By Andrew Patner
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Serving up a musical cocktail

CONCERT REVIEW | eighth blackbird's tasty music fusion

The words "crossover" and "fusion" are perhaps the most frightening in the music descriptive lexicon. They indicate a self-conscious crossing of a barrier -- from "classical" to "pop," say -- or a marriage of things that just don't taste great together.

Yet there are successful ways to bring different influences together. See, for example, the marvelous Chicago-based new music sextet eighth blackbird (the "birds," as their fans call them, don't capitalize their name). Saturday night at the Harris Theater, they presented one of the most organically realized evenings of music that took the best of several disciplines, discarded classifications and arrived at enchantment.

The Chicago-based eighth blackbird treated audiences at the Harris Theater to a successful melding of different disciplines.

Riding high with three classical Grammy nominations for their latest release, "Strange Imaginary Animals," on Chicago's own Cedille Records, the 11-year-old ensemble riffed on the album for their second program in their first local series.

Enlisting the assistance of composer/laptop mixer Dennis DeSantis, the group offered remixes, both subtle and dramatic, of five works from the album plus local arranger Cliff Colnot's adaptation of Radiohead's "Dollars and Cents."

The results at first questioned and then defied distinctions of acoustic and amplified, "natural" and electronic, composition and improvisation.

New York-based DeSantis, 34, kicked things off with his own 2001 "Powerless," a catchy four-part exercise in rhythmic energy inspired in both name and style by Stravinsky. The players, on flutes, clarinets, violin, cello, percussion and piano, blended well with their real-time on-stage remix. Canadian Gordon Fitzell's 2001/2004 "evanasence" made even fuller use of the live interactive electronic elements and was the first work to move toward a sort of 21st century trance sound.

Colnot's arrangement is only the latest in an ongoing infatuation by current "classical" artists with Radiohead's multi-layered, referential pop. Colnot's version was wholly appealing, complete with sly highlights in the scoring and violinist Matt Albert doing a pretty good Thom Yorke with the chorus.

Steve Mackey's 1989 "Indigenous Instruments" had the least need for a re-think, as its concept includes a scoring for acoustic instruments of rock sounds and techniques. But the 2002/2005 "Friction Systems" by University of Chicago graduate student David M. Gordon, 31, was astonishing in its blend of the composer's ideas and tight focus, the now-customary virtuosity of the players and De Santis' ability at making new aural universes. You wanted to get up and dance.

Andrew Patner is critic-at-large for WFMT-FM (98.7). 

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