144 Strings

Christy Doran — 144 Strings for a Broken Chord (Between the Lines, 2018)

During the course of Christy Doran’s suite for 24 guitars (four of them basses), you’re rarely listening to all 24 guitars — or if you are, they’re playing with restraint. This isn’t an barrage of shredding, and even when dense riffage-upon-riffage moments come up, they’re well coordinated and cleanly executed. The sound often resembles jazzy prog. It proudly showing its blues and rock roots, and it’s executed with the precision of a chamber orchestra.

The band includes drums, and they’re crucial, adding a tiny bit of sonic variation that provides a focal point. The four electric basses often get buried in the mix, but they have plenty of good moments, including solos. The passages of many guitars playing small parts together, often as the backing to a solo, create a lushness, a crunch that can only come from lots of strings being plucked at once. “Broken Chords” is brimming with that sound. The bluesy “Bad News Babe” is another good example, with the little chiming harmonics played as a group backing.

“Andromeda” is an exercise in grooving counterpoint — think of the overlapping lines of Steve Reich or later King Crimson with a jazzy beat set down by the drum kit. It has a sparkling sound that tickles my prog center.

“Gunslingers” has some appropriate showing off, in the form of tickling, speedy riffs adorning the corners of the sound while a chiming guitar figure occupies the center. It’s a fun exercise in precision, including what sounds like a “solo” played by multiple guitars in unison:

Doran was fortunate enough to present 144 Strings live in a theater, with the guitarists seated in a gentle arc spanning the stage. It just plain looks fun, and based on the excerpts he’s posted, the concert was a blast as well.

SF Tape Music + sfSound

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival runs January 10-12 at the Victoria Theater (2961 16th Street, San Francisco).

Source: Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

For Bay Area creative music, the first big happening of the calendar year tends to be the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. “Tape music” refers to an early type of electronic music that wasn’t performed live, but was instead committed to reel-to-reel tape. The pieces today are digital recordings, played to the Tape Music Festival audience across 24 speakers in near-total darkness (minus any legally mandated EXIT signs). It’s an audio adventure.

Sunday’s program (7:00 p.m.) features pieces that combine pre-recorded parts with live musicians (presumably not in total darkness). One example would be “Clarinet Threads,” a 1985 composition by Denis Smalley (below). It’s a format that’s fairly common, but I think it’s a first for the Tape Music Festival.

Smalley’s piece is on the Sunday program, along with new or recent pieces by sfSound members Matt Ingalls and Kyle Bruckmann and the world premiere of local composer Ken Ueno’s “Ghosts of Ancient Hurricanes.” There will also be two 1964 pieces by Mario Davidovsky, who died in August and whose composing advanced the musician + electronics format.

Here’s the complete Sunday program, taken from the sfSound site:

Sunday January 12, 2020 (7:00pm)
a special 3-set concert of works for instruments and fixed media featuring sfSoundGroup

KEN UENO – Ghosts of Ancient Hurricanes (2020)
– interval –
DENIS SMALLEY – Clarinet Threads (1985)
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY – Synchronisms #2 (1964)
MATT INGALLS & SFSOUND – Blue Sedan (2020)
– interval –
JONTY HARRISON – Force Fields (2006)
MARIO DAVIDOVSKY – Synchronisms #3 (1964)
KYLE BRUCKMANN – Clutterfields (2019)

A few other program items that stand out at first glance:

• Very classic pieces by Pierre Schaeffer (1948!) and and Toru Takemitsu (1956) (Friday 8:30 p.m., Saturday 9:30 p.m.)
• A 1992 piece by Pauline Oliveros, who was feted at the 2017 festival (Friday)
• A 2011 piece by Ken Nordine, who died in February (Saturday, 7:00 p.m.)
• A piece by bran(…)pos, a personal favorite and a Day of Noise veteran (Friday).

The complete four-show program is here.

Monk: The Work

Miles Okazaki — Work (self-released, 2018)

From Kevin Whitehead’s book, New Dutch Swing, regarding Thelonious Monk’s “deliberate lack of polish”:

What some heard as fumbling, thick fingers crushing so many adjacent notes, Misha [Mengelberg] heard simply as a liberal use of minor seconds. Monk in a way took diatonic harmony to its extreme, hiding every basic triad in an obfuscatory thicket.

Early on, I encountered the assertion that Monk’s hand size made him imprecise on the keys, and that his genius was to turn those would-be mistakes into stunning special harmonies. Over the years, I’ve learned that idea is more or less debunked. Monk was purposefully crafting something that was his. He was innovating.

So, when someone plays Monk on an instrument other than piano — a non-chordal instrument like a saxophone, or even a guitar, where those piano chords might be challenging to replicate — what happens then? It seems to me that you would get a very personal reading.

