Viola

Is it just me, or has the viola suddenly become hot?

Between items in the news and items crossing the KZSU transom, viola seems to be popping up much more than usual.

* Violist Nadia Sirota got quite a few good reviews for her album First Things First, including one in the Mercury News (albeit as part of a classical-CD roundup.)  Kudos to the New Amsterdam label for getting her noticed in the first place, let alone reviewed.

* Jessica Pavone turns to the viola for her duo work with Mary Halvorson.

* Szilard Mezei. He’s only got a few albums out, but yeah, he’s a viola-slinging bandleader.

* Mat Maneri’s viola seems to have become his lead instrument since the early 2000s, with his violin relegated to the bench.

… And then you’ve got viola as a front-line ensemble player in various jazz groups, like Carl Maguire’s Floriculture (Stephanie Griffin) or Sean Noonan’s Brewed By Noon (actually, that’s Maneri again so it might not count.)

What gives? Is it people like me who just like the freshness of a little-used instrument (and if so, is the oboe/bassoon revolution far behind)? Is it a case of musicians hearing, and then wanting to explore, the deeper sonorities and more breathy voice of the viola? Is it dumb plain coincidence?

All this matters to me because I played viola in elementary school. I couldn’t resist the appeal of playing an instrument nobody else did (and I sort of felt sorry for the viola).  As a result, I’ve developed an attachment to the viola in my music listening; it’s been my gateway to a lot of classical music, for instance, as I’ve been introduced to composers by their viola sonatas and concertos.  It’s nice to see the viola getting this kind of attention. But that openes up a bigger question: If the viola becomes cool, does that mean I have to dump it because it’s too trendy? (Kidding.)

Back

It’s so nice to be home after a month of steady travel and heavy work pressures. I’ve been home every weekend for three weeks, but this time I’m home, without the overhang of another upcoming trip.  I can take it slow for a while. And I’ll be back on the air Tuesday morning.

My last “tour” stop was Orlando, where I didn’t have the stamina to really explore outwards. Neither did I have a car, which I’d have needed.  And I’m not sure there was that much to discover anyway, certainly not another 21 Grand or anything.  (Sorry Orlandoites, but the city seems to be all amusement parks and loud touristy bars/restaurants, alongside flat suburbs. It’s just like Anaheim, but with more swamp.)

I’m slowly re-acclimating to normal life, including regular time to listen to music. Although I must say, on these trips I had the good fortune of staying in hotel rooms where you could plug an MP3 player into the clock/radio. Ethel, Exene Cervenka, and Evan Parker’s Electroacoustic Ensemble bled into the neighboring rooms, or so I like to think. I feel pretty good about that.

UPDATE, 11/15: Brian Feldman on Twitter (@BrianFeldman) points out the Timucua White House events: house concerts for new music (in the classical sense) or musics that would appeal to that kind of audience.  Sounds lovely.  I’ll keep it in mind if I wind up in Orlando again.

Blather: Travel Blues

The good and bad news (for me, anyway) is that I’ve got a lot of travel in the next several weeks. I’ll be in Chicago, New York, and Orlando.

What’s bad is that I’ll have to skip some of my KZSU shows in early November and, because these trips are for work, I’ll do a lot less listening to music.

The good news is that I can tap some out-of-town shows. I’ll have a night or two in Chicago — the Velvet Lounge and the Umbrella Music calendars will come in handy there. Sadly, I might have only one night to myself in New York, but it’s a doozy — The Stone is having one of its fundraising nights (meaning John Zorn will be in the house), and, conflictingly, Go Home is playing a rare clutch of shows at the Jazz Standard. (This is the band I’d been lucky enough to see in January.) Wonder if I could make it to one set of each.

Then there’s Orlando. Just … just don’t talk to me about Orlando.

High Zero

Ahh, High Zero. In more flush days, when I traveled a lot for work and had the freedom to extend my stay to see music or baseball, Baltimore’s High Zero festival — featuring improvisers from around the globe, grouped in never-before-heard combinations, was a lucky hit. I’d read about the festival after the 1999 installment, probably because some local musicians had gone, and was lucky enough to be in the Baltimore/D.C. area the following year at just the right time.

