Alberto Ginastera Performs Live - February 2016

Last week the Los Angeles Times interrupted its continuous coverage of the Academy Awards to run a Mark Swed review of a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic concert.  The program was all-American (unless you refuse to accept something written by a Argentinian composer as American).  It was anchored by an old Aaron Copland chestnut and included a non-film score and a piece by a native of Modesto.

The Phil will repeat the same program on tour in Europe.  Swed enthused that "Dudamel prepared to inject a dose of L.A.'s brash, even reckless, attitude toward the cautiously conservative classical music establishment."  Look out Europe, L.A. is really gonna rock your world.

Swed's review text, however, failed to mention the most interesting part.  You had to read the caption of a picture found only on an inside page of the print edition to learn this tidbit.  Here's the picture.  Click it to see it larger.  Can you spot the big news?

Yes, Alberto Ginastera will be performing his own piano concerto.  That's remarkable because Alberto passed away in 1983.  Not only is the Philharmonic shaking up the cautiously conservative establishment half a world away, they're now able to bring musicians back from the dead.  Is there nothing they can't do?  I'm very impressed.  Imagine how impressed the Europeans will be.

And it must be true because I read it in the Los Angeles Times.

There is precedent for post-mortem performers, however.  In 2008 Mixed Meters was surprised to read about a live performance by pianist Art Tatum.  Except this was in a paid advertisement in the New York Times, not an actual review.  Tatum, who died in 1956, had been dead even longer than Ginastera.

Mistakes in captions are, I'm sure, part and parcel of modern newspaper budget cutbacks.

Here's another example I clipped from the L.A. Times many years ago.  Apparently they published this on March 17, 2002 because this article is on the back of the paper.  I'm surprised to discover that I have never posted it to Mixed Meters.

Can you spot the error this time?

Yes, the man is playing a contrabass, not a cello.  Duh.

Repercussion Unit at Feed the Weed

We're having a serious drought in California, so when it rained here in Pasadena last Saturday most everyone was pleased.  The only possible exceptions were the members of Newtown, a local alternative arts organization, who had gone to a lot of work to plan an outdoor fundraiser for that day.

True Pasadenans will immediately associate the name Newtown with Oldtown, the local trendient shopping and eating district, more properly called "Old Pasadena".  Newtown's motto is a persistent weed in the garden of art.   The fundraiser was called Feed the Weed.

Since music was a large part of the offering of Feed the Weed and since I was likely to see a number of friends, the rain didn't stop me from attending.

Of course I took some pictures.  And if you hang on to the end of this post, there's even a video of the Repercussion Unit!

The setting was a large already-well-watered yard of a Newtown supporter's home.  Various  fruits were strewn on the grass for anyone who wanted to play melon soccer or possibly citrus lawn bowling.  Eventually the rain lessened.  The sun made a brief appearance - for like five minutes.  The show went on, more or less as planned.

Richard Amromin, whom I have known for nearly 40 years, is the out-going artistic director of Newtown.  Richard was involved with the Independent Composers Association back "in the day".  You can see several more pictures of him in the MM post Second Second Story Series - Portraits by Robert Jacobs, one of several articles about the ICA from 2008.

The musical events at Feed the Weed included the group Non Credo, fronted by Kira Vollman and Joe Berardi.  There was also a tribute to Arthur Jarvinen performed by Jack Vees, Miroslav Tadić, and M.B.Gordy.  Pianist Irene Gregorio-Stoup also performed some of Jarvinen's Serious Immobilities plus other works by Rima Snyder and Eric Satie.

The remaining musical ensemble of the afternoon was the Repercussion Unit.  I've written twice about the R-Unit: one was in my obituary for long-time CalArts percussion teacher and Unit founder John Bergamo and the other was about A Tribute to John Bergamo held last year at CalArts.

At Feed the Weed the Repercussion Unit consisted of three founding members Larry Stein, Gregg Johnson and James Hildebrandt plus newcomer Amy Knoles.  They dedicated their performance to Bergamo and to Lucky Mosko, another Unit original member who passed away in 2005.  The performance started with instrument building.  Each player constructed their own cajon.  (Cajons are wooden boxes that people who are impervious to pain sit on and slap with their hands.)

I happened to shoot some video clips of their carpentry work and also most of a performance of Wake for Charles Ives from Four Pieces for Drum Quartet by composer James Tenney.  Tenney was another respected CalArts composition faculty member who died in 2006.

I assembled the video clips into this:

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At 2'03" of the video there's a short cut-away showing Robert Fernandez and Dee McMillan.  She's the one in the red hat.  At the very beginning of the video you can hear Bob's voice saying "At least my wallet stayed dry."   Bob and M.B. Gordy were featured in this recent post.

Another participant in Feed the Weed about whom I've written here at Mixed Meters is Susan Braig.

John Bergamo

I note, with great sadness, the passing of John Bergamo. John was the percussion instructor at CalArts when I was a student. Here's a picture I took of him the last time I saw him (at the memorial service for Arthur Jarvinen in 2010).

If you're not familiar with John's musical abilities, I highly recommend that you read John Bergamo, Percussive Renaissance Man by B. Michael Williams, an article about his many interests, written when John was added to the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

Although I didn't study percussion I was in several ensembles that John conducted. One memorable piece was the Quartet for tenor sax, trumpet, piano and percussion by Stefan Wolpe.  Less memorable was  Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Ensemble (all brass and percussion) by Alvin Etler.  More memorable was spending the summer of 1976 in Newhall CA watching John and his fellow members of The Repercussion Unit rehearse.  (I just sat and listened.)

