My concert review is going to be about a classical pianist named Denis Matsuev. The videos that I found were on the WQXR website’s blog. In the first video he takes the traditional jazz tune “Take the A Train” and develops a classical rendition to it. He is playing in Moscow during April 2013. By listening to the original by Duke Ellington, you can decipher how much of a transformation the jazz painting went through after being dipped in some classical paint. Of course Matsuev uses familiar motifs from the tune, but only to take it through dodecaphony and major chromaticism in his solo during this piano concerto. The swing feel is completely omitted by crazy harmonic change and multiple tempo and speeds. Indeed a display of skill, I still consider this a disrespect to jazz as a genre. The dissonances leaves listeners with an uneasy feeling compared to the original format. Classic music may be very complex and polished but there is nothing as smooth as jazz.
Denis is in his comfort zone in a classical setting and ensemble covering songs. This is the second video that can be seen on the same page. He is performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 3. He is very expressive while performing. He lets the music take over, even swaying while playing. Expression wasn’t only in the instrument, his eyebrow raises and his facial gestures showed true passion. His eyes seem closed for most of the performance; such an epic piece requires focus and concentration but he looked very comfortable and seemed to be enjoying the music he was playing. To top it all off Matsuev performed the entire concerto with no music sheet, and an old conductor; dominating and accenting heavily as he pleased throughout. At 9:57 he took charge of the ensemble then began taking the audience into a world of dissonance and excessive accenting. Later at 27:46 the ensemble descends, leaving open space for Denis’s modulation and chromatic ascension. There was sporadic, heroic accompaniment from the ensemble. Matsuev seemed to be just as great a pianist in both genres, but seemed to be more erratic than calm in his “jazz” performance.
In conclusion, Matsuev is an amazing pianist. As far as he interpreted the jazz tune, he made the concerto his very own, with consistent momentum and energy. He never sounded off or repetitive. At 37:50 it’s hard to tell if his harmonic progression is improve as with the jazz performance, but then is mimicked by the band in unison adding texture and reason to the sped up chaos. At the end of the concerto, there’s a delicate major change, bringing all the madness to a resolution, to THEN be sped up and returned to the minor tonic. This performance was epic indeed. I’m glad I took some time out to critique this great pianist, along with the criticism of the jazz “parody” I’m impressed and understand the standing ovation he received for such a virtuosic performance.
Congratulations, everyone, for a successful concert on Wednesday. This was the most polished and professional performance that I have seen and heard from a class and you are all to be congratulated!
Now to business: we have only 2 classes remaining and then the Final Exam scheduled for Monday, May 22 at 8:30am. I will post an outline of the exam soon (later today or tomorrow) so that we can use some of our class time next week reviewing and preparing outstanding responses to the questions.
We’ll also continue our conversation about environmental music by looking at a few composers who have composed site-specific pieces and works that expand theatrical performance to a global scale. Of note: there will be a performance of John Luther Adams piece Ten Thousand Birds in Morningside Park on Sunday at 3pm. Free. This is a great opportunity to experience a site-specific environmental work. There will be more to come on Make Music Day, June 21.
Finally, if you are interested in learning how to build your own website to promote you and your music, I can give a little workshop on Reading Day or the following week after finals to walk you through using the Commons to create your own WordPress site. Let me know if you are interested by replying in the comments. Let me know if you’d prefer Reading Day (Friday, May 19) or a day after exams are over.
**Due to the upload limit I could only upload this short 15 second clip. This is to show what it was like for a bit.
On April 28 I went to try and see a neo-classical trumpet performance but the venue had a different performance planned out instead. It was an audio engineer experimenting with electronic sounds to make music or a new sounds altogether. I decided to stay because I find the idea of experimenting with music and sounds fascinating. I bounce between thinking how pointless it may seems sometimes, and then how necessary and crucial it is to evolve in music. The focus of this performance was to improvise with a sound board on his laptop, and having that be accompanied with visuals that he recorded himself. The length of this experimental performance was 43 minutes.
