Concert Review: Thollem McDonas with Paul Kikuchi and Greg Campbell

One of the biggest disappointments with my current life is that I simply don't have the time to see live music enough. Yes, I have a one year old, and I love to spend as much time with her as I can, but what really limits my abilities to see live music is that I work as an audio/visual technician evenings and weekends a lot..like five or six nights per week. So when I get the chance to see some cool music, I'm very grateful.

Last week, I went north to the Chapel in the Good Shepherd Center to see a performer I've never met. I was curious about this pianist that was going to perform two duo sets with two different drummers. Steve Peters helped recruit two of Seattle's best: Paul Kikuchi and Greg Campbell. I was there with less than 30 other people for an evening of what turned out to be some of the best live music I remember hearing.

Comparing Paul Kikuchi to Greg Campbell is a complex task. If you want to have a solid and creative drummer, you can't go wrong with either of them. If I had to compare them to famous rock drummers, I'd say that Greg is like Neal Peart (Rush) and Paul is like Stewart Copeland (The Police). However, I think Greg and Paul are each more interesting drummers than these particular counterparts.

Thollem McDonas is a traveling pianist of spectacular talent. When asking him where he actually lives, his response was simply “the road”. Thollem travels all over the world performing improvised music to a great variety of audiences. This brings a fantastic amount of imagery to my mind when thinking of a traveling experimental pianist. Thollem is not playing Rachmaninov with symphony orchestras, and I assume he doesn't do too many piano recitals of Brahms and Chopin. Rather, I imagine he is performing in bars, clubs, underground venues, etc. Because he's a pianist, he's very much at the mercy of the instrument that is available to him (I once had to play on a pretty crappy upright piano in Heek, Germany because it was all the particular bar had). Luckily, when he performs at the Chapel here, he has a very nice grand piano available. He did make a little joke before the second half that when he's playing with an electronic keyboard, he will often buy one off Craigslist when he comes into a new city and then sell it there the day after the gig. This was shocking, but I found out afterwards that this was slightly in jest.

The first set of this show was acoustic piano with Paul Kikuchi on drum set. Strangely, Thollem reminded me of two of my most inspiring mentors: Peter Gries and Mark Polishook. Peter Gries was the head of the music department at CWU while I was there, and he was also my piano teacher for a couple of quarters. The way he approached the piano with finesse and relaxation through the body has always been in my mind. The tone that is created from the piano is unique this way, and it is a similar tone that Thollem creates when he touches the keys. Mark Polishook was my first composition teacher, and he happens to be an incredible jazz pianist. Not many people are as creative of improvisers as Mark, who has a really aggressive and dissonant approach, but Thollem has a very similar improvisational voice. In this set, Thollem seemed to channel the piano stylings of Liszt and Scriabin with a touch of flamenco. Paul very eloquently accompanied with a mixture of keeping time and hitting textural sonic accents. Listening to Paul play and watching him make each percussive attack very deliberately makes me wonder if drummers really enjoy playing time all night. It seems to me that Paul relishes the opportunity to play melodically with a drum set (and some other toys). Since the nature of free improvisation doesn't always have a steady groove/pulse, it takes a completely different style of drum technique to make an interesting performance. These two fantastic players complimented each other very well. Even though this was the first time they had met (Thollem walked over to introduce himself to Paul after the first “tune”), it was one of the more spectacular musical performances I remember seeing. One particularly exciting highlight for me was when Thollem played inside the piano. He has developed a technique of touching the strings in just the right spot to create cool harmonics, and he can alternate plucking the strings and striking the keys to create some really nice timbrel material. After the show, he mentioned that the inside playing reached a new level that he was excited about.

