Composer/string instrumentalist Jessica Pavone is “one of the busiest young performers on the city’s creative music scene,”. Here at Roulette on Tuesday, November 10th she celebrates the Tzadik release of “Songs of Synastry and Solitude”; a collection of songs for string quartet influenced by an interest in the simple beauty of folk songs, the ghosts of all things lost and Leonard Cohen’s encouragement to live outside this world.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
JESSICA PAVONE: I began composing the pieces in the fall of 2007. Four pieces were composed in September and October 2007 for a MATA interval concert. I composed four more in January and February of 2008. The completed eight pieces were presented at Issue Project Room in March of 2008. The last three were composed in December of 2008 and January of 2009 for a concert at The Kitchen in April of 2009. That was the premier of the complete set of songs. Folk music was on the brain and that, of course, could mean many things. I was also thinking of myself as a song writer in addition to being a composer. The influences for the pieces weren’t coming from traditional forms for string quartet, sonata form etc.. but from folk songs and other influences. There is a lot of arpeggiation of chords throughout the ensemble – emulating a finger picked guitar, there is chorus / verse structure, there is an emphasis on simplicity. I find that most of the music that I am drawn to is rather simple when I break it down and transcribe it. Those are specific qualities of folk music that I appreciate. I met Erin, the viola player of The Toomai Quintet, at a show we were both performing in. The string quartet music was already in mind but I hadn’t started composing yet. Just hours before I met her, I received a call from MATA do present a piece in their Interval series. Somehow, Erin and I started talking about this and she said she had just started working regularly with a string quintet with double bass ad they were looking for new repertoire. I took her contact information, we did a reading together, they were fantastic.
R: Are there working artists today with whose work you identify, or rather, who do you consider to be your peers?
JP: Yes. I am blessed to have a wonderful group of close friends that I have made over the years who are musicians and with whom I work.
R: What was the last music you listened to?
JP: Ornette Coleman, Skies of America
R: Chocolate, Vanilla or Rocky Road?
JP: Chocolate – even better with peanut butter or chocolate chips
in it.
R: What is music?
JP: A vibration, many vibrations
R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
JP: I am most certainly both.
R: Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
JP: Time. One learns by doing – learning from their mistakes and successes.
R: What is interesting to you about your own work?
JP: How it develops over time.
R: Do you do other things aside from music?
JP: Yes, of course. Some favorite past times are; going to the gym – I have too much energy – must be expelled, walking – again an energy issue – I pace up and down the subway platform so i tend to walk instead of take the train quite often, reading, listening to music, painting, watching movies, studying astrology, cooking when I’m not being lazy about it, going to the beach – especially in winter.
R: Other thoughts?
JP: Be true to your intention.
On Tuesday, October 27th at 8:30PM Pamela Z, a San Francisco-based composer/performer and audio artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, and sampling technology will be performing at Roulette. Processing her live voice through “MAX MSP” software on a PowerBook, she creates solo works that combine operatic bel canto and experimental extended vocal techniques with found percussion objects, spoken word, and sampled concrète sounds.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
PAMELA Z: My typical way of working, whether in a small concert format or a large-scale full-evening performance project, generally involves a string of short works or short episodes that make up the whole. This concert will be no exception. In this case, I’ll be doing a variety of short works, some of which are excerpts from larger works, and some of which are stand-alone pieces.
PZ: Sonically, my influences are too numerous to name. I tend not to think about a particular artist when I’m making work, but I think that we all owe something of our work, both in terms of aesthetics and techniques, to those whose work we find engaging and inspiring. When I listen to my music collection in “shuffle mode” it leaps wildly between artists as varied as Luke DuBois, Carla Kihlstedt, Åke Parmerud, Mark Ribot, Carl Stone, Meredith Monk, Erase Errata, Alarm Will Sound, etc. (just to name a few from a randomly-generated playlist) and I believe this broadness of sonic territory definitely finds its way into my own musical ideas. I also derive inspiration for my work from visual artists and movement artists (experimental theatre and dance). I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from my early collaborations with Jeanne Finley + John Muse, who do wonderful video installation works, and I’m also inspired by sound installation artists such as Paul Dimarinis and Ed Osborn.