Before the performance the engineer explained that the visuals were recorded beforehand and that he would play sounds and rhythm on top of the visuals. The subjects of these visuals varied greatly and how they were edited made it difficult at first to make out what they were. They were broccoli, flowers, construction sites, cranes, 50’s movie scenes, the sky, parks, people and some light show effects. He would play very random and ambient sounds on top of these visuals. The rhythm stayed consistent at common time. As he played on this time signature the music his improvised music was v heavily syncopated. The sounds were very foreign but you could hear a piano in there, some phone dial tones, and sometimes even some metal sounds. These samples were taken to their limits and back by stretching out the pitch, and modulating them up and down. These sounds were also quite sporadic. The rhythm was consistent but there were moments when the sounds and melodies went all the place. It was quite polyphonic. Overall the sound was ambient, and despite there being a lot of sounds and rhythms going on at the same time, it was still soothing. A lulling effect almost. These improvisations that lasted for a full 43 minutes lead to many different directions, and this was good because it created interesting moments. On the other hand this was bad because on an equal amount of moments I felt lost. Sometimes a change was too sudden to comprehend or make sense of.
As I listened to this piece I couldn’t stop thinking about the week that the class focused on electronic music and we discussed the Theremin, sampling a single sound, and mostly just the origins of making music through electric means to find new sounds. It felt like this piece belonged as one of the selections for a listening assignment that week. An issue that I have with this is exactly that it feels like it belongs with our pieces in the listening assignments. I was looking forward to the improvisations but quickly felt underwhelmed when it didn’t feel like something made in 2017. It felt done already, especially after the week we spent on electronic music. If anything this piece is showing the audience how the artist has grown or simply what his style was. I wouldn’t really recommend this performance simply because it already sounds like what we listened to through Youtube for our homework. Due to there being a lack of instruments or added emotion, hearing this live didn’t add much besides hearing something exclusive to that moment.
On April 7th, 2017 The World Music Institute along with the Brooklyn Raga Massive presented a concert in honor of the 95th Birthday Celebration of the acclaimed master of classical Indian music Ali Akbar Khan. The concert was held at Le Poisson Rouge and featured Alam Khan, the son and legacy of Ali Akbar Khan, as well as the Om Gam Ensemble. Ali Akbar Khan passed away in June 2009, but his profound impact of being an ambassador and teacher of classical North Indian music to the Western world is still strongly felt and acknowledged through his school of music, founded in San Rafael, California. The Ali Akbar College of Music is run by his wife Mary Khan and son Alam Khan, who is also an advanced instructor of the sarod. The school holds a massive archive of over 8,000 hours of live musical instruction by Ali Akbar himself and 125-recorded concerts. Through online classes the college instructs students in the Ali Akbar Khan legacy across the United States and worldwide.
The concert at Le Poisson Rouge opened with the Om Gam Ensemble, which featured an eclectic band of instrumentalists led by bassist and composer Michael Gam, who is also a core member of the Brooklyn Raga Massive. The ensemble gets its name from the mantra of the Hindu Deity Ganesh: “Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha.” Ganesh is the Hindu elephant headed god who is known as the remover of obstacles, which the ensemble imitates by trying to remove musical obstacles that would theoretically divide music into separate genres. Om Gam presents a collaboration of artists from different musical backgrounds, including Indian classical, traditional African, Middle Eastern, and Jazz. The ensemble consisted of Michael Gam on upright bass, Shivalik Goshal on tabla, Arun Ramamurthy on violin, Kane Mathis on the santur, and a guest flute player.
Om Gam began its set list with an unconventional daytime raga during the evening’s performance. In Northern Indian Classical music traditions, daytime ragas would be played only during daylight hours and vice versa with evening ragas. According to custom reflected in Vedic traditions, certain times of day produce distinctive energetic vibrations that would harmoniously complement the raga’s vibrating tone. Om Gam’s opening number began with a livelier daytime raga mood in opposition to a more contemplative nighttime raga atmosphere. Tension was built as the upright bass was bowed with an increasing crescendo both in time and volume, and small wooden mallets also hammered the santur in a mirrored fashion. The tension was resolved when the flute came in with a lighter melody with the accompaniment of the tabla drums, which held a traditional raga beat. The following numbers of Om Gam were less traditional and conveyed a more eclectic sound as it included more diverse world compositions and timbres such as the Persian santur. For their second piece the ensemble covered a South African Jazz composition by Abdullah Ibrahim entitled The Mountain. The rest of the set-list was a mixture of Indian, African, Middle Eastern, and even Celtic sounds. The ensemble was experimental in the manner they combined timbres, rhythms, and improvisations, a true fusion of the world music scene contained in Brooklyn.
