Margaret Bonds: pianist composer, and teacher

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was a pianist, composer, and teacher of music. I probably first became aware of her as a teenager, through some of her arrangements of spirituals for "classical" voice, especially as sung by Leontyne Price (e.g. He's Got The Whole World In His Hand, which Price commissioned from Bonds in the early 1960s) but have only recently delved more deeply into her work, and realized that many of her compositions --- the classical songs and some piano pieces are what I've really gotten into so far--- should be considered classics of 20th century American music. I expect they will become---indeed, hopefully, many of them already are---a permanent part of the classical music repertoire.

Most recently, I was reminded of Bonds by an excellent essay by pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, whose blog Do the M@th is essential reading for those interested in jazz and/or classical music. "Black music teachers in the age of segregation" emphasizes their contribution to the musical development of jazz musicians, both by teaching European techniques and theory, and leading ensembles often covering a wide range of music styles, sometimes integrating African-derived and African-American-developed elements and procedures. Iverson doesn't mention Bonds in his essay, but she is yet another example of a black musician whose role as teacher was important in American music---although her compositions and (sadly, probably under-documented) live performances are equally important contributions.

Bonds as teacher, as well as performer and composer, figures prominently in the diaries and essays of Ned Rorem---she was one of his childhood piano teachers in Chicago, and helped him with his first forays into notated composition. Rorem's discussion of his time with her, as well as with other childhood teachers, in the essay "The Piano in My Life" from Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary is engrossing.

It was time for a real teacher... Margaret Bonds .... at twenty-two was a middle-western "personality", having played Carpenter's Concertino with the Chicago Symphony under the composer's direction, and being herself a composer of mainly spiritual arrangements and of original songs in collaboration with Langston Hughes. ... At our first lesson, she played me some ear-openers, The White Peacock by Griffes, and Carpenter's American Tango. Had I ever heard American music before? ...

Margaret Bonds played with the authority of a professional, an authority I'd never heard in a living room, an authority stemming from the fact that she herself was a composer and thus approached all music from the inside out, an authority that was contagious. [...]

The first piece I wrote down, "The Glass Cloud," was influenced by Margaret's other prize pupil, Gerald Cook. [...] In the years to come his identity with Margaret would shift from student to colleague as the two-piano team, Bonds and Cook, became a glamorous enterprise at Cerutti's in New York, and at Spivy's Roof. When Margaret went her separate way to marriage, motherhood, documentation of Negro song, opera writing, and death, Gerald turned into the greatest living accompanist of the Blues, working first with the lamented Libby Holman, then--and still--with Alberta Hunter.

Did I outgrow Margaret Bonds? Why were lessons discontinued? If there was an objection to a seeming glib jazziness chez elle, Margaret thought of herself as classical and deep. (Conversely, I feel as influenced by prewar jazz as by "serious" music. Not the tune itself but Billie Holiday's way with a tune taught me to knead a vocal phrase, just as Count Basie's piano playing still shapes my piano composing.) In any case Margaret and I lost track of each other until we had all moved East during the war. Then we remained close friends until she died.

The whole essay is a great read, simultaneously sketching with vivid strokes aspects of an era in American music and American life, and of Rorem's musical development.

There is much more about Bonds at the pages for the 2016-2017 exhibitions "Margaret Bonds: Composer and Activist" and "Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes: A Musical Friendship" at the Georgetown University Library (where some of her papers are held) including music manuscripts, photographs, concert programs, and correspondence from, among others, Rorem, Hughes, and Andy Razaf (whose stationery sports a sidebar listing songs he composed and/or wrote the lyrics to). Directly relevant to the matter of Black teachers and the institutions they worked in as a crucial resource in the development of American music is this from the exhibition text:

Throughout the 1950s, Bonds continued her work as a composer, performer and teacher. In addition to private lessons, she joined the staff of East Side House Settlement, a non-profit social services organization committed to serving New York’s underprivileged youth. At East Side House she taught weekly music classes, hosted performances featuring African-American composers, and served as music director for the annual spring musical.

There may be a lot to rediscover about her influence, as a teacher, on jazz and classical musicians, especially African-American ones, during this period in New York. East Side House Settlement is still active.

As far as her work as composer is concerned, from what is available on disc or digital streaming I'm particularly partial to her pieces for solo piano, and her songs. What is available in these genres is extremely good, and should find a permanent place in the repertoire of pianists and singers. Although the list of works in her Wikipedia entry is not lengthy, there is much that looks promising that does not appear to available in recordings or online performances; one hopes that will change.

 The Bells, based on the spiritual Peter Go Ring Dem Bells, from her Spiritual Suite for Piano, beautifully melds influences from European and American classical music (especially Debussy, Ravel, and perhaps Americans like Charles Tomlinson Griffes (who crops up in the Rorem quote above)) with African-American spirituals and pianistic touches reminiscent of jazz or perhaps the popular music of the time. Here it is played by Thomas Otten as part of a 2013 symposium on Bonds' work:

The other two movements, Dry Bones and Troubled Water, are also on youtube played by Otten at this symposium; below, Troubled Water, based on the spiritual Wade in the Water, is played by Samantha Ege:

The Youtube listing for Ege's performance gives the date of Troubled Water as 1967, but Randye Jones' online biography (which also displays the abovementioned concert program) also lists it as part of the Spirituals Suite, which it dates to the 1940s or early 1950s.