Pianist/composer Samuel Vriezen presents his unique rendition at breakneck speed of Tom Johnson’s conceptual cult classic, The Chord Catalogue, together with a large-scale lyrical constructivist piece of his own, Within Fourths/Within Fifths at Roulette on Wednesday, October 28th.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
SAMUEL VRIEZEN: What I’ll be playing at Roulette is a program of two large-scale piano pieces, both of which are basically completely constructivist chord progressions, which, however, produce totally different musical results. It’s Tom Johnson’s 1986 The Chord Catalogue, and my own Within Fourths/Within Fifths from 2006, which was a response to Tom’s work.
SV: Michael Pisaro’s “Hearing Metal 1″ on Edition Wandelweiser. Three pieces that consist of close-miked soft tam-tam stroke gently mixed with soft sine waves. Very elegant and pleasant music.
R: What is music?
SV: It’s the exploration through sound of coexistence in time.
SV: Performing is nothing more than the continuation of composing, carried on with other means. At least I guess that’s the case for me. I definitely think of myself as a composer first, but for many reasons performance has become part of that. The Chord Catalogue certainly played a major role in that; I got very curious about Tom’s piece, and I wanted to know it from the inside. It was my composer’s curiosity that got me going here. The desire to get to know some musical thinking from the inside is what often gets me to learn a piece. I now think of the composer’s job basically as thinking through the performance situation. That can go much further than just writing down the notes that will land on some second violinist’s desk. It can involve thinking through the entire process of music making itself, and how music making exists within the world. But in order to know what can be done I feel it’s good to know performance from the inside.
And, of course, performing is just a lot of fun!
SV: I might never have become a composer if I hadn’t heard the work of Xenakis and Nancarrow. But Cage and Johnson amongst others have been important too, as have in recent years been the composers of the Wandelweiser group, the work of Jackson Mac Low, the writers associated with Language Poetry and the philosophy of Alain Badiou.
SV: In the past few years I’ve been very active in the Dutch literary world, publishing poetry, essays and translations. I’m very interested in bringing those concerns together with performing; as a part of that I started a group together with some poets and musicians in Amsterdam, which we have called the Jackson Mac Low Band after NY experimental poet/musician Jackson Mac Low, to explore polyphonic music/spoken text work.
In celebration of his new CD on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, the renowned ensembles ICE and Talea came together to perform the chamber music of Mario Diaz de Leon on September 25th at Roulette. Hypnotic and ritualistic, the music mixes acoustic and electronic elements, and draws from influences including noise electronics, free improvisation, new age, spectral music, and underground metal.
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Mario Diaz de Leon (b. 1979 in St. Paul, MN) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in New York City. After playing guitar in hardcore punk bands in the mid to late 1990s, he began writing works for classical instruments with electronics in 2001. Initially inspired by composers such as Ligeti, Dumitrescu, Ryoji Ikeda, and Scelsi, his chamber music draws on many influences including noise electronics, spectral music, free improvisation, new age, avant rock, and underground metal. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory and Columbia University, and has studied with George Lewis, Fabien Levy, and Randy Coleman, among others. Ensembles such as ICE, iO Quartet, and Romania’s Hyperion Ensemble have performed his work internationally. He is a member of the Shinkoyo collective, founded in 2002, and has collaborated extensively with Shinkoyo members Severiano Martinez, Zeljko McMullen, and Doron Sadja. Since 1999, he has worked with visual artist Jay King, and the duo have exhibited multimedia works throughout the US and Spain. In 2006, he began giving solo performances, and has since embarked on various US tours and released the album Mira on Shinkoyo Records. He has played guitar in many bands including Disembodied, Symbol, and Stexx.
