7/4

June 2, 2008 Music Review | Bang on a Can Marathon Festival’s 21st Birthday Celebration Blurs Boundaries, Dusk Till Dawn By STEVE SMITH, NYT Musical calendar watchers love the seeming portent of anniversaries that end in a zero or a five. But in America, turning 21 is meaningful, too. It’s an age that comes with a certain implied license to go a bit crazy, to take risks, maybe even to lose control for a while. Perhaps that explains what was by all accounts a first for the Bang on a Can Marathon, which began in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center on Saturday night: a mosh pit. The unlikely occurrence took place during a frenetic 4:15 a.m. performance on Sunday by Dan Deacon, a Baltimore rock musician known as an exuberant, crowd-pleasing one-man band. Maniacally bouncing young bodies crashed into one another with gleeful abandon. A few brave souls body-surfed atop outstretched hands. Bang on a Can has long included performers from outside contemporary classical circles in its annual marathons, both to blur musical boundaries and to lure new audiences. If it has never seen a response like this one, well, no one else is quite like Mr. Deacon. Normally the center of attention (and often planted amid audience members), here he was a ghost in the machine, controlling the booming, buzzing electronic patterns of his “Ultimate Reality Part 3” from a hidden position. Onstage two rock drummers, Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman, bashed tribal rhythms in tandem; overhead on a video screen, scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger films split and morphed into psychedelic swirls. Mr. Deacon’s geeky hedonism — all 15 minutes’ worth — was a high point of the 12-hour event, which Bang on a Can produced in collaboration with the mostly pop-oriented River to River Festival and arts>World Financial Center. Two other performers from alternative-rock circles also attracted their own retinues. The most polarizing, to judge by comments afterward, was the guitarist Marnie Stern, who blissfully strummed raucous chords and tapped spidery solos over a piercing looped drone. Some observers proclaimed Ms. Stern’s performance unbearable. I found her intensity oddly seductive if you could get past the resemblance of her sound to that of a swarm of bees amplified by a tinny P.A. system in a crowded gymnasium. Of greater general appeal was Owen Pallett, a Canadian singer and violinist whose work under the name Final Fantasy mixes swords-and-sorcery imagery with a vulnerable gay sensibility. Mr. Pallett played three of his songs during a powerful 10 p.m. set by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. He then joined the group in “Twelve Polearms,” a fanciful commissioned work that wavered between sweetness and suspense. Those performers aside, the marathon mostly presented new iterations of familiar themes. The vibrant chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound kicked off the proceedings at 6 p.m. with a movement from John Adams’s “Son of Chamber Symphony,” and much later offered a staggeringly creative arrangement of the Beatles’ abstract sound collage “Revolution 9,” arranged by Matt Marks. Signal, a new chamber orchestra, made an auspicious New York debut at midnight with a powerful account of Steve Reich’s “Daniel Variations.” Musicians from around the world attested to the global reach of the Bang on a Can aesthetic. Crash Ensemble, from Ireland, played colorful works by Donnacha Dennehy, its founder, and Terry Riley, as well as an overlong exploration of altered intonation and hammering rhythms by Arnold Dreyblatt. Ensemble Nikel, a quartet from Tel Aviv, brought pieces by Chaya Czernowin, Sivan Cohen Elias and Ruben Seroussi, which, though filled with fascinating spurts and bursts, had little shape or momentum. Bang on a Can’s founders — Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang — were each represented by a striking piece. The solo vocalists Pamela Z, Caleb Burhans and Bora Yoon fashioned attractive and deeply personal creations using electronic effects. As dawn approached, the Canadian ensemble Contact presented a faithful arrangement of Brian Eno’s meditative electronic piece, “Discreet Music.” The marathon concluded with a 5:30 a.m. performance of Stockhausen’s “Stimmung,” sung with intense concentration by the sextet Toby Twining Music as the sun rose. High overhead, birds perched on wires near the ceiling chirped a lively counterpoint. Whether in protest or in appreciation was anyone’s guess.