Bonds' setting, published in 1959, of Three Dream Portraits by Langston Hughes is superbly done. The only version for low male voice with piano that I've found on Youtube in acceptable sound is an excellent one by baritone Thomas Hampson with Kuang-Hao Wang on piano:

(Dorian Hall deserves mention for a superb performance with Dr. Timothy Cheek on piano, but there is unfortunately a lot of distortion in the recording---this would appear to be a casually recorded, though musically top-notch, recital.) There are several female voice versions on Youtube in good sound, for example one sung by Bonnie Pomfret with Laura Gordy on piano; another by Icy Simpson with Artina McCain on piano and one by an unidentified singer and the Ritz Chamber Players. The live recital recording of no. 1 in the series, Minstrel Man, by Nicole Taylor with Joan Sasaki on piano, is also worth mentioning, though the recorded sound quality is not perfect. Yolanda Rhodes and Josefina Gandolfi also do an excellent job with this song.

The settings of Hughes' Songs of the Seasons are also excellent. Below, an excellent live performance (the vocalist is Louise Toppin) of Summer Storm from a valuable 2013 symposium on Bonds, available as a sequence of youtube videos, that includes lectures as well as performances of works by Bonds and by her teacher, Florence Price (e.g. Price's Night, beautifully sung by the extraordinary countertenor Darryl Taylor).

In this symposium Toppin also performs several excellent songs that are not listed in the Wikipedia entry on Bonds. Stopping by Woods and The Pasture, from 1958, are on texts by Robert Frost; Feast, on a text of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Winter Moon, another of the four Songs of the Seasons, is available in a studio recording by Toppin with John B. O'Brien on piano. Bonds' songs also work beautifully sung by baritone Malcolm Merriweather with Ashley Jackson on harp rather than piano: Winter Moon from Seasons, To A Brown Girl, Dead (1933) on a text by Countee Cullen, and the Three Dream Portraits appear on a CD along with Bonds' Christmas cantata, Ballad of the Brown King, to words of Langston Hughes. Little David is an example of Bonds' setting a traditional African-American spiritual melody and text:

Here, as in many of Bonds' arrangements of spirituals, the piano part doesn't provide a conventional chordal background, nor does it double the voice---it is new musical material that is entirely Bonds', and contrasts with the vocal line while being absolutely appropriate to it.

Last but not least, perhaps Bonds' best known song is her setting of Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers, composed around 1936 and first published in 1944. Bonds spoke of the great personal significance of this poem to her, in an interview with James Hatch quoted in Jones' online biography:

I was in this prejudiced university [Northwestern, where she matriculated in 1929 and where, according to Jones, "she was allowed to study but not to live or use their facilities"], this terribly prejudiced place–I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he [Langston Hughes] tells how great the black man is: And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have–here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school–and I know that poem helped save me.

A favorite performance of mine is Gerald Blanchard's, from his CD on Blue Griffin:

Thomas Hampson gives a mellower, less urgent reading, but beautifully phrased and recorded, and making the text exceptionally intelligible:

One can also find on youtube a mixed-chorus SATB arrangement of this setting---it is not clear to me whether the arrangement is by Bonds herself or not, though I suspect it is---which would be well worth tracking down by interested choirs.

There's much more to be said, and investigated, about Bonds and her work; some of the links above, especially the Kilgore dissertation and the brief online Randye Jones biography, are good starting points, as is the Song of America page on Bonds. I have a copy of Mildred Denby Green's Black Women Composers: A Genesis, which has more on Bonds, her teacher Florence Price and others, on the way, as well as an Anthology of Art Songs by Black American Composers, edited by Willis Patterson (published by Hal Leonard Corp.) that includes the score of Three Dream Portraits. I'm looking forward to seeing what I discover in this anthology, although I'll probably be studying the musical content of, rather than singing, the Dream Portraits, while searching for scores for the Songs of the Seasons and the Frost and Millay settings, which are not included in that anthology. But I'll stop here for now, and leave you to enjoy her music.

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The greatness of Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

Cecil Taylor, one of the most important musicians of our time, and one of the pioneers of what is roughly called "free" or avant-garde jazz, died on April 5, 2018, at 89 years old.  Ben Ratliff has written an obituary at the New York Times, and Ethan Iverson has written an appreciation at his blog Do The Math.

I'm not going to write extensively about his music or life here; I'm just going to give links to a few of my favorite Taylor works, mostly ones that I am intimately familiar with.  (Well, I ended up writing a fair bit about some of them.)  They're chosen primarily for their intrinsic greatness, but with the main purpose of getting people who may not be familiar with Taylor in touch with his music, so the choice may be biased a little bit towards more "accessible" pieces.  I've been toying with the idea of a post, perhaps titled "Canon and Playlist," which would include a personal canon of the music commonly referred to as "jazz".  One idea would be to include just "masterpieces of the highest order" --- you know, stuff on the level of the late Beethoven piano sonatas, Janacek's "On an Overgrown Path", etc.  (So in jazz, e.g. "Parker's Mood" (Charles Parker), the album "Saxophone Colossus" (Sonny Rollins), Lester Young's greatest performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with smaller groups in the 1930s---that sort of thing.)  The first two or three pieces I'll link here were would be my top Cecil choices for such a list (where they definitely belong). Anyone seriously interested in music owes it to themselves to listen to these pieces, several times if you don't connect the first time. You will probably find yourself richly rewarded. "Straight masterpieces", as someone said in a different context. If it weren't for the fact that Taylor grew up in Queens and settled in Brooklyn, I'd be tempted to refer to it as real Uptown Funk as well.

1. "Bulbs" from "Into the Hot", one side of a 1962 LP issued under the name of Gil Evans, but with the "Into the Hot" side composed and performed by Taylor and his group (the other, much less consequential, side, "Out of the Cool", was by Johnny Carisi). Evans was a great arranger, known especially for his work with Miles Davis, but I think he's generally considered to have acted merely as producer for this session. By turns, and often simultaneously, funky, sardonic, spooky, transcendently beautiful. Make sure and listen all the way to the end...where some amazingly beautiful things happen involving lines made of hierarchies of ascending arpeggios, calling to or layered over each other, decelerating into some calm after the high-energy drive of the central portion of the piece, then crystallizing into a hard-to-describe, somewhat raunchy, sardonic, and joyously dancing bit of riffishness, expanding again into transcendence as the arpeggiated lines layer over the cyclic riffing, then come apart centrifugally into jagged notes and long tones relaxing toward silence as they ascend, fading, into the empyrean.  Or whatever. Just don't miss it.