www.myspace.com/mariodiazdeleon
www.iceorg.org
www.taleaensemble.org
www.tzadik.com
Using her solid classical training as a springboard, Cellist Okkyung Lee incorporates jazz, sounds, korean traditional music, noise with extended techniques to create her own unique blend of music. On Thursday October 22 at Roulette Okkyung collaborates with video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen using pre-recorded sounds from the cobble stone street outside Location 1 as a source material to blur the physical boundaries between the venue and the outside.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
OKKYUNG LEE: Kjell and I met probably 3-4 years ago in New York at one of Phil Niblock’s parties. We didn’t talk all that much other than basic exchanges then. A week later I had this solo gig in Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon which I dreaded going since I thought there would be nobody. It was at the back of this Jamaican deli on 4th avenue somewhere. Well, when I walked in there were 2 people: the owner of the place who couldn’t care less about the music and Kjell. I guess I didn’t play too bad because he stayed until the end or maybe he didn’t want to embarrass me. Afterward he invited me to come to his studio to watch some of his flickers works and I was totally blown away. Also his passion and total understanding of free improvised music were very apparent through his way of responding/processing the signals to generate his visuals. Then on top of all that he’s such an awesome person. What else can you ask for? Naturally we wanted to collaborate with each other and almost 2 years ago, we finally played together in New York and it was an exciting experience for both of us. Then last week we played together with Keith Rowe at Kontraste Festival in Krems, Austria which was another great opportunity.
At roulette, I’ll be taking the sounds from the street outside Location 1 and some of sampled cello sounds which will be (hopefully) manipulated throughout the concert gradually along with live solo cello. Then Kjell will be taking these signals and feed them through his system to affect his visuals. The idea of blurring the physical boundaries between inside and outside of the space was the starting point for me to develop this project.
OL: Rocky Road just because I’m a Pisces.
R: What is music?
OL: Whatever you want it to be.
OL: Oh, hard to say. Although I wouldn’t dare to call myself a “composer.” I write my own music, little tunes, or whatever they are but wouldn’t call them “compositions”. I guess I get different satisfactions(?) from each side and that’s why I keep doing both. Sure it’s hard to do both at the same time. I mean it’s really hard to give cues when you play cello!
OL: Suppose having an extremely hard-to-please-and-mean-spirited cello teacher growing up might do that to you.
OL: Too many to name. It’s always great to be blown away standing in front of/listening to/watching a great piece of art in any forms. The last great 2 things I saw were one of Cy Twombly’s paintings from “A Gathering of Time” and “Last Meadow”, a dance piece choreographed by Miguel Gutierrez. They both thrilled me and made me want to “create” something of my own.
OL: I try to understand things, especially human behaviors. I think I’m getting better at it slowly, very slowly. And I LOVE watching movies.
Improv master Larry Ochs has played with everyone from John Zorn to Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, and Andrew Cyrille as well as being one of the driving forces behind the 30 year strong ROVA Sax Quartet. On Tuesday, October 13th at Roulette he presents the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core with a meditation on and a 21st-century distillation of the songs of American and eastern European blues-shouters, and of traditional chant-singers from Asia and Africa. The result is strikingly modern.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
LO: I’ve been composing for improvisers since 1971, with the whole process jumping a few levels once I got involved with Rova Saxophone Quartet in 1977/78. I also prefer performing in ongoing bands, including bands that play 100% free-improvisation; improvisation that is based on mutual interests and results in the eventual creation of a world of sound that that band comes to inhabit whenever it reconvenes. The important thing though is: the working or ongoing band. I’m into “deeper is better,” and you can’t get deeper without repetition, development of a group sound, and a willingness to take chances with partners you trust to know how to support you when you’re improvising out there without a net.