In a 1989 LA Times article about The Unit: One Man's Junk is Another's Music John is quoted on the subject of finding new musical instruments:

Members are on a never-ending search for new instruments. Sometimes they turn up during pilgrimages to junkyards ("I usually end up getting ripped off because I'm so excited they can tell I really want it," Bergamo said).

Sometimes they're simply lying in the street. Bergamo found his favorite "bell," a broken pipe fitting, on the ground. "I threw it down and heard it and knew I had to have it," he said, happily tapping it with a mallet.

"I'm so excited" and "Happily tapping it".  No one who knew John would be surprised by such expressions of enthusiasm for exploring the world of percussion.

Here's a 1991 video about The Unit going on tour to Germany.  Lots of shots showing John and also Lucky Mosko, who passed away in 2005.  The other members are Larry, Gregg, Ed and Jimmy.  Here's Part one:

and Part two:

Another music group which formed around John was the Hands On'semble, seen here playing John's own piece Piru Bole:

Here's a picture of John way back in March 1965 (second from the right), part of a group performing György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes.  That's when he was a member of Lukas Foss's Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I found this picture in the book by Renee Levine Parker, This Life of Sounds. Evenings for New Music in Buffalo. (available as a pdf)

I had a lot of teachers during my professional education as a musician.  Only two stand out for having consistent positive attitudes towards music and music making.  John was one of them.  John Bergamo will be missed by many but his memory will stick around because he had that rare ability to share his own positive attitude with so many others.

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One more thing about my personal relationship with John Bergamo.  After my graduation from CalArts John set the course of my entire career as a musician by recommending me, as a music copyist, to Frank Zappa. I told the story in my online interview with Alt.Fan.Frank-Zappa:

GETTING THE JOB
BL: How exactly did you hook up with [Zappa] in the first place?

DO: I was a student at Cal Arts in Valencia CA. Ed Mann was a student at the same time. His teacher was John Bergamo (who I also worked with). John had been hired for some session work with Frank (I think he's one of the nameless musicians on Greggary Peccary) and had gotten Ed the chance to get in the band and Frank hired Ed. Frank was looking for someone to be his "musical secretary" and both Ed and John recommended me to him. Then they both told me that I would be getting a call from Frank Zappa. "Sure" I thought "when pigs have wings."

Bergamo had played the Black Page and had lost a copy of the music which Frank had given him. So John hired me to copy the Black Page to give it to Frank. I figured they had showed that to Frank.

One Sunday afternoon (this was June 1977 - as I was eating a pancake breakfast with my roommate) the phone rang and it was Ed Mann saying "Frank Zappa wants you to work for him." so I called Frank and he told me to come right over. I thought it was a job like all my other work at the time (i.e. "come right now we have music that needs to be recorded at 8 o clock tomorrow morning"). When I got there he took me in the house and showed me piles of music. He started handing me things from the piles and giving me instructions to work on stuff. I asked him if he had seen the copy of the Black Page - he hadn't.

So I had showed up to my interview without the one piece of music that was sure to get me the gig.

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Thanks to Steve Layton for the link to Percussive Renaissance Man.

Buell Neidlinger, another member of Center for Creative and Performing Arts and close friend of John's, told me this little annecdote about the performance of the Ligeti:

At the Carnegie Rectal Hall performance, Don Ellis purposely wound his metronome ten extra turns, so the piece became interminable with a single clicking for about 4 mins. extra.

The Shackle Stick

Music, at its best, is a mystery for the listener. A dose of uncertainty about exactly what is happening on stage can turn an average performance into a sublime listening experience.  These days, high technology can be used to intensify this aura of musical mystique better than just about anything.

Electronic music technology abounds in the form of portable sound processing equipment (as represented by laptops, tablets and even smartphones). Composers and performers are using these digital tools to create and explore as yet unknown musical worlds.  They produce new sounds, new textures and new ways of playing together.  A listener may not be able to identify exactly how the music is created, but it is clear that the performers are doing it ... somehow.

One such group - a duet called Shackle, Anne LaBerge and Robert van Heumen - is on the cutting edge of such music voyages of discovery.   Here's their self-description.

Shackle is a band.  We make improvised music and use a computer system to structure our improvisations.

They describe their electronics as as

a cutting-edge digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member

and

a computerized communication system that proposes various compositional elements to each player, they can then choose whether or not to cooperate with the proposed material.

In other words, they're not telling us much.  What is clear is that it is some sort of "system".  The flute is played.  Sounds are modified electronically and also sampled for further modification.  We are told that there is improvisation - but it seems impossible to know what is planned and what is spontaneous.  A joystick is moved as if in some sort of game.  We watch as pedals are pushed and buttons poked.  We hear the sound change.

But we cannot predict the sounds we hear from the actions we see.  It is hard, even impossible, to find an answer when we wonder "How did they do that?"  Failing to find an answer for how the technology works opens up a possibility for a listener to seek out the mystery in the music.

Here's a short excerpt:

You can hear longer tracks of Shackle at Soundcloud or at the Shackle website.

Shackle is trying to raise a modest amount of money via Kickstarter to fund the distribution of their music.

They want to use a unique new medium - the USB stick.  The little beastie,  called The Shackle Stick, will contain video and photographs as well as an hour of music.  In an era when storing and listening to music on computer is increasingly the norm, someday sticks may well become a common format for sharing music.  But for now, it's a new idea.