Cecil Taylor, piano; Jimmy Lyons, alto sax; Archie Shepp, tenor sax; Henry Grimes, bass; Sunny Murray, drums.

Like many people, probably, I was turned on to "Bulbs" long ago by a piece collected in Amiri Baraka (then writing as Leroi Jones)'s book "Black Music" (at Barnes and Noble; at Amazon) which reviewed the whole Taylor side of "Into the Hot/Out of the Cool" and singled out "Bulbs" especially. I picked it up as a teenager as part of a three-LP Impulse sampler, "Energy Essentials", being sold as a cutout, which also featured things like a 10-15 minute sampler from the alternate take of Coltrane's "Ascension", and various pieces by Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and such. I also highly recommend the other "Into the Hot" pieces. Some motives or melodic moves from "Bulbs" also appear in the other pieces. Because it is more of a contrast with "Bulbs", I recommend starting with "Mixed", where the embedded video below will take you on first click, and then replaying the video from the beginning if you want to hear "Pots" as well. "Mixed" adds Ted Curson on trumpet and Roswell Rudd on trombone, and starts in a low-key, slow, out-of-tempo vein, with muted trumpet as well as Rudd's tromobone in the mix, spacious textures and much attention to varieties of timbre, slightly reminiscent of certain veins of 20th century classical music, then morphs into a very pretty ballad episode (I hear a slight suggestion of "All the Things You Are" in places, but would be interested to know if there are any more clearly recognizable standards being alluded to here), then is taken over by a repeating, somewhat sardonic riff, which alternates with a three-note ascending chromatic line (this is one reference to the "Bulbs" material, where the line is one note longer, a chromatic 1-2-3-2), develops more complexity and segues into a superbly improvised piano-and sax duet. Great stuff from Archie Shepp on tenor. And on and on... I would class "Mixed" as a masterpiece also.

2. The second unmissable masterpiece (well, let's count "Mixed" and call it the third) I'm going to recommend is "Indent", a solo piano performance recorded in concert at Antioch College in Ohio in 1973. It starts out with incredibly funky pentatonic motives, layered, developed, combined with a more chordal "second theme" (perhaps, and with variants), and these and other materials that are introduced are built up into an increasingly complex structure which ends up spinning into intense and dissonant flurries of note-clusters. This kind of cycle is repeated a few times in the piece, with different thematic material, and also with recurrences of earlier material. A masterful composed-and-improvised sonata. If the dissonant flurries put you off at first (which won't necessarily be the case!), just hope that they will make more sense on repeated listenings, and know that there are calmer and more consonant passages, often of great harmonic and melodic beauty, on the way.

For more solo piano of this sort, Silent Tongues (Live at Montreux) was in heavy rotation (on the sorts of stations that played this stuff at all, i.e. WEMU (Eastern Michigan University) and WUOM (University of Michigan)) when I was first getting into Taylor's music.  I recommend repeated listening to one of his solo records until it is fully appreciated, though, rather than skipping around; Indent was the one that got me into it and is still my favorite.  Once you dig it, there are many more to explore...

Now, for further listening, I'll embed a few more things that I'm familiar with and love.

3. To represent early (i.e. late 1950s) Cecil, here's a 1959 take on Cole Porter's Love for Sale with Buell Neidlinger on bass and Denis Charles on drums. I wonder if anyone bought this for the hilarious (in context) noirsploitation cover expecting some smoky late-night make-out music to play when bringing a date back to their pad...I hope so. The introduction is remarkably prescient of the kind of playing Taylor was to do in later work such as Indent that makes no reference to standards, but the fusion of this with subtly-transformed but recognizable standards-and-bebop style and material is a beautiful thing. (It is further advanced in that direction than on some of his records from a few years earlier.)

4. In the abovementioned appreciation, Ethan Iverson is of course right to cite the 1960 This Nearly Was Mine, also with the Neidlinger/Charles rhythm team, as a supreme Cecil achievement in the realm of reimagined standards.  Definitely another unmissable masterpiece.  Mosaic Records reissued most of the Candid sessions with Neidlinger, Charles, and Taylor (and often Archie Shepp on tenor and Lyons on alto), including this performance, and this set is a highly recommended collection, once you have Into the Hot and Indent, for getting further into still relatively accessible Taylor.  Unfortunately, although I bought the CD version when it came out, it is now out of print and used copies seem to be very expensive, so getting the individual Candid albums seems to be the way to go now.  The World of Cecil Taylor, Air, Cell Walk For Celeste, Jumpin' Punkins, New York City R&B.  (There also appear to be some multi-album sets but I am afraid these might be fly-by-night European ripoff editions.)

5. For more great ensemble Taylor, still relatively accessible, I recommend as the next step after Into the Hot, the 1966 Blue Note album Conquistador, specifically the title piece. A long form, well-structured and full of variety, with lots of beautiful episodes and material, and great improvisation. Early in the piece there is one of my favorite Jimmy Lyons alto solos. Lyons often brings beboppish lines into Cecil's free framework, often to great effect, but sometimes (not in anything I've linked above, I think!) I can find them a bit repetitive or unimaginative (as standard bebop lines can also become on occasion). I love the transition from an episode of long, pretty trumpet (or is it fluegelhorn?) lines by Bill Dixon (at 5'37 he seems to begin to quote Miles Davis on the Davis/Gil Evans Sketches of Spain, but takes the line elsewhere!), to funky vamps beginning at 7'20 or so, behind an appealing rising melody, aimed at gradually bringing the energy back up, and ultimately taking it into a top-notch Taylor solo. This solo is pretty intense, with a lot of the lines that sound like flurries of note-clusters, but interspersed on fairly short time-scales with short bits of other material...and the control and variety of structure in the intense fast lines is great. The beautiful rising melody-over-vamp recurs momentarily to mark the end of this solo, and things go on from there.