First, it would be Monk heard through the layer of translation from piano to a different instrument. But more than that, the solo aspect would provide a “purer” version of that musician’s take on the material. Broccoli tastes different to you than it does to me. I can say this confidently because other people seem to actually enjoy the stuff. Maybe Monk sounds different to you than it does to me — or, more clinically, maybe the details that stand out to your ear aren’t the same ones that stand out to me.

These ideas linger in my head when I listen to Miles Okazaki’s Work, a six-volume collection of all of Monk’s compositions performed on solo guitar. Certainly, Okazaki gives some songs novel treatments. But I like to think that underneath it all, there’s a chance to peek into a musician’s brain for a “clean” read of what Monk could sound like — the Monk that Okazaki hears.

That feeling is particularly strong on Work because of the rules Okazaki set for himself. No funny time signatures (every song was originally in common time, it turns out). True, recognizable readings of the melodies. One guitar for the entire project, with one amplifier and no effects. There was leeway to experiment, but the goal was to present Monk as Monk, keeping that translation layer thin.

The familiarity of Monk’s songbook gives any jazz musician a preset level of expertise, much like the tens of thousands of pitches thrown by a baseball player by the time he makes the Major Leagues. Okazaki started out knowing how to play around with these tunes. The challenge was how to present them as a whole, and how to vary them enough to create a compelling 70-track album. I’m especially grateful for Okazaki’s liner notes, which detail the evolution of the project and include track-by-track comments that nod to musicians and recordings that inspired him. 

Of course, Okazaki is a modern artist full of tricks and angles. He’s part of the regular crowd on the Pi Recordings label. So these aren’t meant to be pristine, sober readings of Monk. Some, like “Think of One,” dabble and stray as Okazaki’s improvisation progresses. Others, like “Misterioso,” dive down for a new, undiscovered perspective. (“Despite the way it sounds, the performance is in common time the whole way through,” he writes in the liners.)

 
“Monk’s Mood” opens with some dissonant dabbling that feels out the chords and melody of the song. That’s normal for any solo jazz piece, I suppose, but there’s a closeness to the homebrewed recording, as if you’re in the workshop watching Okazaki think his way through the piece, decoding its mathematics and deciding which elements to wring out. On other tracks, the sound is almost tactile — close enough to feel the delicious tension on the strings as he chops his way through “Bright Mississippi.”

 
I’m skipping around Work rather than powering through all the tracks in sequence. I’m surprised at the sheer number of Monk songs that I’ve never heard of. I can’t point to specific revelations about any given composition yet, but it’s fun hearing Okazaki pick the tunes apart. There are more lessons to be found in there.

One last thing. Yes, you can listen to the entire album for free on Bandcamp. But please consider purchasing it, at the fair price Okazaki is asking. Musicians should be compensated for projects like this — after all, it was work.

What Just Happened

Two sources of inspiration for this blog are Wil Wheaton dot net and Real Life Comics, partly because both are so long-running. Both also slowed as they aged, in terms of posting frequency. Wheaton recently took a month off. Real Life Comics went away for four years before reviving for a spell in 2018-19.

There’s no rule that says I have to explain the hiatus that this blog took between June and December, but why not. It’s nothing crisis-level. No depression or family tragedy, nothing like that.

Mostly, it was the day job. I call it that, flippantly, but in reality I have a grown-up career that I enjoy devoting time to. A few consecutive busy months left me allotting less time for music in general — not only seeing shows, but also taking time to seriously listen and think about music.

There’s also the kids. They’re teenagers, and I don’t want to miss what little time I have left with them, especially with the oldest having reached college age.

Then there’s the writing itself. Originally, this blog (and its stick-figure predecessor, which still survives) was an outlet for a kind of writing I wasn’t able to do at work. Oddly, the writing at my current job uses the same mental muscles as the blog — not in terms of style or subject but in terms of process. At the end of a writing-heavy day, I find I’m less inclined to sit down and go through the same motions for my hobby. That’s an issue I’ll have to wrestle with.

And of course, there’s inertia. Once I got out of the habit of blogging and going to shows, it was easy to stay out.

Why come back, then? First, the blog is a point of pride, even though I don’t really tell anyone about it. I like seeing the long history of posts. And despite what I said about writing, those muscles could use the exercise.

But secondly, I got inspired. Real Life Comics came back.

Real Life is a web comic that started in 2000, based loosely on Greg Dean’s real life, plus some liberties such as a holodeck and wormhole-style teleportation. After Greg and his wife had a child (in the comic, but in real life, too), the posting frequency petered out until it finally stopped in 2015. Understandable. I’ve been there. I don’t know why I kept checking the site, but I did, and bam — in late 2018, I discovered that the strip had started up again and had run a couple of months’ worth of steady updates.