Here's another video of Anne and Robert self consciously trying to stay relaxed on camera as they explain who they are, describe what their project is and ask for your support.

I signed up to support The Shackle Stick via Kickstarter. If you want to help these intrepid musical explorers go where no musician has gone before, then you too should consider supporting them.

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A quarter century ago Anne and I played in an improvisation group, the Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio.  (There are three short improvs available for listening.)

Anne has already gone where no flutist has gone before.  Here's her website.  You can listen to her mysterious talents as flute soloist.  Mixed Meters recommends her recent album Speak on which she also tells stories.

Once Anne visited L.A. and was presented to a class of music students at CalArts by Vinny Golia.  You can watch event that here.

System Tags: Shackle. . . Shackle Stick. . . Anne LaBerge. . . Robert van Heumen. . . musical improvisation. . . live electronic music

Tim Minchin

Here are videos by Tim Minchin. I had never heard of him until yesterday.

He's an Australian living in Britain.  He has unkempt red hair and uses lots of eye-liner.  He writes songs which he sings while playing the piano.  He's a very talented guy.  Also very funny.  Very uninhibited when it comes to discussing sex.  Prudes and Republicans will not approve.

More importantly, his music shows a strong political sense.  If you believe in things like religion, alternative medicine or the paranormal, Tim Minchin is not going to amuse you.

Some of his songs are definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK since he often deals with sexual topics.  The first video at least makes the effort at a G rating.  It was written especially for television broadcast in the UK.  It's clean - if you ignore the double entendres.

I like self-reflexive art like this: songs about songs.  Here he performs at the Proms, with full symphonic accompaniment.  It's a song about singing the pitch F-sharp while playing in the key of F.

Tim does not mince words about controversial subjects. The Pope Song, for example, deals with priestly pedophilia - a hot button topic. He clothes this delicate subject with countless repetitions of the f-word  Reminds me of Frank Zappa in that sense.

You could compare Minchin to Victor Borge, as a comedian pianist - only with sex.  Or to Tom Lehrer, as a comedian, pianist, social commentator - only with sex added.  Minchin's use of clever wordplay can be really remarkable - I'd compare that aspect of his work to someone as good as Cole Porter - just with lots of explicit sex.

In this last video, an animation of a Minchin monologue, you might sense a resemblance to Ken Nordine.  You might get the impression that Tim is a really smart guy who does not suffer fools one little bit.  Someone who's pretty confident that his way of understanding of the world is the proper one and isn't afraid to get into your face to tell you just how wrong you are.

There's a lot more Minchin on YouTube.  What the heck - here's one more: Some People Have It Worse than Me - which contains this great existentialist line:

But the total non-existence
of colonic animation
Seems to me
the perfect metaphor
for the utter constipation
of my soul.

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This just in: Tim Minchin here in Los Angeles on April 10 at Amoeba Records in darkest Hollywood. He's got a lot of work to do before he cracks the U.S. market.

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I know it's a pale comparison to Minchin's songs, but you could listen to my own piece which overuses the word fuck: Frustration Etude No. 1.

Fuck Tags: Tim Minchin. . . songwriter

Sergey Kuryokhin - pianist of anarchy

Sergey Kuryokhin passed away in 1996 at the age of 42.  He was an avant-garde improvising pianist from the Soviet Union.  Apparently he did a lot of other things and was quite well known in Russia.

Years ago I purchased Kuryokhin's solo album Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion.   Each of the four track titles begins with the word "combination"; for example A Combination of Boogie and Woogie.  The first cut, A Combination of Passion and Feelings, is my favorite.  Another cut based on the Dave Brubeck tune is called A Combination of Power and Passion (Blue Rondo a la Russ - a Tribute to Dave Brubeck).  I don't remember why I originally bought the disc but I do remember how it amazed and impressed me.  It still does.  (You can buy it online here.)

Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion reveals an obviously classically-trained artist who is free-associating his way through the musical styles of several centuries.  He does everything with tremendous good humor, a complete lack of self importance, seemingly limitless talent and a large well-spring of pure creativity.  His styles range from Mozartian classicism through the most excessive uber-Romantic schmaltz with episodes of pop musics from different eras.  All of this is spiced with bursts of the most atonal free jazz you or Cecil Taylor could imagine.

There is information about him at kuryokhin.ru the website of the Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center in St. Petersburg.  The center organizes SKIF,  the Sergey Kuryokhin International Festival, held yearly in Kuryokhin's memory.  Here are several interesting excerpts from their biography page about Kuryokhin:

In 1984 he formed Pop-Mechanika Orchestra - a band, a concept and a philosophy. The band, which could be anything from a modest trio to a full blown multimedia extravaganza complete with a full symphony, a brass band, a rock group, a circus, a zoo, a gypsy singer, and whatever else his fantasy could bring up at the moment, subsequently toured most of the world.

Pop Mechanics was probably perestroika’s most exotic fruit, a big band melding all the typical cliches from dozens of musical styles – industrial music, free jazz, hard rock, operettas, contemporary music, King Crimson, Glenn Branca’s massed guitars and so on and on – into a sometimes sloppy, sometimes feverishly driving pileup. The “pre-Leningrad Cowboys” visuals were an inseparable ingredient part of the concept. They included live goats, pigs, tigers, chicken, dogs, donkeys, monkeys, snakes and ponies onstage, surrealist dresses, and when Pop Mechanics was on its peak in the late 80’s Kuryokhin managed to have a folk ensemble, a KGB employees’ choir, a classic chamber orchestra and an army truck performing simultaneously in addition to the big band itself.