The other long track, With(Exit) is also superb. I have had this on LP, again since teenage years, but this remastered version sounds pretty great even on Youtube... I may have to buy the CD.

The other ensemble Blue Note recording of the era, Unit Structures, is also excellent.  It seems to have gotten more attention for a while.  For instance, Martin Williams included Enter Evening (Soft Line Structure) to represent Taylor in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz that he edited, a sort of gesture toward establishing a jazz canon, back in 1973.  That piece (the second track on Unit Structures) is mostly slow-paced and out of strict tempo, mellower and more reminiscent of European-rooted avant-garde classical music and atonality, than much of what Taylor was doing at the time (though I don't mean to suggest that avant-garde "classical" music was its primary inspiration or that that whiff of it is very strong, or that it is strictly atonal).  The first piece, "Steps", on the other hand, gets into an intense alto improvisation (I am not sure at the moment whether it is Lyons or Ken McIntyre) that might remind one at places of Albert Ayler, and reminds me of Joseph Jarman's intense sax work on the Art Ensemble of Chicago's masterpiece Fanfare for the Warriors (also the name of the album, which as a whole is also a masterpiece).  The solo on "Steps" is somewhat in the "screaming" vein of free jazz...not really something I would recommend as accessible to someone new to Taylor and avant-garde jazz although you never know.  (Ditto for the sax work on Fanfare.)  I am enjoying Unit Structures a lot and will put it into heavier listening rotation if I find time to.  (As I write this, around the 30 minute mark of the whole-LP Youtube video of Unit Strucures, Jimmy Lyons is combining is free boppish lines with more avant-garde stuff in a great, melodically inventive vein.)  But for those new to Taylor I recommend sticking to Conquistador at first.

6.  Finally, if you really want to sample a full-bore, hour-long exorcism and communal communion with the spirit world, Streams and Chorus of Seed, the only track on the live album Dark To Themselves (recorded at the Ljublana Jazz Festival on June 18, 1976) is your ticket. If you are just trying to learn to dig Taylor for the first time, you might want to skip this, but not to go here or somewhere similar is not to give a full picture of Taylor. Besides Taylor on piano it features most prominently the tenor sax of David S. Ware, as well as Jimmy Lyons on alto, Raphe Malik on trumpet, and Marc Edwards on drums. You will probably want headphones for this one---use good ones, as I doubt cheap earbuds will be up to reproducing these sounds accurately enough. Watch the volume, though. The screaming sax of David Ware, especially, on this can be a bit hard to take particularly since it goes on for a long time---but it is a powerful statement (or at any rate, powerful--I am not sure "statement" is the right word) and there is simultaneously often a lot of interest going on in Cecil's piano to focus on. The LP that was the initially-issued version was a heavily cut version of this---the whole thing could have been issued on a two-LP set but perhaps it was thought it would be too much for people. Indeed I am having to take a break from this at the 37 minute mark or so. The CD edition I'm linking to the Youtube upload of includes, I think, the whole performance and has much better sound than the LP. I am still not quite sure what to make of this performance overall, but it has much to offer and is definitely pure, uncompromising Taylor. But I'm sure what to make of Taylor overall: a first-rank master whose creations will be with us, I hope, for as long as humans exist and love music.

De Guise-Langlois & Morgenstern Trio in Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, and Dover String Quartet in Mendelssohn Op. 80, at the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival

On Wednesday, March 7, 2018, at the Leo Rich theater in the Tucson Convention Center, I heard two of the best chamber music performances I've ever heard.  As part of the 25th Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois and the Morgenstern Trio performed Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the end of time), for a standard piano trio (piano, violin, cello) plus clarinet, and the Dover Quartet performed Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor, Opus 80.  You may find in my reviews that I tend to emphasize the positive, and not belabor it when a performance could have been better, instead concentrating on how much I have gotten out of the performance that was actually given.  So let me emphasize that that is not the case here: one could imagine performing these works a little differently, perhaps, but not better than was done here.  This was an extraordinary, unforgettable evening of music.

Program for the first performance of Quatuor Pour la Fin du Temps

The Messiaen is a piece I have valued for decades; I know it to the point of recognizing many of the themes when played in concert, but (unlike some other works) I have not internalized it to the extent of being able to replay significant parts of it in my head.  I have long considered it one of the most significant pieces of twentieth century chamber music; the performance by de Guise-Langlois and the Morgenstern made it clear that it is one of the pinnacles of music of any time or place.  It is inspired by the biblical book of Revelations, and deeply informed, as was all of Messiaen's music, by the composer's intense and very personal form of Catholic faith, and while it should be experienced in this light, with the aid of Messiaen's own program notes (and the obvious signposts provided by the movement titles), it is of universal value and appeal regardless of the auditor's faith or lack of faith.    A translation of Messiaen's notes is included in the Wikipedia article on the piece.  (References like "blue and orange chords" evince Messiaen's synaesthesia, in which harmonies evoked experiences of color.)  I won't try much to describe the significance of the music or the experience of listening to it, since Messiaen's notes give a pretty good idea of what's in store.  In this regard I'll just say that he is strikingly successful at achieving---roughly speaking, as the color experiences will not be available to most of us and the specific religious references are more inspiration or metaphor than something reproducible or verifiable---what he describes in the notes:  the music is powerful, beautiful, glorious.