The second set was electronic, and Thollem played a Rhodes keyboard. This particular keyboard was a digital Rhodes, but it was designed by Harold Rhodes himself...presumably to be modeled after the analog instruments of his earlier design. The keyboard was then being run through a series of effects pedals before being fed to the PA system. As is often the case with electronic music, there were some technical problems from the beginning. Thollem didn't seem to have enough volume in his monitor, and somewhere in his chain the signal was just not sending enough sound. For a good portion of the beginning of the set, the technical issues were somewhat distracting. During this time, Greg Campbell was playing a series of bowls and other resonating objects. Greg has a calm and cool demeanor and an ability to keep everyone interested in the sound he's generating while Steve Peters helped troubleshoot Thollem's setup. Eventually, Thollem was up and running and playing great music. For this set, Thollem played less traditional piano-type material and more spastic avant-garde lines. With the electric keyboard, he used a lot more silence, and a much more pointillistic approach with dissonant chords and non-linear playing. I have to admit that even though the Rhodes has a great sound, as soon as it's played, I'm transported to an underground club in the 60's or 70's. It's such a distinct sound that's quickly associated with specific music from a specific era. This set actually brought to my mind scenes from the movie, The Warriors. The soundtrack to that movie has a lot of electronic keyboard sounds....even though I haven't watched the movie for a long time, my memory of the soundtrack is electronic keyboard that sometimes grooves and sometimes doesn't. I don't remember so much dissonance in the movie, but the overall sound Thollem had was familiar. Even though there were many different effects pedals, I found that there was not a lot of sonic variety in this set. Even though there is more capability when using electronics, I think the acoustic piano had more timbrel variety. I do have a bit of an aversion to the use of effects pedals. I would personally like to see Thollem route the electric keyboard into a computer and use Supercollider to process the sound. This to me always sounds more modern and interesting. However, even with these limitations, Thollem and Greg played a fantastic set.

Once again, I'm floored by the artistry available for us to consume in this city. Visiting musicians come and have great venues in which to perform, local musicians are world-class, and our community is growing with more and more supporters. It's an exciting time to be a musician!

Concert Review: Anne LaBerge and Tom Baker at the Chapel

Wow, it's been too long since I wrote. I have plenty of excuses: new dayjobs that take up time, sick family that needed my care, a broken toe that subsequently got infected and was almost amputated...but that shouldn't stop the SEMR!

So in that vein, it's been almost two months since I saw two wonderful people put on a concert of wonderful music. On March 24, 2014, I sat with a small audience in the wonderful Wallingford space with pretty high expectations. These are two powerhouse world-class improvisers who have a relatively short history of playing together. They have evolved a pretty cool duo and it's very exciting to hear them play together.

Most of us Seattleites are familiar with Tom Baker. He's one of the big anchors in the Seattle new music scene. The founder of the Seattle Composer's Salon, the Seattle EXperimental Opera, Seattle Creative Orchestra, the Present Sounds record label....Tom may be, more than any other individual, the central figure to new music in Seattle. (EDIT: Tom brought to my attention that he wasn't a founder of the seattle Creative Orchestra, just a commissioned composer. Also, he isn't the founder of the other organizations, but a co-founder. Apologies for the error) Tom blends his musical voice in two worlds: composition and performance. As a composer, Tom has a voice built out of an academic tradition. With a doctorate in music composition, Tom has a skill with composition that is not easily matched. As a performer, Tom is a fantastic guitarist (standard as well as fretless guitar) with an experimental and jazz background. Though it's realistically impossible to completely separate these musical voices, Tom is one individual whose performance sounds very different than his composition. I'll make it clear: I love both voices that come from Tom. His compositions are almost understated and pastoral. His improvisations on guitar are sometimes bombastic and always unpredictable. I think we very much miss his quartet appearing more often (with Jesse Canterbury living in San Francisco, it's hard to know when they'll play), and Triptet also has a member who is not local. So the opportunity to see Tom improvise in a new setting is very exciting.

What can I say about Anne LaBerge? She was my mentor. She is my absolute favorite flutist alive today. I spent three years living in Amsterdam studying with her, and the experience was so incredible, I haven't fully recovered from it almost seven years later. Anne is the only flutist I'm aware of who has a very strong background in traditional flute performance who has been able to completely remove herself from it while she improvises in order to create art. When Anne plays the flute, she plays more like a drummer. Her rhythmic playing and use of percussive techniques transcends experimental flute playing, and it surpasses the new proliferation of beatbox flute playing (something Anne has been doing probably thirty years before its popularity). Anne, more than any other musician or teacher has made me the musician I am today. I hope soon I can surpass my current state and really make her proud.