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The Sax & Drumming Core started as a trio of 2 drummers (same guys) and me on sax, and was intended as a one-off CD project only. Touring with 2 drummers and just Ochs out front? No way. But then we performed live for a benefit locally (San Francisco), and then a few other gigs, then a tour, then a 2nd great CD ( Up From Under on Atavistic). Then I got lucky: a producer told me the only way she’d give me a date at her festival is if I agreed to employ Satoko Fujii. Well, that’s not exactly right. I proposed it to her myself, but then I started thinking I could never get enough work to have a quintet tour happen. Luckily the producer didn’t care about that… But, having played with Fujii and Tamura on a Rova project in 2003, and then hearing Satoko playing a synthesizer on Natsuki’s great quartet CD, I knew I wanted to use both of them, to open the trio up for more possible colors, combinations, compositional strategies, etc. So the quintet happened first in 2007 for 3 festivals in Europe plus a recording and concert in Venice; the CD from that Venice session is just out and will be available at the Roulette concert. Since 2007: a tour in western North America in 2008.
We work from compositions for improvisers; four basic forms: a graphic map that for the most part tells you when you’re in and out, but with a few set moments, frames an improvisation; form 2: an open improvisation with notation and visual cues, all available to be integrated into the open form when appropriate; form 3: a more standard form with heads and solos; form 4: a form that meditates on the blues shouters from around the world …this last form was the first one used on the first CD, and the main reason I got this band together.
Are there working artists today with whose work you identify, or rather, who do you consider to be your peers?
LO: I love musicians working in the cross-hairs of composition and improvisation. I also love those working purely in free improvisation, but I need some kind of depth of musical understanding, combined with a sense that I’m hearing the inner soul of the player through their music, be that on saxophone or computer. If I get a sense that you’re just dabbling, I’m out of there. I do take younger less experienced musicians as seriously as my peers if I can see their soul in their music, or the potential emergence of the inner person. If you’re in it for life, I’ll be there checking you out.
The people I continually come back to are those that really combine composition and improvisation or are master improvisers: Barry Guy, Frith, Zorn, Crispell, (talking peers now, not spanning “the history of improvised music”), Lisle Ellis, Wadada Leo Smith, Roscoe Mitchell, Braxton, Evan Parker, Sharp, Z Parkins, Mori, Nels Cline, Fujii, and from the generation just below mine but still peers: Goldberg, Schott, Dunn, Amendola.
What was the last music you listened to?
LO: The last music I was listening to on the plane back from Moscow on Sept 28: Symmetric Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, Morton Feldman, Goldberg-Schott-Dunn, Booker T’s most recent CD “Potato Hole,” Electric Masada, Charles Ives Second Symphony and his great short pieces for orchestra, Guy’s first trio CD with Crispell and Lytton.
Over the past two decades, guitarist Alan Licht has worked with a veritable who’s who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). On October 4th at Roulette, Alan Licht will be joined by Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase and cellist Okkyung Lee for an evening of solo and trio pieces.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
ALAN LICHT: I’ll be playing a new solo guitar piece that’s inspired by Renaissance music as well as Minimalism. It will be a world premiere. Okkyung and Brian will also be playing solos, and then we’ll do a trio improvisation. At least for my part, by constructing the bill in this way I’m trying to show that improvisation is really composition in real time, and the differences/similarities between solo and group playing.
I’ve known Okkyung pretty much since she moved to New York, since I worked at Tonic and she would go to concerts there virtually every night. We’ve played together in a few different situations over the years, always very enjoyable. I actually saw Brian play with Stefan Tcherepnin at Roulette a few years ago; I think I’d seen the Yeah Yeah Yeahs before that and maybe someone had mentioned to me that he was interested in experimental music and had even worked at La Monte Young’s Dream House installation. Anyway, I either met him at Roulette or a while later, and we talked about playing together. We did a duo show, and then Okkyung told me she had also played with Brian and liked it, so I thought we should try a trio. We played together just one other time before, at the Knitting Factory.
R: Are there working artists today with whose work you identify, or rather, who do you consider to be your peers?