Alex Ross' 2004 New Yorker article (reviewing a book on the piece by Rebecca Rischin, and a performance by the Met Chamber ensemble) provides further valuable background and reaction to the piece, which he calls "the most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century".  It was composed primarily in 1940-41 while Messiaen was imprisoned in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII, and first performed there in 1941.  Parts of it were apparently begun earlier (notably the third movement, Abîme des Oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds, for solo clarinet).  I am not sure how deeply the music was influenced by the conditions under which it was composed, since in style, content, and intensity it does not seem to me radically different from his work before and after the war.  It's possible that the composition of the work for a medium-size chamber group may be one of the most important effects of the quartet's origin in a POW camp---it may be my own ignorance, but most of the other great works I am aware of by Messiaen are either for piano (or piano and voice), or large groups like orchestra or orchestra with chorus.

Ross differs from Messiaen in how he describes the "Seven Trumpets" movement, writing:  "the gentlest apocalypse imaginable. The “seven trumpets” and other signs of doom aren’t roaring sound-masses...".  Whereas for Messiaen it is "Music of stone, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness. [...]terrible fortissimo[...]".  How one experiences it may depend on the performance, I guess, as well as the auditor.  Ross calls the "Trumpets" section "Second Coming jam sessions", and in connection with the piece overall (not necessarily this movement), my wife also mentioned a kinship with jazz.  This should be understood in light of the rather wide range of jazz my wife and I listen to --- not just bebop and swing masters like Bob Rockwell and colleagues, but avant-garde artists like Charles Gayle and Peter Broetzmann, and modern if not quite avant-garde groups like Kenny Werner's quartet, Charles Lloyd with Bill Frisell, and the Billy Hart Quartet, just to mention a few groups we have recently heard live.  Indeed, the Lloyd/Frisell combo and the Hart quartet (with Ethan Iverson on piano, Mark Turner on sax, and Ben Street on bass) are especially prone to episodes of Messiaenic intensity: continually evolving ecstatic/reflective grooves, carefully crafted harmonic coloration, dancing rhythmic complexities, calm serenities bringing to mind Baudelairean realms where "tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté".

As I said above, the performance by de Guise-Langlois and the Morgenstern was one of the best things I've ever heard.  Clichés like "riveting", "stunning", etc...apply without reservation and quite literally:  my attention did not wander for a moment during the long performance, and the audience sat in the proverbial stunned silence for ten or twenty seconds after the musicians lowered their bows and instruments, before breaking into a standing ovation.  Of course, S.O.'s have become disconcertingly common these days (it especially annoys me when people stand and clap as a prelude to an early run for the exits), but this one was fully deserved. Ross' generally positive review of the performance he attended remarks that it "lacked the total unanimity that makes a great performance of the Quartet seem like a mind-reading séance".  This performance had no such lack, although our close vantage point in this relatively small auditorium disclosed that the mind-reading was taking place in the usual way, through ears and eyes, as they very actively looked at each other, nodded for cues, sometimes swaying to the music.  It was indeed a kind of séance.  De Guise-Langlois' clarinet playing is remarkable in its dynamic and expressive range and sensitivity to the other musicians; I got the impression (perhaps misguided) that her attention to the other musicians may have been the crucial ingredient binding them into a unit capable of such a sublime achievement.  She has a wide range of expressive timbre at her command, but overall I would say skewed toward clarity and purity of tone.  Catherine Klipfel's tone, on a Steinway D, was great for this piece, bell-like with just enough of a touch of hollowness and edge to add complexity and not to be icily pure.  Everyone played superbly and I will be on the lookout for the Morgenstern and de Guise-Langlois in other repertoire.  De Guise-Langlois seems to me clearly a rising superstar of the classical clarinet.  I didn't find any single link at Youtube that I felt gives an adequate idea of the full range of what she can do, in a sympathetic medium-size chamber context.  I did very much like a contemporary (though relatively conservative stylistically) duet with piano, composed by Kevin Puts.

The space above the stage in the Leo Rich auditorium was larded with microphones for this performance, and highlights of Tucson Chamber Music Festival are eventually broadcast on Classical KUAT-FM, 90.5/89.7 FM, so I recommend trying to find out when this will happen and streaming the broadcast over the web.  (It may be a long time from now, though.)  I would be thrilled if it eventuated in a full-fidelity digital recording---the Arizona Chamber Music Association does sell CDs of past festival highlights, so we can hope this performance will appear on such a disc in the future.

Ross recommends the 1975 recording by Tashi as "still unsurpassed" (at least in 2004).  I have long had this on LP, but have done most of my listening to this Deutsche Grammophon CD featuring Daniel Barenboim on piano (Youtube link here).  I also recall getting a lot out of an excellent performance at the Santa Fe Chamber Music festival in the 1990s, and a really wonderful performance of the solo clarinet movement at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's concert series a few years back.  I think it was part of a concert by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird.  I haven't revisited the recordings I own since the Tucson concert, because I don't want anything to displace it in my memory, although I think it is now time to start listening, as this is a piece of music I want to "git in my soul," as Charles Mingus might say.

I'm not sure if I'd heard of the Dover quartet before this performance of the Mendelssohn.   I quickly decided that the Dover is one of my favorite string quartets ever.  String quartets can sometimes sound strident---an effect that may depend partly on the type of strings they are using.  The Dover was anything but, with a warm, even at times mellow timbre that nevertheless had plenty of texture and was compatible with great intensity and drive where needed.    The F minor quartet, Opus 80, was composed in the shadow of the death of Mendelssohn's beloved sister Fanny; within a few months of its composition, Mendelssohn too was dead.  It is a masterpiece, and the Dover did it full justice.  The outer movements had plenty of intensity.  The slow movement had a bit more autumnal, meditative, mellow pastoral feel --- I had a sense that this movement, too, could have been given more intensity and a different, more anguished, emotional tone in places, but not the sense that such an interpretation would have been preferable, particularly in light of the Sturm und Drang that was often in evidence in the outer movements.  An outstanding performance, also fully deserving of the standing ovation that ensued.