Real Life Comics seems to have fallen back into hiatus, but … if he can revive his work for at least a little while, I can do it too, right?

Back Pages #5: Amy X. Neuburg and Men … and the Spatula of Eternity

(The Back Pages series is explained here, where you’ll also find links to the other installments.)

I don’t have much of a story to go with this one. What I have is the spatula:

It’s from an Amy X. Neuburg and Men concert at the Starry Plough in Berkeley. They were promoting the album Sports! Chips! Booty!, which came out on the Racer label in 1998. The spatula, made of simple flexible plastic, lasted from then until November 2019. That’s possibly 20 years of flipping kid-sized pancakes and frozen hash browns patties — multiple uses per week, with breaks only for vacations.

I’m not exaggerating. This thing got mileage, and I like to believe it was the last of its litter still in active use. It finally cracked this past November, and after some tense moments in the trauma center (Krazy Glue station), it’s been retired to a place of honor atop my CD cabinet.

Looking at that spatula, really looking at it for the first time in years, made me think about the band. Oh wow, the band.

Amy X. Neuburg has built an impressive career mixing songwriting, electronic percussion, dense loops of precise harmonizing (a one-woman choir), and a prog-rock degree of difficulty. Catchy melodies, thoughtful introspection, and a giddy sense of humor permeate her work, including The Secret Language of Subways (MinMax, 2009), the tour de force suite she wrote for herself and three cellists.

Amy X. Neuburg and Men was a playful prog-pop outfit with Neuburg fronting on lead vocals and percussion while the all-“men” band added backing vocals, usually as a unified block. Her husband, Herb Heinz, played guitar (he released some worthy records himself during this era), and Joel Davel added MIDI-driven xylophone and marimba. In good ’90s prog fashion, the band had a Chapman Stick, played by Micah Ball. J.T. Quillan III didn’t play an instrument but looked good in a tux (and sang), which was part of the whimsy.

Following the more serious Utechma album (Racer, 1995), Sports embraced the band’s goofy side, with tongue-in-cheek artsy tunes like “The Shower Song” But the band was also about crisp musicianship and Neuburg’s gift of rich melody, as on the languid “Orange County.” Live, the band was joyous and bouncing, and I’m sure I saw them at the Starry Plough at least twice.

The spatula was a nod to Sports single, “Big Barbecue.” But the track that really sold me was “Naked Puppets.” It opens with some electronics improvising, then bursts into King Crimson-worthy guitar, some fun rhymes, and a prog-circus finale.

You can hear tracks including “Shower Song” and “Big Barbecue” on Amy X. Neuburg’s website. The band’s albums are available on CD Baby and Amazon, where you can sample other treats such as the cover of King Crimson’s “Waiting Man.”

Part of My Childhood Died

I’m still surprised at how deeply I mourned the lost of KFOG, a radio station I hadn’t earnestly listened to since about 2008. Even in the years leading up to then, I would tune in occasionally only for the “10 at 10” show (which inevitably lost some luster after Dave Morey retired), nothing more. College radio and avant-jazz gripped my soul around the turn of the century, and I’ve mostly left the classic rock world behind.

But KFOG wasn’t a normal rock station. For its first 15 years or so, DJs had a lot of leeway. The station did have a rotation and a specific “sound” — it had parameters. But the occasional deep album track was permitted, even encouraged. Weekly theme shows dug deep to fit their themes. It was on the eclectic “Headphones Only” program that I first heard 10cc’s epic “One Night in Paris” and Thomas Dolby’s shimmery, floating “Screen Kiss.”

More importantly, KFOG grew up with me. The station switched to a rock format in 1982, my sophomore year in high school. It became our soundtrack, and it stood out as superior against the four or five similar options on the dial. I carried KFOG with me through college, becoming a fringe member of the “fogheads,” as fans called themselves.

M. Dung, host of the a.m. commute time slot and the Sunday Night Idiot Show.

This was the kind of community that commercial radio no longer tries to foster. Late in the ’80s, the station ran a poll to pick the top 1,045 songs of all time (matching the station’s 104.5 frequency on the dial). Local rock stations did this all the time, with “Stairway to Heaven” always coming in at No. 1. Not this time; KFOG listeners picked “A Day in the Life.” And the top choices from major bands were deep cuts that I had never encountered. The top Supertramp song was “Hide in Your Shell.” The top CSN (and sometimes Y) song was Graham Nash’s “Cathedral” — and holy cow, I had no idea Nash had ever written something so intense.