AL: Sure–as far as guitarists, Oren Ambarchi and Tetuzi Akiyama for sure. Jim O’Rourke too, as far as someone relating different kinds of music to a rock perspective. Really, anyone I’ve played with I consider a peer to some degree, although some of them are really heroic to me as well.
R: What are some defining characteristics of the musical scene you would fit yourself into? What elements of your scene differentiate it from what has come before, or what is happening now?
AL: I’ve actually fit into several different musical circles over the years, without belonging to any of them completely–which I think is deliberate. If you analyze any “musical scene”, you can usually find a lot of parallels to ones that preceded it–the differences are in the personalities of the people involved and developments in the overall culture, not just in the music world.
R: What was the last music you listened to?
AL: Yoko Ono singing on the TV show “The View” this morning.
R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
AL: Seeing Yoko Ono singing on the TV show “The View” this morning
R: Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
AL: Henry Kaiser helped a lot in terms of how teaching me how to really listen to experimental music. Before that I was listening to it as “noise”, more or less–but when he explained how Derek Bailey was putting notes together, and how people were reacting to each other in a group situation, it made much more sense. Once I knew how to listen to it, I could go about playing it.
R: What is interesting to you about your own work?
AL: That it keeps improving.
“Impressive, fascinating, exotic and challenging” ~ Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
Coherence without predictability, speed without tempo, direction without a roadmap – an unlikely foray into the world of out-jazz and free improvisation. On Saturday, October 3rd at Roulette, Hamilton and Eisenbeil will be joined in one set by their special guest, the great percussionist William Hooker.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
TOM HAMILTON: Bruce and I have been working together since 2007. Last year, a lot of our working together was involved in making a new CD for Pogus Productions, titled “Shadow Machine.” We recorded about 8 hours of music, and picked about 55 minutes from that for the CD. So this concert will be a continuation and another step in the material we’ve been developing. We are both big fans of William Hooker’s playing, and thought that he would just “up the ante” for us in presenting additional musical challenges. So we’re very glad to have William as our guest here.
BRUCE EISENBEIL: Tom and I strive to achieve a startling degree of psychological tension and formal abstraction. William and I played together in 1998. We’ve been in touch over the years and I’m looking forward to the new sounds this trio explores. Despite the fact that we use amplification, our sound is quite acoustic in nature. The textures and masses of sound are visceral. I use two amplifiers in stereo. Through the use of a pan pedal I like to change the perception of the sound source.
R: What are some defining characteristics of the musical scene you would fit yourself into? What elements of your scene differentiate it from what has come before, or what is happening now?
TH: I feel like I am on my own, superimposing what I do onto the work of one or another of the artists that I work with. For me, this approached hasn’t changed much over the years. So, it’s hard to know what scene I would fit into, if any. I would say that there are vast numbers of artists in all the sub-genres of new music who have never heard of me. So it’s all kind of uncharted (hmm – no pun intended).
BE: A high degree of contrast in texture, mood and color are a few characteristics that interest me in modern music. Timbre has an ongoing evolution. Contemporary music is often an exploration of new timbres.
R: What was the last music you listened to?
TH: A CD by Thomas Gaudynski, also with whom I just did a concert in Milwaukee. A brilliant below-the-radar electronicist.
BE: An ECM recording of “Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern” by Helmut Lachenmann.
R: What is music?
TH: A hole in the atmosphere in which you throw money.
BE: Music is a poetry of circulating sound. Great music breaks rules.
R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
BE: As a kid I heard a lot of experimental music on the FM dial and in my parents record collection. Using my Dad’s Panasonic reel to reel and my Norelco cassette recorder I was making my own sound on sound recordings when I was five years old in 1969. As a kid I created science fiction and war dramas by superimposing a variety of sound sources. I still have them.
R: Who do you see as instrumental in your development as an artist?
TH: I studied a variety of musical topics with Thom David Mason in both high school and college. He really gave me an awareness of basic musical materials and approaches and introduced me to some music of the prevailing avant garde of the sixties. We were both pretty young, but he was older, and at least 10 steps ahead of me. His own musical activities couldn’t be more opposite to mine.