Schumann: Papillons, Blumenstück, Novellette; Novaes, Arrau, Sokolov

Since my last post involved some Schumann piano pieces, I thought I should link to some performances of them:

Papillons, Op. 2, Guiomar Novaes, piano:

Blumenstück, Opus 19 in Db major, Claudio Arrau, piano:

Novellette, Op. 18 No. 8 in F# minor.  Grigory Sokolov, piano:

Iverson/Motian/Grenadier It's Easy To Remember, II: a deeper appreciation

Since first posting on the topic, I've now played (in my halting way) the solo piano ad lib introduction to the live Ethan Iverson/ Paul Motian/ Larry Grenadier performance of It's Easy to Remember in Guillaume Hazebrouck's transcription, and listened to it several more times.  I'm even more taken by this masterful performance, especially the introduction.  The harmonies in the introduction are often quite dissonant but beautifully limpid, probably due to the very open voicings (wide intervals), and choice of intervals.  The dissonances reminiscent of 20th century classical music combined with untypical but compelling voiceleading remind me a bit of Bill Evans, but the choice of intervals and limpid sonority doesn't so much.  The (incomplete) blow-by-blow that follows is mostly for my own reference, so you might skip down to the next paragraph if harmonic analysis doesn't interest you.  It's far from crucial for appreciating the music, but I really want to know how these sounds are made.  The first part is mostly over an E flat pedal (the piece is in E flat), with couple of excursions to Ab. The first chord is fabulous, with successive intervals of a minor ninth, minor 7th, minor 6th (Eb, E, D, Bb).  Then the two inner voices move inward by a half step for another open, somewhat dissonant chord.  It's perhaps not so important to analyze these harmonically, but the first comes off pretty clearly as an Eb major voicing, with no 3rd which no doubt contributes to the spare, clear sound, and with a major 7th, and as for the E natural (b9 you could say), well it just sounds great, and moves up to a natural 9 on the next chord, while the 7th moves down to the minor 7th of Eb, suggesting perhaps a change in quality to dominant or minor, though not this is not so clear as there's still no 3rd present.  Later in the introduction, the same voicing will indeed function as a dominant leading to an Ab major triad at the end of the first system of the transcription.  But first we get a repeat of the first two chords at a faster pace, except with A natural in place of Bb in the top voice (which is basically paraphrasing the melody).  The tenor voice is going up chromatically, cadencing toward a G as part of the double-whole-note Eb major 7th, the first time we get a 3rd with an Eb chord.  The repose is disturbed with a little tweak up to a B natural in the treble, just to add a little more pretty dissonance to the picture. (Nothing wrong with a touch of the "girlfriend chord" once in a while.)  Then we again get those first two chords, Bb in the treble again, moving in quarters, initiating the same four-quarter-note chromatic ascension in the tenor to G, but the bass moving up to Ab on the last two quarters, over which the harmony sounds first like Ab7, then Ab m7, while the top Bb leads down into a bluesy figure.  The next system finishes out with more chromatic movement in the bass, more intricate melody in the top voice accompanied by good inner voice action especially in the tenor, and a final cadence on Eb major again, with the 3rd but in the same open voicing that marked the first appearance of the G before, except that now the D forms a minor 2nd cluster with that seemingly outrageous, but beautiful, E natural, kind of fusing the initial two dissonant Eb voicings but with the added 3rd for an earthier, more harmonically grounded sound, perfectly capping off the introductory chorus.

Besides the open voicings and relatively spare use of 3rds (so that they are all the more effective when they are used), movement by half-steps is a major feature of the voice-leading in this introduction, but it doesn't come across with any feeling of slick hepness or angst-ridden compulsion, perhaps because it's not being used heavily as b9 or #11 over dominant chords, or in related diminished or augmented substitutions for dominants.  Maybe there is a relative absence of tritones in the voicings, though I didn't check carefully.  Anyway, the half-step motion is prominent enough to be considered a major musical ingredient, but doesn't really interfere with what sounds to me like a relatively diatonic, if sometimes beautifuly dissonant, feel.  I guess the chromatic motion is not, for the most part, setting up dissonances that cry out for an obvious resolution, nor effecting such resolution.  It reminds me a bit of Stravinksy in that the dissonance is often created by the interaction of natural melodic motions in the voices, and (along with the melodic motion) the actual intervals in the chord seem almost more important than any compulsive "functional" movement in the harmony even though there is some of the latter on occasion.

The other remarkable thing about Iverson's playing on this piece is the strong influence of Monk, assimilated well into Iverson's own style, in the trio portion of the piece.  Monkian upward arpeggios appear as early as measure 16 (the 3rd measure of the first trio chorus), often combined with scalar material that still sounds quite Monkish (as in measure 16), or leading into more original melodic figures (as in measures 25-26).  A classic downward-dropping Monk left-hand figure is used in measure 30, a very bluesy Monkian chorus-ending figure at 44-46, upward arpeggios in 47-48 lead again to more personal Iversonian material in 49-50, and the list could go on.  Often Iverson seems to be extending or filling in Monkish lines with his own material more reminiscent of more standard bop-influenced lines, but never quite the standard bop clichés.  There's lot's of great action in the inner voices too, sometimes Monkian, sometimes not particularly so.  I think Monk's vocabulary and approach, even while it contributed crucially to the lingua franca of bebop and beyond, has probably been underexploited by pianists who are perhaps rightly afraid that it's hard to make something personal this way, something that doesn't sound like copying Monk's licks, but Iverson makes it work to great effect.  (I guess you could argue that a few other pianists have been strongly influenced by Monk's approach while keeping the harmonic and melodic content of their playing further from Monk than Iverson does here.)

