Album Review: "Discussions" by Roscoe Mitchell | An Album a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

WHO: Roscoe Mitchell, composer and saxophone; Roscoe Mitchell Orchestra
WHAT: New compositions and improvisations by Roscoe Mitchell
RELEASED: September 2017
LABEL: Wide Hive

When I crave free jazz, I'm usually in one of two situations. More often than not, I listen to free jazz when I'm walking around NYC -- the aural chaos of the music befits the visual chaos of the city. However, I also find that I love to listen to free jazz when I'm cooking or washing dishes. Cooking isn't so cerebral for me; it leaves my brain free to ponder anything and everything. Raise your hand if you've ever had a mid-meatloaf existential crisis. Or is that just me?

So, I try to put on some music that requires me to pay attention. Today, it was this phenomenal free jazz-classical-fusion (kind of?) album.

Roscoe Mitchell founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago a little more than 50 years ago. AEC was among the pioneering ensembles of this high-entropy kind of free jazz, a little less predictable than their predecessors and a little more similar to avant-garde classicists of the day like Stockhausen (💗) and Berio.

Mitchell is mainly known for his small-ensemble improvised compostions, but in this album he extends a few of his earlier compositions to a full orchestra. The way he uses the orchestral timbre is interesting -- the proud opening of "Home Screen" reminds me vaguely of a totally unrelated piece, Silvestre Revueltas's Ocho por Radio.

I find that the full orchestra gives me more to consider, more to pay attention to. Infinitely many different sounds can come out of any one instrument; infinity times a twenty-person orchestra, now that's living. Mitchell's use of the orchestra keeps your focus darting from one instrument to the next. He almost treats every instrument as a melody and an accompaniment at once. Of course, Mitchell also programs some of his signature small-ensemble improvisations, providing some contrast adding that disorder that free-jazz aficionados crave.

I'm going to keep it short today because I'm quite tired and I'm not done cleaning out my refrigerator, but I'm just going to say that this was a great album for washing dishes and chopping onions. Give it a listen and tell me what else it's good for!

[21] The Knights play Jacobsen, Sanna, Britten, Bielawa, and Mendelssohn at Temple Emanu-El | #1Summer50Concerts

The gorgeous (GORGEOUS!!!!) Temple Emanu-El

WHO: The Knights; Colin and Eric Jacobsen, directors; Kristina Nicole Miller, narrator and vocals; Nicholas Cords, viola; Alex Sopp, flute; Michael Atkinson, horn
WHAT: C. JACOBSEN, E. JACOBSEN, KYLE SANNA Compositions after Walt Whitman; BRITTEN Lachrymae; LISA BIELAWA Fictional Migration; MENDELSSOHN Octet, Op. 20
WHERE: Temple Emanu-El
WHEN: June 18, 2019, 7:00pm

"Don't fart."

That's all I can think when I sit in the audience of live-broadcast concerts. A cough is forgivable; a sneeze even more so. But if those WQXR microphones are poised just right, your toot could be the talk of the nine people who still listen to live concerts on the radio.

God, look at me. Potty humor, radio jokes, you'd think I grew up in the 2000's or something.

This concert was the opening of this year's Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, so named for the Naumburg Orchestral Shell in Central Park where they're usually played. However, 114 years of free orchestral concerts can take its toll, and the shell was in dire need of some TLC, so the concerts were moved for this year to the gorgeous (GORGEOUS) Temple Emanu-El on E 65th. Good thing, too -- it was rainy and disgusting while we were standing in the long, long line to get inside.

The Knights are one of the more active independent orchestras in New York City, the kind that starts with friends playing chamber music in someone's living room. This was their tenth consecutive appearance at the Naumburg series, and you could tell they felt right at home. This concert was a dual celebration: first and foremost, they were celebrating the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth. However, they also managed to get their hands on a tremendous Amati viola which was celebrating its 400th birthday -- move over, Whitman!

The full WQXR broadcast from the other night, fart-free!

Though Kristina Nicole Miller was credited in the program as a "narrator," her singing was one of the highlights of the first half. Kyle Sanna's Whitman composition, after a section of Song of Myself, morphed into something of a Disney-meets-modernism situation -- very interesting indeed. Miller would have been right at home as a Belle or Ariel, but her clear understanding of the complex Whitman propelled her far ahead of any Disney aspiration.