KFOG was never a perfect blueprint for my tastes. They didn’t like prog rock; I didn’t like Led Zeppelin. But we were sympatico in that dance of discovery that radio can be so good at. As I started dating my wife, she would comment that I seemed to own everything KFOG played. It wasn’t remotely true — but they could easily spin four or five songs in a row that were on my shelves, and I would always point this out just to annoy her.

By the mid-’00s, KFOG began succumbing to corporate blandness, and the decline kicked into full gear by the time Dave Morey left in 2008. I stopped listening shortly after.

But if you don’t know: Cumulus Media, KFOG’s final owner, understood the station’s impact and gave it one last farewell. Radio stations don’t normally get that. When KFOG switched formats in 1982, it simply switched. It was planned and pre-publicized (as opposed to a WKRP-style coup) but also abrupt. That’s the business. In contrast, KFOG’s final night — Sept. 6, 2019 — was a marathon of old shows from the archives, the familiar voices of old friends long gone and tunes that I had not heard for 10 or even 20 years. It was all pre-recorded, but the shows were selected with a fan’s ear. It was closure.

All this reminds me of another high school memory: reading William Faulkner and his famous quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Even though I honestly wouldn’t enjoy hearing peak-era KFOG for hours on end, so many of my musical choices tie back to those early days. The KFOG I loved has been gone for nearly two decades, but it’s different to know that it’s now gone. This is what it really means to move on, I suppose.

Down the Spectral Rabbit Hole

I love sfSound Radio. It’s a continual shuffle-play of experimental and improvised music, from fully scripted modern classical to spontaneous noise. And during work, it’s a great way to shake the cobwebs and bring some avant-garde street cred to my desk.

Like any good radio, it’s also a way to discover new sounds. And so it was that I recently heard a sparse strings piece that I liked, which pulled me into the world of spectral music and made me reconsider Steve Lehman’s recent octet albums.

The piece was the introductory movement of Gerard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques — solo viola, it turns out. That led me to give the complete album-length composition a listen. As with minimalism, Grisey’s music is a rethinking of what the orchestra can do. Les Esapces is a roiling sea of sound, not so much divided into discrete events (like waves on a beach) as presenting continuous shades of emotion. Abstractness aside, it does feel like a narrative, one full of unsettling emotions.

I’m not sure what to make of the Epilogue, where a pair of horns lash out on composed unison phrases, almost playfully. Behind them, the orchestra maintains a sparkling sheen hinting at heavy thoughts and universal mysteries. But as the piece ends, the sheen drops — we’re left with the horns and a drum. The contrast feels like it’s meant to be a silly touch at the end of this epic piece, but that seems out of character. It can’t be that simple.

Only after doing all this listening did I look up Grisey and learn that he’s the composer tied to the idea of spectral music — compositions that use the lingering harmonics of notes to create the “spectral” sheen that sounded so special to me. (Grisey did not coin the term “spectral” and apparently didn’t like it.)

I’d heard of spectral music before. It made jazz headlines thanks to the Steve Lehman Octet.

But when Travail, Transformation, and Flow (Pi Recordings, 2009) was released, I gave it only a cursory listen, to see what this “spectral” stuff was about. And I didn’t immediately get it. I think I was expecting some overtly complex or ugly musical language, something brutally obvious as with microtonal music. The albums were good, but I didn’t feel “spectralized.”

The problem is that I paid too much attention to Lehman’s angular saxophone soloing. It’s fantastic, but he does that all over his other albums. What I should have noticed was the sheen, that uncomfortable rustling built out of subtle, off-kilter harmonies. After sitting with Grisey for so long, it was so obvious.

In contrast to Grisey’s overhang of impending doom, Lehman’s spectral sheen is brighter, like sunlight bouncing off glass. He uses the vibraphone (Chris Dingman) as the foundation, but it’s necessarily complemented by the horns to create a dissonant and lingering effect. You hear it right out of the gate on Travail, with “Echoes,” combining a ringing vibraphone chord with a combination of horns sounding a bright but slightly “off” chord.

On a track like “Segregated and Sequential” (from Mise en Abîme, Pi Recordings, 2014), the sheen is more implied, spoken in horn fragments while the vibraphone — a custom microtonal version, still played by Dingman — chimes away at a different tempo. “Autumn Interlude,” also from Mise, is based on a snappy theme and rhythm but intentionally drags itself down — both in tempo and mood — through the use of what sound like microtones on the trombone.

Tristan Murail is another composer strongly tied to spectral composition, and it turns out I’ve already enjoyed his piece “Winter Fragments” in my collection. Before, it just sounded nice; now it sounds all “spectral” to me. It’s interesting how much we can influence our own musical experiences. It makes a difference when you know what you’re listening for.