Pretty much any free time I've had lately has gone straight to the pursuit of visiting friends, having friends visit, and catching live (often free) music and art. Here's a little of what I've been up to in reverse chrono:
1) Rhys Chatham -- A Crimson Grail (for 200 electric guitars + 16 basses and 1 hi-hat):
What more can I say? The composition may not have broken new ground in minimalism, but its success lies in the sheer physical heft Chatham et al conjure. Arranged around us in a circle and divided into four groups, the guitarists played neat tricks like making a chord seem to sweep from right-to-left, front-to-back, like wind but with the consistency of water. The sound could be a bit muffled when sitting down, due to the other audience members being in the way of the guitarists; slowly but surely most listeners began to stand up in order to appreciate all of the treble, mid, and low end that the guitarists were producing. At its loudest, the sound physically vibrated the contents of a water bottle my friend Aaron was holding, which was unsettling and amazing.
2) Liquid Liquid -- played a set after Rhys Chatham
Incredible, possibly even better than hearing Rhys conduct a 200 guitar orchestra. Especially the set's climax, an extended version of their classic "Optimo". Liquid Liquid provided a completely different definition of minimalism during their post-Grail set. Where Chatham's work explores overtone series, punk headlong velocity, and the cumulative mass of a zillion players performing the same relatively few notes, Liquid Liquid's dance vignettes were built on the fidgety unity of four musicians playing with polymeter and timbre. It was weird to see the band at Damrosch Park Bandshell b/c i) many in the crowd seemed too old or stodgy to know what they were witnessing, ii) the cops wouldn't let people get together up front and dance, and iii) the huge stage and open air threatened to make the band sound too diffuse. Liquid Liquid won the day though, playing a taut set that steadily whipped the crowd, old/young/rich/poor/pop/art alike, into a standin-up-hootin-hollerin frenzy. Dance music, against all odds!
3) Tyshawn Sorey et al @ the Stone 08/06/09
Here's a clip of Tyshawn Sorey playing the drums. His tone is massive, his affect is both pensive and ecstatic. At the gig I caught at the Stone, though, a very different side of Tyshawn Sorey was on display. He was playing the piano with a group that consisted of a drummer, two upright bassists, and a classical guitarist. The piece was one of his own compositions and justified the many Morton Feldman references I've heard thrown around vis-a-vis Sorey's work. They played music that required monastic, near-total self-control, in which the musicians had to play with lengthy silences and suppress the urge to add even a single extraneous note. Heady pleasures arrived periodically in the form of gorgeous (and very harmonically sophisticated) piano arpeggios and runs, dialogues b/w Sorey and his nimble drummer, an extended conversation between the two upright bassists in which they played heaving chords followed by arctic silences, and a tete-a-tete b/w drummer and classical guitarist that justified the latter's somewhat tic-like tendencies. In any case, Tyshawn Sorey is an incredible player and composer and I'm excited to live in a city where I can hopefully catch him again and again.
4) Merce Cunningham Dance Company @ Rockefeller Park 08/01/09
Indeterminacy, i.e. neither I nor, presumably, the performers knew what would happen next. But it kept happening and, from time to time, stunning me into a silence more silent than itself. Like when the dancers seemed to be negotiating emotional encounters at one moment, then evoking a street scene where nothing much occurs, then standing absolutely still in wild poses for minutes at a time, like cheetahs in freeze frame...? Towards the end of the performance, a guy and his gal rode by slowly on the river by jet ski while playing a loud, cheesy top 40 R&B song; the dance absorbed this and everything else in its vicinity. R.I.P. Merce Cunningham.
5) Polvo @ Brooklyn Bowl 07/31/09
Saw em last year and was not let down, though not quite stunned either. This time around, they laid waste to amps, eardrums, and any expectations of a slack "reunion" gig. New segments are stitched into old songs more convincingly, old songs are played with an almost metal-like level of control and aggression, new songs borrow some classic rock phrasing and meld it into phrases that echo 90's indie rock classics. "Enemy Insects" had a long outro section that showed how the clean psychedelia of their late 90's Shapes album neither diverged from nor desecrated their earlier, tinnier, scrappier style. Bands of the 00's beware: face-paint, feathers, synths, and disco beats are not enough.