The theremins I've heard sound a bit bright to have no harmonics. That's why they sound bright - the harmonics. I don't need to go to a Physics lab, I can just turn on a synthesizer to hear a sine tone.

It depends. What kind of guitar is that? .

The other hand controls the volume.

It sounds like a sine tone with extra harmonics. .

Thanks for sharing.

I didn't even read the Wiki...I've seen the swastika in Hindu and Tibetan art. I forgot about the native american usage. It's ancient . .

I'm surprised anyone in the West knew what it was at the time. .

at one point, I bought a bunch of modern classical on LP and then my turntable died. I'll get a new one someday.

no mo' donuts for me. .

This afternoon I saw a couple of local teens - gang members - wearing this head dress. Charming. .

I wish I had good North Indian food in my neighborhood. There's a massive Indian community about 10 miles from here, maybe the largest in the NYC area. But nothing around the corner. I've been hankerin' for some lamb vindaloo for a few days. .

May 31, 2008 Music Review Portraying Spirituality of Messiaen as Organist By ALLAN KOZINN The works of Olivier Messiaen that have traveled best are chamber, vocal and orchestral scores. But Messiaen was an organist, and he composed an imposing body of works for his instrument. This year several organists have taken the occasion of Messiaen’s centenary to make that point. Gail Archer began a six-concert tour of the major Messiaen works in January, and undertook a tour of Manhattan’s organs while she was at it, playing each concert in a different church. For her finale, on Thursday evening, she performed the huge “Livre du Saint Sacrement” (1984) at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This 18-movement, 100-minute work was Messiaen’s last organ score, and it makes the greatest demands on both player and listener. Messiaen was a believer in Roman Catholic mysticism, and to a great extent his complete body of works is a symbolic lexicon through which he explored the mysteries of faith. For him, meditation was turbulent rather than serene, and belief was a matter of intellectual and emotional struggle rather than of simple acquiescence or platitudinous certitude. And the music he wrote to express his thoughts on divinity — particularly in the “Livre du Saint Sacrement” — tended to be dissonant and texturally broad, with walls of abrasive, reedy timbre supported by heavy pedal tones. Occasionally, Messiaen stepped back for a gentler, more translucent rumination, as in “La Transsubstantiation” and the two “Prière” movements. Within Ms. Archer’s vivid, muscular performance, in fact, were moments of striking simplicity, most notably the declarative single-line melodies, based on plainchant, that open several movements and seem like straightforward professions of faith before the inevitable grappling with the terrors of the sublime. In the more expansively dense sections Ms. Archer played with an unflagging power and assertiveness. Those are necessary qualities here: the best way to deal with this score as a listener is to stop wondering why Messiaen painted God in such harsh colors and let the music envelop you. When it does, Messiaen’s vision becomes clear. Ms. Archer made that possible, but she was working in tough conditions. Listeners who might have been expecting something else began streaming out before the third movement. Others seemed more concerned with taking flash photographs or chatting. And in balancing the need for ventilation against the need for quiet, St. Patrick’s chose ventilation: its unusually loud air-conditioning system rumbled through the entire performance.

And of course there was this one, couldn't have been a very good influence:

I had this on a t-shirt when I was a teenager.

any pictures? Nothing worthwhile. As I said, the bush was removed.

I'm not sure where the anger towards DD comes from. Unless you're blaming them for intentionally putting her in a scarf designed to strike fear into the hearts of the lunatic right? It's bad karma. Because Rachael dislikes Chinese food? Well there you go...what goes around, comes around.

I'm not sure where the anger towards DD comes from. Unless you're blaming them for intentionally putting her in a scarf designed to strike fear into the hearts of the lunatic right? It's bad karma.

any pictures?

Bret Michaels ...

Smokey Robinson AND Earth Wind and Fire? I'd say she's batting .500, possibly .750, depending on when the U2 concert was. OK. That's the only hip thing about this story.