"We hadn’t even properly heard the music [from the  west], only read about it. For us Western industrial music, Einsturzende Neubauten and all the rest were like a myth, just the same way that it was a truly mythical event when John Cage came to meet us in Leningrad in 1988. Cage’s thinking had influenced very much the concept of Pop Mechanics, especially his idea of all sounds having equal right to exist. Thus we always wanted to have both human and animal sounds in the live show”, [Pop Mechanics' member Sergei "Afrika"] Bugaev says now.

Of the discs I own, besides the ones for solo piano, there are performances by Kuryokhin with small groups and with big bands.  One strange disc (I think it's called Introduction in Pop Mechanics; it's number 3 from the four-disc set Divine Madness for which Leo Records annoyingly does not provide a downloadable program booklet) is apparently played with one hand on an organ and the other hand on a sampler keyboard.  It goes for over an hour with only one short contrasting section in the middle.  In other words, the sudden twists and surprising turns which I like so much are not there.

He did a lot of different things - I said that before.  YouTube might be the best place to get an overview: you can search for Курехин on You Tube.   You'll find many interviews in Russian plus clips of movies for which he wrote the music.  A BBC documentary about Pop Mechanica's trip to Liverpool in 1989 (it's in English; Part One and Part Two) really gives the over-the-top kitchen-sink anything and everything feel of his performances.  I particularly like the scene where Kuryokhin is singing into a microphone while being beaten about the head and neck with bouquets of flowers.

Contemplating these mad anarchic happenings in small doses from a distance is refreshing, especially since anarchy is so very out of favor in American music lately.  I doubt I'd care to attend a Pop Mechanica extravaganza or any sort of happening at all these days, but, hey, what's wrong with watching a little anarchy, I always say.  Back when happenings were happening in the U.S. their creators weren't known for extreme musical stylistic variety in the way Kuryokhin seems to have embraced so naturally.  Try searching Google for the phrase "David Tudor plays jazz".

The craziness aside, it is specifically Kuryokhin's solo piano playing which I find inspiring.  Without that, there would be no point in my writing this article.  Alas, there seems to be very little of his solo work available on YouTube.   Here's a YouTube video from the solo piano album The Ways of Freedom, a cut called The Wall Kuryokhin:

The picture above of him playing two grand pianos is from the same album.  On the record jacket it says:

Leo Records is grateful to all those people who had the courage to smuggle out the tape from behind the Iron Curtain.

Some of the playing has a Conlon Nancarrow-ish feel.  Kuryokhin plays blindingly fast on a tinny sounding instrument - or maybe the tape speed has been messed with.

His solo playing also attracts me because it is so completely unaffected by the "jazz swing" pandemic from which improvised music often suffers.  These days, in certain types of music, swing feel is omnipresent, like it was handed down from God.  Modern jazz seems hopelessly addicted to it.  I'm often annoyed when players can't turn it off.   Kuryokhin almost never turns it on - although other players on his albums do.

The seven-disc album Absolutely Great! is fascinating, full of wonderful music.  There are three complete concerts recorded in 1988 in Northern California.  Each concert is on two discs; the first of each pair is mostly Kuryokhin playing alone and the second disc is ensemble music.  (The last disc is a less thrilling commercial release by Kuryokhin and Henry Kaiser.)

Kuryokhin's solo playing surprises and delights me.  It leaves a very positive feeling.  Of course, as with any improvisations, quality varies; you take each moment as it comes.  Inevitably, some moments are better than others. I like the mix of strangeness and vituosity.  To say that his music is from another country doesn't begin to describe it.  Rather it seems to me like it comes from a different planet.

I've added the album Some Combinations of Fingers and Passion to David's Favorite Music which you can find in the left side-column of Mixed Meters.  It's my woefully incomplete list of things I like to listen to a lot.

I don't add music to that list because I think other people will necessarily like it or because I think it will endure through the years.  There are other blogs chasing that fool's errand.  The reason I put music on my favorites list is because it inspires me to create my own music.  That is the highest tribute I can imagine offering to another musician.



Other Mixed Meters' writings touching on improvised music:
Art Tatum Plays Live - June 2008
Mingus Epitaph (if only to see a picture of W playing a guitar)
The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio
A New Rhapsody in Blue (Marcus Roberts)
A Tradition of Experiment in Los Angeles which comes complete with a collection of reviews, programs and fliers from the late eighties and early nineties.  Get it in pdf or text.

Sergey Tags: Sergey Kuryokhin. . . Soviet music. . . Russian music. . . improvisation. . . happenings. . . Pop Mechanics. . . piano

Funny Piano (part 1)

Here are some video links with one thing in common. All involve a piano and none of them involve a cat and all are kind of funny. Well, I thought so.

In the first my favorite pianist Glenn Gould introduces the "brilliant German reductionist" composer Karlheinz Klopweisser. In this short promo Karlheinz explains the difference between German silence and French silence. Watch it here or you can download the video from UbuWeb.



Next we have another larger-than-life fictional character, Andre Previn, conducting Grieg's Piano Concerto on a 1971 English television show while he was conductor of the London Symphony.


Finally we have a clip from a 1963 Jack Parr show on which then former Vice-President Richard Nixon performs a snippet of his own Piano Concerto. (Sadly the audio is missing at the end.) Tricky Dick seems very relaxed and even cracks a joke.