Lisa Bielawa's piece took many a cue from composer and amateur ornithologist Olivier Messiaen, weaving birdsong in and out of the gossamer orchestral texture with impressive aptitude -- though Bielawa's birdsongs were not taken from real birds, they were just as convincing as any material Messiaen drew from. Flautist Alex Sopp channeled her inner avian as though she'd been doing it regularly all her life; hornist Michael Atkinson played similarly well, but the gorgeous (GORGEOUS) Temple Emanu-El's acoustics did him a disservice by swallowing him completely.

The Amati came out in the hands of violist Nicholas Cords for Britten's Lachrymae, a piece modeled after John Dowland's 17th-century consort work of the same name. Cords played ridiculously well, from what I could hear of him -- Emanu-El is harsh on all mid-range instruments, not just horns. Too often, modern reinterpretations of early pieces suffer from hypermodernization; Cords and The Knights, under the functional baton of Eric Jacobsen, infused the Lachrymae with almost as much Dowland as Britten.

As for the Mendelssohn -- well, it certainly did the job. Eric Jacobsen pulled out his cello and joined the lively octet with his brother (concertmaster Colin Jacobsen), Nicholas Cords (400-year-old Amati in his hands), and five others from the orchestra. It was great. It was everything you wanted from chamber music. By the time the ensemble played the final E-flat chord, I was fully convinced that a) they had been playing together as an octet for years, and that b) they were all best of friends. Whether either of those were true, who knows, but that's the kind of emotion they exuded, and let me tell you, I couldn't wipe the grin off my face for the rest of the evening.

Free concerts are always worth it, but that doesn't mean that some free concerts aren't better than others. The Knights have impressed once again that not all great music has to come at a great price; some organizations care more about serving their audiences than they do about turning a profit. All musical ensembles want to serve their communities to at least some extent. And I think the Naumburg series has refined that art down to a T.

Stay tuned for the next Naumburg concert on July 10: Venice Baroque Orchestra with Anna Fusek, recorder!

[1] S.E.M. Ensemble at Bohemian National Hall | #1Summer50Concerts

WHO: S.E.M. Ensemble
WHAT: New York - Ostrava: Influences and Initiatives
WHERE: Bohemian National Hall
WHEN: May 28, 2019, 7:30pm

Yes, last night I chose a new music concert over the New York Phil playing Beethoven's Eroica. But I saw the Phil do Eroica last season. And at this rate, I'll probably get to see it next season. And the next season. Ad nauseum.

Besides which, this concert had the universal college-student trump card: it was free.

As New York's new music ensembles go, S.E.M. is ancient. Founded shortly after Czech composer Petr Kotík moved stateside in 1969, they were -- and are -- closely linked with the American experimentalists that make baby boomers wrinkle their noses. They now perform regularly, mostly in Brooklyn Heights's Willow Place Auditorium (best described as a cross between a parochial school auditorium and a YMCA basketball court -- one of my favorite quirky concert venues in NYC).

Not pictured: the gymnastics mats piled in the back left corner

The program was composed of new pieces written by students of S.E.M.'s biennial Ostrava Days festival along with older stalwarts of the ensemble's repertoire. Particularly of note was violist-and-composer-on-the-side Anna Heflin's Included/Excluded (2019), which found a string quartet sitting with their backs to one another, each playing a fiendishly difficult and independent line. Then, all of a sudden, one of the violinists shouted: "CHAIR!"

"CHAIR!"

I was sort of confused -- maybe she said "share" or something like that? No, she said it again, "CHAIR!" at which point the cellist began clapping at rhythmically constant, but seemingly arbitrary intervals. A couple minutes later, the cellist launched into a tirade about how people who drop dead on the street are still expected to make polite banter with passers-by. It was absurdism at its finest; I found myself scratching my head, but oddly and thoroughly satisfied.

Other highlights included Alvin Lucier's Navigations for Strings (1991), a piece which consists primarily of ever-so-slightly compressing and widening microtones; if you listen carefully, you can hear the sound oscillations getting faster and slower with the changing dissonances. Kotík and Wolff's pairings of pieces each displayed a very distinct narrative of their compositional evolutions.

But, perhaps most amusing of all was the final piece, Earle Brown's Available Forms I (1961). The sheet music of the piece takes the form of six unbound pages, each with five "events." The events can happen in any order, the pages can be played in any order, with any number of repetitions. Kotík had constructed a nifty music stand-mounted cardboard contraption with which he could show the orchestra how to move between pages; the events were shown with the fingers of his non-baton hand.

Overall, a great start to the project. If you're in the mood for something a little weirder, S.E.M. is your group. Oh, and be sure to take a visit to the Bohemian National Hall on E 73rd St -- it's the only consulate-plus-cultural-center-plus-restaurant you'll ever visit, I assure you.