For this performance, both Anne and Tom were playing with live electronics. Tom was playing his electric fretless guitar, a processed theramin, and his laptop running Reason. Anne had her flute, alto flute, and piccolo as well as her laptop running Max/MSP and a Kyma signal processor. The two players decided to position the speakers on the floor behind them, and this had the effect of blending their sounds much more than if the speakers had been on stands facing the audience. This has made me think of how I will present my own electronic music. With the speakers on the floor, it was like having a garage band with amps sitting on the floor. It felt much more informal and raw.

Anne has been incorporating text in her music for a number of years, and she has always had a strong feminist voice. In one of my first lessons with her, she related many of the struggles women have being composers in Europe. Even though Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, is a bastion of progressive politics, they seem to have a very long way to go in cultural gender equality. The prejudice is that men are on the vangard of art and music. Women don't really have a place as composers or jazz musicians or experimental improvisers. Obviously, this prejudice is awful, and it sickens me to think that this world where my own daughter was born still clings to archaeic and sexist thoughts.

The textual material Anne used was about two groups of women that are nowadays almost forgotten: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and the World War II Soviet Union pilots named the Nachthexen. The stories were wondeful recounting the very talented baseball players and pilots that were shattering glass ceilings during the same decade. Baseball was linked to the overall performance through a Max/MSP patch that had the two players play a musical baseball game.

One thing that I have almost never seen happen with a performance by Anne LaBerge is an awkward interaction with her technology. She inspired me to become a computer musician, and even though I constantly stumbled over my equipment and technology, I was always impressed by her perfection. Strangely, this night seemed to have an element that may have confused her. Using a snowball mouse, Anne pushed buttons and made gestures to trigger audio files. The expression on her face relayed a playful confusion that I couldn't tell if it was intentional or not. Strangely, I found this refreshing since I have never experienced a performance by her that wasn't perfect.

Overall, this was an absolutely stellar performance by two very creative and fantastic musicians. Anyone who ever has a chance to see either of these two play should really make sure they head out and see it.

Concert Review: Han Bennink and Mary Oliver with Wayne Horvitz, Jacob Zimmerman, and Geoff Harper

Is it fair to review the concert with a headliner from the Netherlands? I first heard Han Bennink play in Amsterdam with Cor Fuhler and Wilbert de Joode. The creativity of the free improvisation between these three musicians was astounding. It's still a gig that stands out in my memory as one of my most definitive moments in my European musical adventure.

Han Bennink is a drumming legend. He plays on the last recorded performance of my favorite jazz musician, Eric Dolphy. "Last Date" is such a wonderful album (though the recording quality could be better) that showcases Eric Dolphy at the height of his creativity with a young Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg doing what they can to keep up (they do a stellar job by the way, but Dolphy was playing ahead of his time). "The Topography of the Lungs" is one of the most regular albums on my record spinner (tablet/phone). In this album, Bennink plays with Derek Bailey on guitar and Evan Parker on alto saxophone as the three great improvisors create wonderfully textured music that has inspired me for many years. With plenty of other recordings of Han Bennink out there, you should really do yourself a favor and check him out. Any opportunity to listen to his playing should not be missed.

Joining Bennink in Seattle was the American violinist (who also lives in Holland), Mary Oliver. I met and listened to many performances of Mary Oliver while I was listening to Amsterdam, and she is unquestionably a master of experimental violin performance. Her regular use of extended techniques always makes me giddy (I really love it when people have mastered playing their instrument in unconventional ways). Most other times I've seen Oliver perform has been with dancers. Between her and Anne LaBerge (my mentor from Amsterdam), the two of them opened my brain up to interdisciplinary collaboration.