When I was in my directionless early 30s, I was given some very good advice by Mort Subotnick that changed my whole orientation and identity as an artist. He admonished me (ironically?) to first think of myself as a composer & start paying more attention to the art world in general.
In the last 20 years, I’ve worked with many other composers, helping to produce their own music through some phases of audio engineering. So becoming involved with their working approaches and convictions has been fascinating for me. Robert Ashley, in particular, has taught me the value of knowing when to stick to your idea and when to let it happen on its own. Alvin Lucier has shown me by his example the value (and results) of procedural integrity. I am continuously presented with the development of advanced musical ideas set into motion through actual productions, and am very lucky to be part of that process.
R: What is interesting to you about your own work?
TH: The work itself informs ME about my own musical preferences. Many times, the synthesizer acts like it’s some sort of teaching machine.
BE: Today, September 23, 2009, my primary interest in my experimental music is sound. How do I project a sound? What informs me in the production of that sound? Is thought faster than the speed of light? It’s certainly faster than the speed of sound. I play original music because I have a strong visionary component to my nature and I like to interact with others.
R: Other thoughts?
TH: Just glad that Roulette exists.
BE: Ditto.
Lisle Ellis, is a New York-based bassist, composer, visual artist, and teacher. On September 26th at Roulette, Ellis presents Stomping Ground – a “band” of shifting dimensions and a “song” without end – investigating ideas of community and a spectrum of diversity through traditional, experimental, and futuristic concepts, attempting to convey meaningful music through a shared sensibility of custom, territory, and gathering together.
ROULETTE: What is Music?
LISLE ELLIS: Music is sound that can transport us, or at least point our thoughts and feeling towards something beyond ourselves. Music could be just about anything: any sound you listen into with a particular kind of attention or it could even be a play of light: reflections, shadows, and movement that could be a kind of visual music. A basic array of sounds, of music, may take the hard edges off our emotions and sooth us in someway temporarily. Yet, in its most sublime state, music can be transcendental and inspire us to cultivate the capacities of our being. A phrase that I often ponder as a definition of music, and possibly artistic process in general, is by Jean Genet: “exulting love at the edge of the abyss.”
R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
LE: I’m an improvising composer/performer working from the peripheries of composition towards an understanding of the nature of the limitations of improvisation. I’m curious about how ideas of restraint, constraint, and circumscription as found in the process of composition affects improvisational processes. My music reflects my absorption in thoughts on the evolution of musicians and musicianship and I see my work as creating studies for a possible transformative future music. I create etudes that attempt to help define, shape and shift interactive behavior within the ensemble and bring a deeper understanding to the essence of individual and aggregate reflex and response in improvisational contexts.
LE: Pianists have always been my most important influence. I would say that even on the bass my playing has been very much more magnetized by the work of pianists than bass players. I’ve even consciously sought to implicate the pianisms of particular players in my playing. And I do play some piano myself, it was the instrument that I wanted to study as a child but circumstances wouldn’t allow for that. Of course, there are many, many bass players that I listen to and whose music I cherish. In fact I would say I’m a kind of Will Rogers of the bass: “never heard a bass player I didn’t like.” I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to work with some magnificent pianists: Paul Bley, Marilyn Crispell, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Misha Mengelberg, Paul Plimley, Cecil Taylor, Mircea Tiberian, and my current pianist, Angelica Sanchez.
Tune in to WNYU at 89.1FM or on WNYU.org Wednesday september 30th at 9:45 for an interview of artists Tom Hamilton and Bruce Eisenbeil on the Didjilution program. Hamilton and Eisenbeil will discuss their recently released collaboration on pogus recordings, and their upcoming event at Roulette on October 3rd among other things. Didjilution airs each wednesday at 9pm on WNYU.org and 89.1FM, featuring an eclectic mix of new and classic experimental electronic music.