In fact, the display of constructive influence by Monk, and the use of Monkian influences in a clear personal style, makes me wonder if the introduction might be more influenced by Monk than I realized.  I haven't listened to Monk's solo piano for a while, and it is probably time to listen to more.

Speaking of more, here's hoping we get to hear more from this set, or others in the same week at the Vanguard.  All About Jazz's review of what was probably the first set on that same Friday (March 11, 2011) is tantalizing, too.  This is some of the most interesting piano playing I've heard in many years---jazz of the highest order.

Ethan Iverson, Paul Motian, Larry Grenadier: It's Easy To Remember, live at the Vanguard

Excellent piece from 2011 by Ethan Iverson on the late Paul Motian.  Discusses a lot of music I need to check out, and unexpectedly includes a superb live version of Rodgers and Hart's It's Easy to Remember featuring some of the best jazz piano I've heard from Iverson, which means some of the best jazz piano I've heard in recent years. Plus there's a downloadable transcription of his playing, provided by Guillaume Hazebrouck. The harmonies in the piano introduction sound unusual to me, but totally natural.  I really love the intro.  There's a fair bit of Monkishness, especially later in the solo, but well integrated with Iverson's own conception.  Some nice interaction of multiple voices in the piano at times, not in a showy way, adds a lot.  I found this post linked  from Ethan's recent post on Motian's compositions, which Motian's niece and heir Cynthia McGuirl is considering publishing.

Learning "rootless" voicings for jazz piano from Earl MacDonald

[Understanding this post probably requires a basic knowledge of seventh and related chords and extensions and alterations as used in "straight-ahead" (swing, bebop) jazz and mid-twentieth century American popular song harmony.  The highlighted (and recommended) links will tell you what they are, and something of how they function in jazz harmony, though not the full story.]

A basic component of most jazz pianists' toolbox is the so-called "Bill Evans" or "rootless" or sometimes "left-hand" voicings.  Each of the three terms is inaccurate.  These were to some extent used before Evans came on the scene in the late 1950s/early 1960s, but he perhaps used them more extensively than others.  (Wynton Kelly, Red Garland, and Ahmad Jamal are among those also cited as inclined to use them.)  Along with McCoy Tyner, Evans also was a pioneer in using quartal voicings, which would probably be equally good candidates for associating with his name, but are not our topic here.   A few of the "rootless voicings" contain the root of the chord, though most do not.  And although they are commonly used in the left hand while the right plays melody, they may also appear in the right hand.  "Four-note voicings" might be another term one sees used, though I'm not sure if that's as specific.

In some of the classic books on jazz piano playing (like Mark Levine's highly recommended "The Jazz Piano Book"), these may be introduced a bit too early, and some teachers may overemphasize them early on (especially to students who are already fairly aware of the basics of jazz harmony).  Working pianists, who usually play in a rhythm section in which the bass takes care of stating the roots, like to use these voicings in order to stay out of the way of the bass line, and because they allow for more "color" tones, as found for example in standard extensions of 7th chords to include 9ths, 11ths, 13ths.  (Some of these may be called "alterations", a term whose appropriate application I'm not completely clear about and am not going to get into here; it usually refers to a #11, b5 (enharmonically the same as a #11), b6=b13, b9 or #9, but precisely which notes are "altered" and which are just extensions depends on (what is considered to be) the harmonic context.)  For learning jazz theory in a way that gets it into your ear (and fingers, if playing piano and not just hearing jazz harmony is your ultimate goal), I think it's best to practice four-note voicings with roots first.  These can work for elementary solo piano playing, and for getting the sound of a tune including the roots fixed in your mind (play the "rooty" voicings in the LH, and the melody or an improvisation (yours, or a transcribed one) in the RH).  Of course you can use these same possibilities with the Evans voicings, and you will find that many of them are the same as "rooty" four-note voicings for chords a third higher, so practicing the rooty ones first also helps with the Evans ones.  I'll post on rooty voicings at some point, but here I'll discuss learning the more advanced Evans voicings, something I am in the middle of doing.

I'm using pianist Earl MacDonald's excellent post on how to learn these voicings.  I recommend printing out both his post, and his pdf file with music notation and taking them to the piano.  I won't go into detail, but just say a few things that might be a useful supplement.  Two voicings, labeled "A" and "B", are given for each chord type.  Frequently, though not always, the B voicing just involves taking the bottom two notes of the A voicing and making them the top two notes.  For example, the first two chord types he considers (minor 9th, and  [dominant] 13th) work that way.  I tend to think of these kinds of four-note voicings as a pair of intervals (that between the bottom two notes, and that between the top two), separated by the interval between notes 2 and 3 (top of the bottom interval, and bottom of the top interval).  Then I just think of the move to the other voicing as moving the bottom interval up an octave (or the top one down an octave, depending which way I'm moving it).  It can help to keep in mind how the middle interval will change when you do that:  e.g., for the minor 9th voicings, from a minor third for the A voicing (I don't think explicitly about this in this case, because the A voicing here is just a root position major seventh starting on the third of the chord we are voicing, e.g. Cm9 is voiced as EbMaj7)  to a half step, or vice versa.  The cool thing about these voicings is that when you want to move from, say, a B voicing  to a voicing for the same type chord with the root down a fifth (very common root movement, with or without a change in chord type), you just keep the top two notes the same and move the bottom ones down a half step or a whole step.  So again, thinking about the chord as a pair of intervals helps.  Of course ultimately you want to get this into your fingers, and not "think" too explicitly.  For example, to move the minor 9th B voicing to a minor 9th a fifth down, you go to the A voicing of the new chord, by keeping the top two notes the same as in the previous chord, and dropping each of the bottom two by a whole step.  When you start incorporating the voicings into chord progressions, the chord type will often change, but since root movement down by fifths is common and important, you can frequently negotiate these progressions effectively by going from an A voicing for the first chord to a B voicing for the second, or vice versa, keeping track of which notes change and which stay the same.  Often  you will just move the bottom interval, or just move the top interval, which is nice.  And if you've practiced root-included 7th-chord progressions, you might find some of the movements are similar, or the same, just used over a different root.  I haven't done much along these lines yet, but obviously ii V7 I  or the minor homologue, iiø V7 i, are the first ones to work on.