I remember Jon Rose being more loose and joking than I expected, as he twisted a “metal” improv into “All Along the Watchtower,” complete with singing. I remember Toshi Makihara doing the heavy-duty drums to start that “metal” piece, and impressing me all around with his bag of tricks. They were in trio with pianist Lafayette Gilchrest — who’s better known for a thick-pulsed take on funky jazz, something I wouldn’t have discovered later if not for seeing him in this setting.

And I remember a fantastic set with Joe McPhee, Jack Wright, and Ian Nogoski, where Nogoski’s sine-wave electronics started ever so subtly in the mix and turned into a powerful backing drone.

Nice memories, being brought back this weekend as I read Lars Gotrich’s A Blog Supreme on the NPR site. Gotrich is doing some brief reviews of the High Zero sets he attended last weekend.

High Zero gives you a lot of music to experience, and as enjoyable as improv can be, I’ve found it’s very hard to describe multiple sets without repeating yourself a lot. Kudos to Gotrich for giving it a shot, and for giving such abstract music some exposure.

Thanks to Avant Music News for pointing this out.

Mini Hiatus

Not from this blog, but from the radio station. I’ll be off-air for the next two weeks, barring a possible (but unlikely) sub spot or two.

Then, starting Sept. 28, I’ll be moving the show off of the coveted Friday afternoon spot. Probably to early mornings (6:00-9:00 a.m.) or late nights (midnight, or possibly 9 p.m.)

Either way, I’ll still be around. Check KZSU’s schedule after Sept. 28 to find out where.

Nine Redemption

About 10 years ago, my radio show was on Thursday evenings. And so it happened that on 9/9/99, I found myself on the air, doing a microphone break at (according to our clock) 9:09 p.m.

It wasn’t until days later that I realized what song I should have played at that moment. Of course. “Number nine … number nine … number nine …”

I got redemption today, because the station needed a fill-in for the morning hours. So at 9:09 a.m. on 09/09/09, “Revolution 9″ got the spin it’s been waiting a decade for. Yes!

(I really am this geeky. Sorry.)

This was a very last-minute thing. I packed the rest of the hour with anything I could conjure off the top of my head that had to do with “9,” and rounded out the show with the colossal Beethoven’s 9th. I do dislike playing such familiar songs on-air — even music-geek favorites like Genesis’ “Apocalypse in 9/8″ — but it was for a good cause, namely, my unhealthy numbers obsession. If for some reason you want to see the playlist, it’s here.

Tim Berne Interview

A colossal interview with Tim Berne has been posted on Ethan Iverson’s “Do the Math” blog.

This has probably been mentioned, like, everywhere by now, but what’s a blog for if not to repeat the blather on other blogs?

I’m joking. (Well, a little.)  I’ve only skimmed the interview, but what I’ve seen is fantastic, tracing the history of Berne’s career, getting into details about how bands like Bloodcount got formed and how the L.A. crowd (Nels and Alex Cline in particular) helped him get going. Iverson picks four tracks to plunge into, both in terms of music and history.

Go. Read it.

Playlist: June 19, 2009

Playlist for Friday, June 19, 3:00 to 6:00 p.m.

….. Whoa, that new Steve Lehman Octet album is a kick. More about that later.

….. Played about 20 minutes of Tina Marsh’s music, as promised. Didn’t have time for the full 20-minute “Milky Way Dreaming,” unfortunately.

….. Bloom Project is, in this case, the duo of Rent Romus (sax) and Thollem McDonas (piano). They explore some nice spaces well beyond jazz, but in a style that sticks to traditional playing as opposed to the heavy electronics Romus has been using lately. The contrast is interesting (and probably worth a writeup sometime).

….. Pink Saliva is a trio of Montreal-area improvisers, documented on one of a few 3-inch CDs we’ve gotten from Majuma. It’s mostly lo-fi cacophany — I mean that in a good way — but the third track, played here, gets a little closer to jazz.

….. Andy Haas (sax) and Don Fiorino (guitar) are improvisers who craft a unique sound, one with heavy doses of world music and a subtext that I’m guessing comes from a lot of classic-rock listening during formative years. They’ve got two very different CDs in rotation with us right now. Hanuman Sextet can be traced back to psychedelia experiments with Indian music, but it’s also got healthy doses of jazz horns, lots of steel guitar (not your usual improv instrument), and some more down-to-earth grooving than you normally get from the psych crowd.