Funny Piano Tags: Glenn Gould. . . Andre Previn. . . Richard Nixon

John Roasts Roger

My buddy Roger Lebow has a strange malady - every ten years, when the second digit of his age number turns to zero, he throws himself a big birthday party. Like yesterday afternoon.

My buddy John Steinmetz roasted Roger. I made a video with the point'n'shoot in my pocket. In an era of instant picture posting this is available the morning after - just like those old-fashioned newspaper things.

As always, my apologies for the sound (I was far away in a boomy room) and for the occasional camera jerk (I laughed sometimes too). If you go to the YouTube page you can annotate the video with your own comments.



Other Mixed Meters videos in a similar vein which you may enjoy: Vinny Introduces Anne and Vinny Introduces Me.

Click here to see John Steinmetz's many Mixed Meters appearances, most recently about the Push Poke Prod Press. This is Roger's first feature appearance but he has been thanked previously.

And before I forget: Happy Birthday, Roger. I was gonna get you a card - but this will have to do.

Roast Tags: Roger Lebow. . . John Steinmetz. . . comedy roast

Art Tatum Performs Live - June 2008

Imagine my surprise to see an announcement that Art Tatum (1909-1956) would be performing live in a few days. This was in a consumer electronics company advertisement in the New York Times West Coast Edition.

Here (in purple) is the exact text of the ad for J and R Music World; New York Times, Tuesday, June 17, 2008, page D8.

Art Tatum will be performing at Harlem's World Famous Apollo Theater on June 19th, 20th and 22nd.

Receive a FREE pair of tickets for the Friday show (6/20th) with purchase of his new CD, "Piano Starts Here: Live At the Shrine"

Price ($12.99) effective thru 6/21/08
Free ticket offer while supplies last.

Click on the picture to read it for yourself.

Returned from the dead to play in public once again!! Wow. I'd like to be there too.

In reality it's a promotion for this recently released album on Sony Classical who apparently forgot to tell the J&R people that poor Art left this mortal coil 52 years ago. The album is a "RE-PERFORMANCE" of 1949 recordings done by this company. Their website has a sample of the process. Seems very cool. I'd like to hear it.

This story is another part of the explanation.

ADDENDUM - added about 5 hours after the above:


I had to buy pet food this afternoon. The pet food store is near a Best Buy. I went there to look for a new DVD writer for my computer. They didn't have any. I wandered through the CD section. They had a lot of Sony Classical discs. They actually had "Art Tatum Piano Starts Here Live at The Shrine" for $14.99. I got the last copy. It's $2 cheaper at Amazon.

The disc has 13 songs on it but 26 tracks. Each track is provided both in Surround Sound and Binaural Sound. I listened to the binaural ones on my iPod. It's supposed to sound like you're actually sitting at the piano - high notes on the right, low notes on the left. There's audience applause (very fake and annoying) farther off to the right.

The big selling point of this new disc is that they've recreated the exact performance recorded years ago on a living modern mechanical piano using computer magic. Previously they've done the same thing to Glenn Gould. I wonder how they reproduced Glenn's "singing".

I'm sure the sound of this Tatum album is just a sweet wet dream for technoids. But who cares. I'd completely forgotten about all that crap half way through the first track because Art Tatum plays rings around the piano.

He shoots arrows into the strings and transforms them into a great angelic harp. He tugs at the tunes distorting the melodies like funhouse mirrors. He left jabs and right hooks the harmonies until they cry uncle. He tells musical jokes and times the punch lines perfectly. This is absolutely wonderful music.

Granted, I don't know the original Un-Re-Performed recordings. I'm confident I'd react to those recordings just the same way I reacted to this gee-whiz-bang computerized modern value-added re-performed audio technical marvel. I say "Who cares how it sounds. That guy can really play."

I hope he plays a few gigs in L.A. after he finishes his run at the Apollo.

ADDENDUM TOO (added the next day) - Zenph Bloggers

Turns out that one of the people who worked on this Art Tatum album and also Art's live performance at the Apollo has a blog. Who woulda thunk it?

Here's a link to Eric Hirsch posts in the category Zenph. Check it out.

Re-performed Tags: Art Tatum. . . ressurection. . . Sony Classical. . . J and R. . . Zenph. . . Reperformance

The Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio

Skip to the video of Vinny Introducing Me
Skip to recordings of the Golia LaBerge Ocker Trio
Skip to a new 30 Second Spot The Nurkle (for Vinny)

The renaming of the CalArts School of Music, as discussed in this previous MM post, has progressed to the Temporary Sign Stage. Here's proof photographic.



I made another trip to the beautiful Santa Clarita Valley (read about the first trip in this other previous MM post.) Trip one was at the request of my friend Art Jarvinen. Trip two was at the request of my friend Vinny Golia. Here's a picture of Vinny.


This time I was asked to speak to a class in "Career Design". Don't ask me what that is because I don't know. Apparently students who know what I have done during my so-called career will be able to avoid my obvious mistakes. Good luck with that.

I made the following video of Vinny as he introduced me to the class. I've added a few text comments of my own to the video.



At the end of the introduction Vinny mentions a wind-instrument improvisation trio which consisted of Anne LaBerge on flutes, myself on clarinets, and Vinny on clarinets, flutes and small saxophones. This happened during the eighties.


I asked Anne and Vinny for permission to post some recordings of the three of us. They agreed (although Anne wanted me to mention that she is still alive. She has a home in a place called Holland and maintains a homepage in a place called the Internet.)