The basic construction principle for most of the voicings can be understood starting from the example of the minor 9th chord.  The chord tones used are 3, 5, 7, and 9 (3 and 7 of course refer a minor third and minor seventh relative to the root, since this is a 9th chord; the 9th here is major).  The A voicing is [3 5 7 9], B voicing is [7 9 3 5] (left to right going low to high in pitch).  When a voicing has a natural 11th (enharmonically, 4th) it appears instead of the 3rd.  (This happens with one chord type, the half-diminished chord with natural 11th.)   When it has a 13th (= 6th) it usually appears instead of the 5th, in the above constructions.  There is an exception to the 5 goes to 6 rule for the A form of the standard major (no 11th) voicing:  the A form is a 6 9 voiced [3 5 6 9] (so one can think of the 6 as having been substituted for the 7th).  A #11th, on the other hand (one chord type: the Maj7#11), is substituted for the 5 (the boppers used to think of the sharp 11 as a flatted fifth; thinking that way there is no substitution going on here; then again I don't think the boppers often added a sharp 11th to major chords).  The Maj7#11 is also an exception to the rootless rule: it is voiced  A: [1 3 11 7] and B: [11 7 1 3].  The other exception to the rootless rule is the B form of the standard (eleventh-less) major chord: it is a Maj7 with root, voiced [7 1 3 5], i.e. the major 7th and then the root-position triad, starting a half-step above the 7th.  This pair of major voicings is the only one that doesn't obey the rule of putting the bottom interval on top while keeping the top interval as the bottom of the new voicing, to go from A to B voicing.  Rather, the bottom goes on top, but the formerly top interval shrinks (if you must think this way) from 6 9 (a fourth) to 7 1 (a half-step) as it becomes the new bottom interval.

One could probably understand a bit more about the choice of particular types of voicings from the voice-leading properties they give rise to in common progressions (primarily major and minor ii V I or i type progressions).  Curious is the omission of a voicing for the dominant 7th #11.  This was a very important chord starting with bebop.  If this reflects Evans' practice and not just MacDonald's predilections, I wonder if it's because Evans usually used a different type of voicing (quartal?) for this chord type?

If MacDonald's exercises seem time-consuming and difficult, let me just say that you can progress fairly quickly, and it's worth it.  Here's a point from MacDonald that I really appreciate his emphasizing; it's crucial to remember, not just about this but about many, many exercises involved in learning to play jazz (and other musics, for that matter, e.g. scale practice):

Learning voicings is similar to learning to ride a bike.  At first it is difficult, frustrating, and at times, painful.  But once it is learned correctly, you never look back, and you can do it instinctually ever after.

A few comments on MacDonald's suggested learning routine. For all of the exercises, I've done them sometimes without sounding the root, but frequently with the root sounded in the bass. I think this is important to get the proper harmonic function of the voicing in your ear. Less crucially, I've done some of them with the right hand as well. Exercise number 8, taking the voicings down the circle of fifths with metronome (he refers to it as the circle of fourths; up a fourth is down a fifth, modulo octaves) is particularly crucial; I think this is where you'll really get the voicings memorized. Besides sometimes doing it with sounded roots, when I don't sound the root, I've been saying its letter name out loud. This also helps in better memorizing the circle of fifths, which anyone playing any music with essentially Western tempered harmony will want to do. Another point is that before working on each chord type, it is good to sound out the full chords, in root position, stack-of-(usually)-thirds configuration, and then compare this sound to the rootless voicing sounded with the root in the bass. You'll really start getting an idea of how extensions and alterations sound by doing this (especially if you sound out the lower seventh chord before adding extensions). You don't have to do this for every root (I haven't been), but it might be worthwhile too.

I have not yet made flash cards and done the "random roots"  exercise.  I've tried going up by fifths, as preliminary step toward getting away from the reliance on "muscle memory" and explicit thinking about the "lower the bottom two notes" trick for moving the root down a fifth while going from an A to B voicing, and I recommend it, as it's a cool sound as well.  I'm ignoring his suggestion about completely mastering one chord type before going on to the next, in that I've worked quite a bit on the 13th chord without complete mastery of the minor 9th, but I think that's OK as long as you don't mix things up to much and really push on each type focusing primarily on one at a time.

Finally, the observation he asks you to try to ignore, that five of the chord types share the same voicing (just with a different root), is quite neat and important, an example of the general phenomenon that putting a different bass note under a given set of pitches in the middle or upper register can make an enormous change in the way they sound. Not only could it be used for reharmonization of a given melody, but I imagine it could be used (and probably is used) in composition, not just jazz but classical composition (many of these 7th, 9th, 13th, 11th, and 6th chords appear in classical music, especially Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Copland) to effect modulations, by changing the root under a given voicing and then treating it as if it has the new harmonic function, resolving it in some standard way. It would be neat to find---or create---examples of this.