….. Radio I-Ching, also featuring Haas and Fiorino, goes in a tougher direction: Heavy drums powering fleet sax lines and often crunching guitar, a heavy dose of rock sound applied to a jazz-jam concept. The lighter tracks add swirls of world-music exotica, a tough-to-place mix of African, Cuban, and Asian styles. “Judgement Day” is like a late-night party in a Cuban jazz club, and “Topsy” is a bebop gyroscope out of control. But I’m particularly taken with their version of “Misterioso,” which is a raging blur of guitar and drums, dark and flitting, with the soprano sax suddenly piping in with the melody line.

….. Pop alert: The new St. Vincent is really good, richly produced, and packed with nooks and crannies of sound (strings! extra guitar!) that make for a great pop-record experience. As good as Annie Clarke’s first album was, this is miles ahead. Flotilla is an indie-pop quartet with a harp player (and yes, she gets a solo, on at least one track!) They’ve got a deliciously icy sound that reminds me of Call and Response’s Winds Take No Shape album.

M-Theory Pulls My Strings

I’m in San Diego for the next several days — on business, not pleasure, so there’ll be no time for music shows.

But I did arrive early enough for a trek to the Mission Hills area to visit M-Theory Music, though. It’s a nifty little CD store with some nice, obscure, used jazz vinyl (which I never dare purchase — it’d be too much burden in addition to the computer bag I lug around). I love to spend an hour or so at the listening stations, trying to find new stuff. Who needs Sea World when you’ve got this?

Even with a dearth of avant-garde stuff at the store, it’s hard keeping the haul as minor as possible. Here’s the damage this time:

1. Los Campesinos! — We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. A find at the listening station. Crazed, manic pop, dense with instruments and sounds and energy. A latter-day New Pornographers, maybe, with a British accent in the lead vocal and — suddenly! — an American-accented female vocal. I’ve been in the mood for big-energy pop lately.

2. Asobi Seksu — Hush. The other listening-station find, a Japanese pop band apparently fronted by some classical-piano child prodigy. High energy here, too. Big, airy guitar sounds and forceful vocals, and some nice sheens of emotion. Apparently they were just in San Diego a week ago.

3. Medeski, Martin & Wood — Zaebos. The trio plays selections from John Zorn’s Masada Book Two, the cluster of 300 or so songs that came from an outpouring of inspiration a few years ago and is being documented on the Book of Angels CD series on Tzadik. I’ve heard mixed things about this one, and I’ve had mixed feelings about MMW, but I’ll give it a shot, to show M-Theory that people do buy this stuff sometimes (plus, it was sold at a price uncharacteristic for a Tzadik…)

4. Archie Shepp & Roswell Rudd — Live in New York. Replacing a copy I’d lost and never got a good listen to. A 2000 session of veterans that includes Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille, Grachan Moncur III, and a bit of Amiri Baraka.

5. Hugh Masekela — Phola. This one’s kind of for the kids, actually; they’re showing an open spirit when it comes to music, and when I spied this one filed in the wrong place, it suddenly seemed like a good direction to try out with them.

So much for play time. It’s off to work.

Playlist: Feb. 20, 2009

KZSU playlist for Friday, Feb. 20, 3:00 to 5:15 p.m.

The upcoming week is jam-packed with promising live-music shows, including a few very cool ones outside the normal purview of my show. (I’m thinking of the Scatterbrain Jamboree, a benefit for the SF AIDS Foundation that’s being put on at Thee Parkside tonight and tomorrow.)

I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing Marco Eneidi, who’s back in town from Vienna for one show, Feb. 26, at the Luggage Store Gallery.  UPDATE: More info here.

Also setting up plans to host Le Quan Ninh and Michel Doneda next week — two musicians from France who will be in town to perform some modern classical stuff in the sfSound Microfestival (details at sfsound.org.)

Other highlights:

• The Club Foot Orchestra, a ’90s Bay Area phenomenon, is reconvening at Amnesia on Sunday night as “Orchestra Nostalgico,” playing Nino Rota music. It’s a show I’d mentioned briefly here.
• Opus Spongebobicum got mentioned here, and I’ve played it quite a bit on-air. This time, I borrowed a trick from fellow DJ Red West and played a few tracks in succession, to give people a chance to hunt out the Spongebob theme in the variations. Whether this counts as “fun” is an exercise left to the reader.