I've posted three studio improvisations which we recorded in February 1986. We never did anything with the tapes except culling these three takes onto a separate reel for radio interviews. The box is marked "No electronic sound processing" because, apparently, there had been some confusion about how we made the sounds.

This is completely spontaneous unplanned music. It was like a conversation between people with different views on common interests. We are all composers. Vinny and Anne are still explorers of the outer realms of woodwind performance. So was I, back then. We were a good match. I look back on this group with great fondness.

The three improvisations are Copyright (c) 1986 and 2008 by Vinny Golia, Anne LaBerge and David Ocker. Timings #3 - 6'43" #11 4'20" #12 1'48"

Listen to Improvisation #3
Listen to Improvisation #11
Listen to Improvisation #12

Our only available pictures as a group come from a photo session proof sheet. These were taken by photographer Joel Mark. I did not ask permission of Vinny or Anne or Joel to post these. I'm the one hiding behind a mostly-not-yet-gray beard and photo-gray glasses. Click any picture for a bit of enlargement. Don't expect much.





This third improv is actually a duet between Anne and myself. If it sounds like we had been listening to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, that's because we had. She and I had recently played Pierrot together in a group called The Thirteenth Floor.




Here's a flyer for a trio concert at a place called BeBop Records. The drawing of the sea lion wearing a pirate hat on which sits a parrot is one of my doodles. If I remember this concert correctly Anne couldn't make it for some reason so it ended up being a duo concert, just Vinny and myself. Anyway, I like the doodle.


And finally while I was at CalArts - er, I mean at the Herb Alpert School of Music - for the final time, Vinny had to tell me how to close a piano lid. "You have to retract the nurkle" he explained.

I liked the word "nurkle" although I have no idea what he meant.

I decided that "nurkle" needed to be part of a musical title.

Listen to The Nurkle (for Vinny)

The Nurkle (for Vinny) - (c) Copyright 2008 by David Ocker - 34 seconds




Nurkle Tags: Anne LaBerge. . . Vinny Golia. . . David Ocker. . . woodwind trio. . . musical improvisation. . . CalArts. . . Herb Alpert. . . school of music. . . The Nurkle. . . 30+Second+spots. . . Career Design

A Fine Line Between Classical and Parody

Here are three things I've run across lately. They seem to relate.

• A News Article about Classical Music Offsets
• Musical Compositions Based on Polling Audience Preferences
• A Scholarly Lecture on the Oeuvre of Petula Clarke

Click any of these lines to skip to that section.




Offsetting Your Classical Music Footprint

April 18, 2008

NEW YORK CITY, NY--In a late-breaking story, the Wall Street Journal has reported how an entertainment think-tank in Tennessee discovered that investment magnate and cultural aficionado Yo Ma-Ma's attendance at "classical" music events is much higher than the average American's.

Yo Ma-Ma's office's response is that he is reducing his "classical music imprint," in part, by purchasing "classical off-sets," something only recently discussed on National Public Radio and other public media.

The concept is pretty simple: You can figure out how much "classical music" you're hearing every day, and donate an amount of money to an organization building "popular music" venues or supporting emerging indie garage bands in order to offset your "classical" footprint.

For example, TicketMammoth's online calculator will tell you how much your New York Philharmonic ticket "costs" in terms of "classical music emissions," and allows you to add a donation to the price of your bill. The donation then goes to a company that distributes it to musicians producing "populist alternatives."

One such company is PopUrEar, LLC, which funds inner city hip-hop projects, folk music wilderness retreats, and trades renewable goth-metal credits on the Chicago Exchange. TicketMammoth's online calculator suggests that 2100 hours of :classical music played per year on a high-end audiophile system creates over 7,000 pounds of potentially harmful cultural emissions that leak into the atmosphere. Buying a $50 PopUrEarCredit will "offset" that cultural imprint by investing in alternative music sources.

The WSJ article also states there's a lot of fraud quickly popping up, so you just have to research carefully who you're donating to, and how populist the music is that they're actually performing.

So, this is what Yo Ma-Ma does. Much of the market for this seems to be from people saying "I know my love of classical music is culturally elitist, but how in the world can I do anything about it?" It makes them feel better to buy a "classical offset," and it's pretty convenient to just click a donation box online.

--Mark Gresham

Mark Gresham has been an online friend of mine for many years. He writes music, writes about music, publishes music and parodies music from a large urban section of Georgia. His blog is EarRelevant. His other online activities can be found via Mark Gresham Dot Com. He will understand why I picked the particular pictures in this post. No one else will. (Clicken the pictures to enlargen them.)

Mark felt the need to add this postscript to his article:

Hey, people, it's only a SPOOF that I just created, a PARODY of an entirely different article...so laugh and shake it off. I was just in one of those moods today...] :-P

Mark's article reminded me of The Improvising Guitarist's contribution to this ancient Mixed Meters post.

This just in: Robot To Conduct Yo Yo Ma in Detroit (really)





Musical Compositions Based on Polling Audience Preferences

In this election season no one should need to be reminded that polling of the electorate is a widely practiced black art. It's important for the candidates to know what the populace is thinking. Or, failing that, to know what the pollsters think the populace is thinking.

And remember: as opposed to mere lies or damn lies, statistics can be manipulated to mean pretty much whatever we need them to mean. A candidate goes into an election with an agenda; nothing the populace supposedly thinks is likely to change his mind.

And so it is, apparently, with composers of music.

