these layers of sound that I consider to be a composition.”Ms. Z performing in San Francisco in 2015.Credit…Charles SmithWhen the pandemic hit, it cut her Rome residency short and indefinitely delayed her MoMA premiere. That was a blow not just for Ms. Z, but also for fans of experimental art in New York. While her music has lately been heard in the city as part of the Resonant Bodies Festival and the flutist Claire Chase’s ambitious “Density 2036” project, her more conceptual work as an installation artist and multimedia creator is not shown often enough here.The Prototype festival this month will offer something of a corrective, presenting “Times3,” a streaming soundscape collaboration between Ms. Z and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle. It comes as part of a pandemic overhaul to this annual festival of new opera and wide-ranging music theater; five of the six presentations in this year’s edition, which runs Friday to Jan. 16, will exist only online. (“Times3” is free; attendees need only register online beforehand, starting Jan. 9, to receive a link and password for the audio.)“Times3” gives listeners something of a crash course in Ms. Z’s ever-evolving practice. “I haven’t jettisoned anything, I’m just adding things,” she said. “At one time it would have been accurate to call myself a musician. Now it’s only a fragment of what my work encompasses.”Ms. Z was still finishing up the final version of “Times3,” alternately titled “Times x Times x Times,” in the days ahead of its premiere. The half-hour or so piece, a meditation on the past, present and future of Times Square, is built from interviews that Mr. Sobelle conducted with scholars and theorists who hold vivid perspectives on the neighborhood. The musical form it takes is Ms. Z’s responsibility.“I tend to work with everything from full sentences to short phrases to just individual words, even syllables and phonemes,” Ms. Z said, describing her editing process using the audio program Pro Tools. “And I’m just capturing all those little pieces and naming them so I can use them as building blocks, to structure the piece.”It’s a process familiar to Ms. Z, since some of her earlier work — including 2019’s “Louder Warmer Denser,” for Ms. Chase — has involved post-produced fragments of interviews. And the way Ms. Z layers her own voice, during live performances, has also prepared the composer for some of the challenges of “Times3.”You can hear that facility for editing in her other recent projects. A concert livestreamed from her home studio and presented by Mills College — featuring, in her description, “voice, real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, wireless gesture controllers and interactive videos” — is technically startling and fluidly soulful; at one point, Ms. Z uses looping to build her own backup choir.[embedded content]The performance includes some pieces heard on her album “A Delay Is Better,” released on the Starkland label in 2004; that album also gives an effective overview of her work. A track like “Badagada” demonstrates her love of traditional operatic singing as well as of Minimalism and live electronic manipulation, while “Pop Titles ‘You’” works as a clever found-poem in sound. “Geekspeak,” which lets speakers other than Ms. Z attempt to define the essence of geekery, approaches interviewing and sound editing as forms of storytelling and art-making.Born in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised in Colorado, Ms. Z studied vocal music and education. Initially, she pursued more traditional voice-and-guitar singer-songwriter work — with “a bit of classical music bizarrely laced in,” she said in an email — before committing to a more experimental approach. In the 1980s, she moved to San Francisco, where she still lives, creating solo performances as well as fulfilling an increasing number of commissions — including chamber music, dance scores and dramatic pieces — from groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird.Her “Times3” partner, Mr. Sobelle, worked with Jecca Barry, a director of the Prototype festival, on past productions. The festival’s organizers recommended that he and Ms. Z do a piece about Times Square. Mr. Sobelle was keen to partner with her; he said that he had been aware of her work “a little bit, from a friend who suggested that I take a look, at another moment, just to see a wild virtuoso.”And when Ms. Z watched the eight-millimeter short film that had opened Mr. Sobelle’s 2005 stage work “All Wear Bowlers” — “a beautiful, poetic piece that was styled after silent films,” she said — she was sold on the collaboration.After discussions with Prototype, the two artists decided not to make listeners venture to Times Square to access the audio. Instead, by using interviews with people familiar with the area, they decided to create what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti might have called a Times Square of the mind.“There’s a landscape architect; there’s somebody who’s a theater stage manager, who’s stage-managed a lot of shows on Broadway,” Ms. Z said. “We interviewed some historians, people who knew about the Indigenous people who lived on that land. And we interviewed a person who has all kinds of theories about what would happen if there were no longer humans — and what changes would occur.”Mr. Sobelle conducted the interviews, then furnished Ms. Z with the raw sound files, as well as notes about ways the transcripts might be layered to produce dramatic resonance.In this way, “Times3” is closely related to the most current version of “Simultaneous,” broadcast last month by Deutschland Radio. In that 44-minute piece, the thematic focus is on the contemporary culture of multitasking, and Ms. Z’s jaundiced view of it.For source material, she interviewed and recorded her fellow Rome Prize recipients on the topic, preparing for the live performances at MoMA. Instead of waiting for those appearances to be rescheduled, she created a purely audio iteration for the German radio station.At the start of the radio version, fans of Ms. Z might find themselves impatient for her voice. But the narrative rhythm of her editing has humor, which makes the build toward her full bel canto-infused technique worth the wait. Her first noticeable vocal contributions come in scintillating, refracted shards around the 22nd minute. From there, her vocalizations grow more prominent. (Make sure to catch a lovely song in the second half.)“Times3” audiences can expect a similar structure. “You’ll hear my voice because I have some actual singing parts,” she said. “Also because Geoff insisted on interviewing me.”Mr. Sobelle said he was impressed with what Ms. Z was “able to cobble together out of strange pieces of material.” Though he was disinclined to offer audiences the equivalent of liner notes for “Times3,” or anything that would suggest an experimental work needs special explanation, he did say that “it’s not like a piece of journalism or like a historical document.”“Even though we’re speaking to academics and journalists and architects and city planners and people like that,” he added, “she’s looking for musicality. It’s very much an art piece.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More