As the main act, Alam Khan on the North Indian stringed sarod and Nitin Mitta on tabla drums, showcased a more traditional and timeless modular exploration of two nighttime ragas. Each raga was improvised live that night with no prior rehearsal and both were a little over thirty minutes. The first raga was a composition by Khan’s grandfather, the legendary North Indian composer and teacher Allauddin Khan, who also instructed Ravi Shankar. The meter was in 4/4 with a cyclical sixteen beat pattern across four measures. The rhythmic pattern revolved in a circular fashion, as the sarod player made alterations to the improvised melodic line, and the tabla player kept count of each measure on his left leg. The duo also followed a similar pattern of dynamics for each raga. In the very beginning Alam would start slowly exploring the particular pitches within a specific raga over the droning recording of the tamboura instrument.
Then he would slowly create a mutable melodic line which he would alter on each cycle with varies ornamentations and rhythms. The main characteristic of the sarod is of the use of glissandi across specific North Indian scales. The trademark sound is sliding across the strings as opposed to the bending of strings on the sitar. The sarod also has four main strings where the melody is usually played on and many others strings which function as drones or octaves when strummed.
In each raga, after the sarod player begins to develop a melodic idea, the tabla player begins the cyclical drumming accompaniment in a moderate fashion. The sarod then leads the dynamics as it grows in intensity and volume, often slowing down with a decrescendo only to crescendo again for a climax. The tabla player is also given moments to solo and to rejoin the sarod, as they exchange improvised phrases in a call and response fashion.
Each raga is in a specific tuning with set pitch patterns. For the second number both the sarod and the tabla had to be retuned to a different key. The instruments can only play one specific key signature at a time. The following raga was also a nighttime raga, but with a faster meter than the first with 7 beats per measure. Khan referred to it as the Garland of Ragas. The approach and sections were similar to the first raga but in a different key with a faster pace as it was the climactic closing number of the night. The faster playing also allowed for more octaves and semi tones to be present in the resonance of the phrasing as Alam Khan struck more of the droning strings of the sarod.
The night was a successful homage to the late Ali Akbar Khan and to the Maihar Gharana school of North Indian music. It was also announced that Alam Khan would be holding a two-day workshop on the sarod in Brooklyn the following day. Alam Khan exhibited the artistic mastery of the instrument synonymous with his father, as well preserving his teaching legacy. The Khan family’s music is devotional and rich in tradition going across the generations into our modern era. It was a privilege to witness an authentic and timeless presentation of North Indian classical music.
During this semester, I have had the privilege to learn and play with many different musicians here at Lehman College, including Mr. Allan Molnar and his Jazz Ensemble. He welcomed me as an unofficial member and this past month I have watched them rehearse to perform an instrumental jazz composition called Blue Bossa by Kenny Dorham. They performed on Wednesday, April 26th at the Senior Ball at the Villa Barone Manor.
The style or genre of this song is called Bossa Nova which is a mix of Samba and Hard Bop Jazz. Blue Bossa is a jazz standard comprised mainly of II, V, I progressions and is played in either a minor or a major key. In this piece, the two keys are not relative major or minor keys. The form might be described as ABCB since the second four measures and the fourth four measures are identical. The 3rd four measures could be called the bridge since it is played in a different key. Blue Bossa was played in C minor.
The piece starts of with the bass guitar and the drums. The bass line is playing around the II, V, and, I chord. The drums are playing the bossa nova which is a style of drumming typically used in the Jazz with a Latin influence. I often use this style of drumming myself in the Latin Jazz ensemble. It isn’t played as aggressively as other drum patterns would be. The rim click simulates the click of a clave. The hi-hat simulates the shaker. 8th notes can also be played with a brush instead of a drum stick to further simulate a shaker. The piano follows to decorate the rhythm with minor chords and its arpeggios to break it down. The trumpet comes in next with the main melody or theme of the song. The first time around it gives more of a staccato sound, but then when it repeats, the trumpet stretches out the notes more the second time to more of a legato sound with some fills for the remaining count in the measure. The trumpet continues to improvise during the solo with different variations of the main theme. A low saxophone comes in after and eventually picks up the pace with a quick solo playing in what sounds like 32nd notes with ties. The piano solo comes in after which is my favorite solo of the piece. I feel like it decorated the tune and fit extremely with all the chord progressions. Lastly, the bass solo follows and all other instruments except percussion stop playing. The drums keep the rhythm while the piano throws in some high pitch chords to decorate the bass solo. The main trumpet theme played with trumpet returns closing out the piece.
I enjoyed watching this performance and personally enjoy listening to Blue Bossa as well as playing along to it. It is a jazz standard and is a good song to play along with because it is played at a moderate tempo and is good for beginners and musicians who want to practice this style of music. It is a good song for beginners to practice with improvisation over chord changes because it’s slow and has an easy to follow harmony.
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