This blog article Hate This Music - Please! by Yotam Haber at New Music Bachs
led me to this page at UbuWeb about Komar and Melamid & Dave Soldier's The People's Choice Music.

Okay, here's the deal. These guys polled a bunch of other people online about what qualities of music were wanted most and which were wanted least. Then, statistics in hand, Dave Soldier wrote the music described by those preferences - er, well -- he wrote his idea of it.

These pieces are either called "The Most Wanted Song" and "The Most Unwanted Song" or (when you listen to the mp3s) "The Most Wanted Music" and "The Most Unwanted Music".

Here's their description of the most unwanted qualities of music as discovered by this "scientific" research:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition.

The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles).

An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs.

The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music.

So these musical qualities were used as a precompositional template. A little bit of the post serial compositional method swimming in the swirling oceans of marketing research.

Not surprisingly, I personally kind of liked the Most Unwanted Music. And I hated the Most Wanted Music. A regular Mixed Meters reader would not be surprised.






A Scholarly Lecture on the Oeuvre of Petula Clark

After listening to The Wanted and The Unwanted, I roamed UbuWeb until I clicked on the name Glenn Gould - whose talents as performer of baroque music on the piano are widely known and are among my own personal favorite musical works in the entire world. Glenn Gould also was a radio broadcaster. He was also a fan of the pop singer Petula Clark

The bit of Gould I found came from a time long ago (1967) and far away (Canada). A 23-minute CBC radio show, The Search For Pet Clark, comprised only of Gould's talking head, interrupted very occasionally by short snippets of Pet Clark songs, reading a script crammed full of literary and political allusions, ungraphable sentences and metaphors lost in the whirlwinds of time and culture, begins with a travelogue of the land north of the Great Lakes. Here's a sample:

And Marathon and Terrace Bay Gem of the North Shore betray the post-war influx of American capital. Terrace is the Brasilia of Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex/Kotex Ontario operation. The layout of these latter towns, set amidst the most beguiling landscape in central North America, rigorously subscribes to that concept of northern town planning which might be defined as '1984 prefab'. And to my mind provides the source of so compelling an allegory of the human condition as might well have found its way into the fantasy prose of the late Karel Capek.

Quaint, huh? It's certainly not the radio material or DJ delivery we hear these days.

Eventually Glenn gets around to his pet subject. (If you want to know HOW he does that, you can listen to the mp3 yourself.) He dissects his material melodically and harmonically. His assumptions of his listeners' pre-existing knowledge and how quickly they can absorb his text are far removed from contemporary media.

Very far removed. So far removed, in fact, that it's hard to believe such an on-air dialogue ever existed. One has to ask "Was this real?"

I leave you with the words of Glenn Gould:

Now, admittedly, such Schoenbergian jargon must be charily aplied to the carefree creations of the pop scene. At all costs, one must avoid those more formidable precepts of Princetonian Babbittry such as "pitch class" which, since they have not yet forded the Hudson unchallenged, can scarcely be expected to have plied the Atlantic and to have taken Walthamstow studio without a fight.

Nevertheless, Downtown and Who Am I? clearly represent two sides of the same much-minted coin. The infectious enthusiasm of the Downtown motive encounters its obverse in the somnambulistic systematization of the Who Am I? symbol, a unit perfectly adapted to the tenor of mindless confidence and the tone of slurred articulation with which Petula evokes the interminable mid-morning coffee-hour laments of all the secret sippers of suburbia.

Classical Parody Tags: Mark Gresham. . . YoYo Ma. . . Classical Music. . . parody. . . market research. . . most wanted. . . most unwanted. . . Glenn Gould. . . Petula Clark

Dorothy Stone, 1958-2008

Today it was a positive shock to read the Los Angeles Times obituary of flutist Dorothy Stone, one of the pillars of the California EAR Unit and priestess of new music in Southern California (and most everywhere else as well).

I had opportunities to work with Dorothy when I was a clarinetist and composer. She was an exceptionally talented and fearless performer. The paper says she was 49 years old - that's way too young.

Here's her bio at the EAR Unit website. At this moment I can't find any other online references to her unexpected passing.

Several years ago Dorothy's husband, composer Lucky Mosko, passed away suddenly as well, compounding the sadness of this news.

My condolences go out to her family and especially to her colleagues in the EAR Unit.

UPDATE: Saturday, March 15, 2008

After the memorial service for Dorothy at a place called Eternal Valley, I walked out of the chapel to see this brilliant blue, white and green panorama. As clear as a perfect flute note. You could see forever.


You can see this picture full size here. (Then click on "Original")

Read Rand Steiger's remembrance of Dorothy at New Music Bachs.

Sad Tags: Dorothy Stone. . . EAR Unit. . . flute. . . flutist. . . composer

Unqualified For President

California will hold a strange Presidential primary election Tuesday. Strange because the nominee is not already a foregone conclusion. We registered Democrats get to decide between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. You registered Republicans choose between Mitt Romney, John McCain and Mike Huckabee.


Here's a quote from the radio version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Secondary Phase, part 6, starting at about 18 minutes 40 seconds) spoken by The Book (the voice of Peter Jones):

The major problem -- one of the major problems, for there are several -- one of the MANY major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it. Or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize, it is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are ipso facto those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary, anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job.

I was reminded of Douglas Adams' monumentally and hysterically accurate observation by an equally accurate but deadly un-funny editorial entitled "Why They Really Run" by Michael Kinsley. Here's a quote:

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values?

What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany?