May 30, 2008 Condi May Not Be A Rocker, But Kiss Likes Her By REUTERS Filed at 10:54 a.m. ET REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have attended just four rock concerts in her life, but the rock band Kiss apparently thinks she is pretty cool. what is this, high school? After a day-long international conference on Iraq, Rice was dining Thursday evening with Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt at a 19th-century villa when a call came in that Kiss was in the Nordic capital on a tour and wanted to see her, aides said. The U.S. group had heard Rice was in town. "It was really fun to meet Kiss and Gene Simmons," Rice told reporters on her plane en route to Iceland on Friday. Simmons, who sings and plays bass, is famed for posing while wagging his long tongue. Rice and her entourage returned to their hotel and gathered with the rock stars in a conference room where photos were taken of the occasion -- without the band members wearing their trademark black-and-white facial make-up. Rice, who plays the piano and considered a career in music before turning to Soviet studies, told reporters she enjoyed "the whole range of music" but had only been to four rock concerts. She proceeded to list them. At age 10, she saw Paul Revere and the Raiders. At age 16, on her first date with an Air Force cadet, she saw Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Later Rice saw Earth Wind and Fire, and she said she has also been to a U2 concert. there is nothing hip about this story!

Happy Birthday Bill. ...and many mo'!

May 30, 2008 Music Review | Aaron Parks A Friendly Vibe, Made Up of Shared Sensibilities and Common Repertory By BEN RATLIFF, NYT Wednesday night at Smalls in the West Village was a friends-of-friends gig, an intersection of two circles. Aaron Parks, the young pianist who led the band, played with the bassist Ben Street and the drummer Jeff Ballard. The Parks-Street alliance comes from a current version of the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band; the Street-Ballard alliance comes from years of playing together in various rhythm sections, including one from an earlier Rosenwinkel band. Through the absent Mr. Rosenwinkel, there was a bit of shared repertory. But in a much more general way there was a shared, up-to-date field of jazz reference, one that includes the short and intricate rhythmic junctions of bebop, the high-wire feeling of the pianist Paul Bley’s playing, slow ballads with backbeats, and rock put to new purposes. It was a casual set with a slightly out-of-tune piano, the kind of night that jazz culture is built on. (About a quarter of the audience members arrived with instrument cases.) This wasn’t a working band, and the job wasn’t preparation for a CD. (All that comes in August, when Mr. Parks releases his first album on Blue Note, with his own compositions and a different band.) No matter: the show was loose but well defined, provocative but to the point. Most of all it felt good. From the start — a version of Sonny Rollins’s “Airegin” — Mr. Street played fiercely. He set up large areas around the beat, loosely and generally defining it, phrasing roughly but always in tune. Mr. Ballard put a lot in those big spaces: he played with sticks close to the skins and metal, changing the flow each bar, often overturning the old logic of jazz drumming by making the snare and the tom-toms maintain the rhythm and hitting the cymbals for accents. And Mr. Parks started stretching out his improvised lines, slowing down their tempos over the steady groove of bass and drums, extending them until it felt as if they would snap off. This was cerebrally intense, but later, in Mr. Rosenwinkel’s “Zhivago,” the set grew physically intense, with all three players locking in and busying up the music. That arc continued through the set’s end, when the guitarist Mike Moreno dropped by and plugged in. As a quartet the band sped through Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Anthropology,” abstracting the melody and playing it straight only at the end. More off the musicians’ common path was a version of Robert Wyatt’s “Sea Song,” a weird and moving tune from the early 1970s with strange harmonic shifts and ominous repetition. It worked. Widening the common repertory is a constant back-of-the-head concern for young jazz musicians. Bjork and Radiohead songs have recently become lingua franca on bandstands; Mr. Parks is sharp to think that Mr. Wyatt, the misfit British pop songwriter with a jazz background, could fit in that playlist too. If he’s right, he’s a step ahead of everyone else.

the terrorists win. .