The first set of this performance at the Royal Room in Columbia City was just a duet with the two traveling players. This set included free improvisation as well as compositions by Misha Mengelberg (who I think was originally supposed to be part of their tour but was very ill). The Royal Room is a great venue with great sound...but for some reason I couldn't hear the speaking between pieces, so I can't name specific titles or composers apart from Misha Mengelberg.

This first set was magical. Mary Oliver and Han Bennink have clearly been playing together quite frequently. Oliver commands a mastery of violin/viola technique to create sometimes ambient and sometimes chaotic sound environments. She uses false harmonics, pressure bowing, pizzicato, vocal harmonizations, and other techniques for this wide sonic range. Han Bennink is very precise with his attacks, very focused on timbre, and has a melodic approach to the use of a drum set. To Bennink, the instrument is not just the drum set, but also his own body, the walls, tables, or anything that can be hit with a stick. The energy that emits from his playing is palpable. Often, a performer will have moments of uncertainty...particularly during free improvisation and while playing with performers who are unfamiliar. Everything Han Bennink plays is intentional,and it is played with conviction.

For the second set, the two headliners were joined by three local players in Jacob Zimmerman on the Altro saxophone, Geoff Harper on the bass, and Wayne Horvitz on piano and electronics. Though these three players are each great musicians, I did feel as if this set was almost an afterthought. The nature of this instrumentation is very reminiscent of a bebop era jazz combo. Indeed, if Mary Oliver were playing trumpet, it could almost be a Charlie Parker tribute (the playing was a bit out there compared to Bird). The pieces for this set were primarily written by Misha Mengelberg again. The melodies were nice and a little esoteric. Cord progressions had lots of extensions and rich harmonic context. It kind of sounded like a sixties jazz jam. Considering Misha Mengelberg was one of the prominent Dutch jazz musicians of the 1960's, that's probably not too surprising.

Even though Mary Oliver is probably among the best and most creative violinists alive today, the sound of a violin in this context wasn't working for me. Let me add that I've spent a significant portion of my life trying to convince people that the flute can be just as great of a jazz instrument as a saxophone and it's very frustrating how much more seriously sax players are respected in this particular idiom. Jazz with all its talk of freedom and creativity can be extremely limiting. All that being said, I found myself struggling with the violin in the traditional jazz setting. It's not just Oliver...I find it difficult when I listen to Stephan Grappelli, Regina Carter, and Jean-Luc Ponty too. But, Jerry Goodman is probably my single favorite musician in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, so I can attest that I love violin in some rocking moments. Playing swing with a violin always sounds strange to my ears...and to be honest playing swing on the flute also does. Traditional jazz musicians take swing very seriously, and it kind of baffles me I admit. Though the violin stood out to my ears as a bit awkward in this context, Oliver played some really cool stuff. 

The second set had some fantastically beautiful moments. Those of us in the city are well aware of how great it is that Wayne Horvitz chooses to live here instead of New York or some other huge international city. Geoff Harper and Jacob Zimmerman are also highly skilled musicians capable of putting on a great show. At one point, Zimmerman and Bennink played a percussion and saxophone duet....and how could anyone not think of Interstellar Space? The smiles on Zimmerman's face afterwards revealed a giddyness to have the opportunity to perform with such a great musician. He held his own and made some killer music with Bennink.

There were some problems it seemed with the audio system. I was sitting at the bar, so I wasn't in an ideal space for the speaker placement...but there were multiple times Wayne Horvitz tried to speak into a microphone and it was never on. I also had difficulty hearing Horvitz at the electronic instruments. I assume this was frustrating to him as well because he never used the electronic keyboard after that first piece. The microphone may not have been turned on at the mic itself, but my hunch is that the engineer never unmuted the mic. Quality electronics are something I'm particularly picky about. I've been working heavily in audio at two high profile event venues ever since moving to Seattle, and I have spent a great deal of time in studios behind the desk as well as behind the mic.
Even though there were these issues with the audio (I would make recommendations to the Royal Room for some consideration for speaker placement in the bar area), the performance was fantastic! It was a great first show to see after so much time out of the scene working and taking care of my daughter. Was anyone else there? Care to add any more insight?