What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik?

What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election?

Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system.

In my opinion no candidate, Clinton or Obama or Romney or McCain or Huckabee, is really qualified to become President. I'm sure that having served in the U.S. Senate is helpful to a President. But if that is the only real entry in your resume you're not ready yet.

Likewise, if you've been a state Governor but never worked a top-level government job in Washington, you're equally unqualified.

Please, no more presidents who learn on the job.


Here is the list of qualifications I look for in a President:

1. legislative experience on both the state and national levels: (get elected senator and representative a few times)
2. executive experience on both state and national levels:( get elected governor or mayor of some megalopolis and also get yourself appointed cabinet secretary of something or other)
   
3. be the Vice-President (a nice touch to your resume but not absolutely necessary because so few people get to be Vice.)
   
4. real experience in international relations (hold a major ambassadorship and negotiate a trade treaty or two)
5. run a business (this is NOT a sufficient qualification. Anyone who thinks they can run the country with a background only in corporate America is a darn fool. Ross Perot and Steve Forbes were spectacularly unqualified presidential candidates)
6. run your political party (know how to manipulate the system, make deals, scratch backs and hide scandals)
7. a good liar (Presidents must convince the citizens, our allies and our enemies that everything is under control - even when we know it isn't - and that we will damn well do what we say - even when we know we won't)
   
8. be a good media-savvy speaker (yep, being a movie star is exceptionally good training for a future President)
   
9. be capable of changing your mind (apparently there's an unwritten law which requires politicians to adhere to immutable principals of behavior. This is called "knee jerk" - like "no new taxes". These are usually derived from unprovable tenets of religious faith and economics. The President is free to privately believe anything he or she wants - but like the rest of us she or he should leave those ideas at home before going to work.)
   
10. learn to apologize for mistakes (another unwritten law prevents Presidents from admitting they were wrong. There is no doctrine of infallibility for Presidents like there is for Popes. You're just this guy, you know.)

Some things are NOT qualifications, no matter what.


Being married to a former President is NOT a qualification.

Going to church, intense religious faith and straight-jacket morality are bad qualities for presidents. I want a President who could have an extra-marital affiar whether they choose to cheat on their spouse or not I want a President who will cheat and lie and steal - for the benefit of the entire country of course - and not get caught.

No one will have ALL of this preparation but can't we find someone who scores higher than 1 or 2?


Having someone who agrees with me on a few issues would be nice icing on the candidate.

Using these standards the most qualified candidate in 2008 recently dropped out of the race. His name was Bill Richardson.

I'm not the least bit surprised by Richardson's lack of success. Most people want a tall handsome President who makes us feel good. A movie star or talk show host. That's no way to run a country.


In my continuing effort to throw my votes away on principle, I'm going to vote for Richardson anyway on Tuesday. He might have a chance at being picked for Vice. If Dick Cheney can be the devil incarnate just a heartbeat from the Presidency, maybe Richardson can have some angelic positive effects.

MUSICAL QUALIFICATIONS FOR PRESIDENT


Someone named Joe Queenan (described as a "New York-based writer") wrote an editorial pronouncing Mike Huckabee unfit to be President because of his choice of musical instrument - the electric bass. Here's a quote:

The president of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, just as the conductor is the most important person in the orchestra, just as the lead guitarist is the most important musician in the band. The bass guitarist, I'm afraid, is more like the Commerce secretary or Uncle Fred, a solid, dependable fellow but definitely not the guy you want with his finger on the red button. Bass players are too bland and dull to run a society as classy as this one.

Joe Queenan has got it completely backwards. In my opinion, a bass player has an awful lot of qualities that we should expect from our President.

• bass players must know the structure of the tune
• bass players play the entire show, every tune, non-stop
• bass players need to be solid; they "lay it down" and then "keep it together"
• bass players help the other musicians sound good
• bass players don't demand the spotlight

Having a Pres with some of these qualities would be a wonderful change for the better. The President is a Suit not a Star. A functionary. A servant of the people. If the President can keep the inner workings of the country solid, the stuff on top ought to come out okay.


Fortunately, musical talent is not a qualification that anyone should consider in picking a candidate. But if it were, Mike Huckabee would be the man for the job. That's the only way I would ever possibly consider supporting him.


A previous MM post, including this picture of Dick Nixon, discusses Artistic Politicians. The world would have been a better place of Nixon had stayed a second violin.

The Huckabee picture came from here.

President Jimmy Carter once "sang" Salt Peanuts at a White House jazz concert. Here and here and here are articles which mention this event in no detail whatsoever. But I heard the broadcast. Carter sucked as a singer. The last link also mentions that President Richard Nixon once played Happy Birthday on the piano for Duke Ellington.

Mixed Meters predicts the winner in November: John McCain or Mitt Romney. The Democratic candidate is going to get swift-boated into a historical footnote (unless some 3rd party right wing candidate siphons off votes Perot-sytle.)

Addendum: the current White House chief-of-staff (quick, can you name him?) also plays bass guitar in a rock band. Click here or here.

Swiftboat Tags: California Primary. . . Super Tuesday. . . Hillary Clinton. . . Barack Obama. . . John McCain. . . Mitt Romney. . . Mike Huckabee. . . Bill Clinton. . . electric bass. . . tenor sax. . . musical president. . . Michael Kinsley. . . Joe Queenan. . . Zaphod Beeblebrox. . . Jimmy Carter. . . Salt Peanuts. . . 2008 presidential election. . . Joshua Bolten