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Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

UNsafe concert: Threadgill, La Barbara, ACO dare to fail

“Playing It UNsafe” is how the American Composers Orchestra characterizes tonight’s concert of works by Henry Threadgill, Joan La Barbara, Sean Friar and Laura Schwendinger at Zankel Hall, NYC. Afraid of classical musicians improvising? Multi-layered “sound paintings” of multi-tracked voice, electronic ambiance and instrumentalists sitting in the audience? Symphonic and light collaborations? Then walk on the wild side — or at least watch the fine videos by Jeremy Robins — like the two of Threadgill explaining his ACO-sponsored research and development project, below — 





 




Threadgill wants the Orchestra’s players to take responsibility for listening to and creating with the interval sets he prescribed for “No Gates, No White Trenches, Butterfly Effect,” a commissioned world premiere expanding on strategies he’s developed with his small group, Zooid. La Barbara’s “In solitude this fear is lived,” inspired in this work by the late visual artist Agnes Martin, incorporates breath and voice, electronically processed and natural, in a wash of sounds. Friar’s “Clunker Concerto” features the percussion ensemble Line 3 as soloists addressing the possibilities of junked cars as drumming surfaces. Schwendinger and her cousin Leni Schwendinger, a lighting designer, came up with “Shadings,” a confabulation of photo imagery captured in Japan (“ephemeral architecture . . . Buddhist dry landscapes”) with orchestral writing promoted as “rich pearlescent tones, with shades of grey.”


To learn more, take a look at the brief but informative video clips produced by Robins for the ACO (incidentally, these clips are the sort of thing the Jazz Journalists Association is trying to encourage with its eyeJAZZ video news training program). Robins’ work serves as intriguing trailers for the pieces and help explain what ACO artistic director Robert Beaser means when he says, “In order for the Orchestra to build on its history, we need to reinvent it.” May such reinvention never end.
 

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Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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