By Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News original link

Tight, fearless sextet's musical declaration

For decades, one of jazz's greatest spectacles was a band called the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The group performed in war paint and loaded the stage with drums, gongs and unusual wind instruments. When the Art Ensemble played, it sent a message: We come from a tradition (Armstrong, Miles Davis, blues, bop), but we're updating it with influences that may surprise you (aleatory music, Asian theatrics, lots of silence) while moving into the future at warp speed.

Blackbird's message

Eighth Blackbird, the young "new music" sextet that gave a wickedly exciting and thought-provoking performance Friday at Kanbar Hall in San Francisco, reminded me of the Art Ensemble. Here, rising out of the classical music world, is a super-tight band that loads the stage with percussion (vibes, marimbas, timbales, bells) and whose front line keeps moving between wind instruments in order to shift colors and textures. Blackbird is sending a message: We come from a tradition (Stravinsky, Steve Reich, aleatory music) but, as professional explorers, we're interested in new sounds and influences (jazz, Asian theatrics, lots of silence), and we're moving into the future at warp speed.

Blackbird has another influence: It exudes a Kronos Quartet hipness while building a fascinating new repertoire at the edges of composed music, a place where through-composed sounds can feel improvisatory. That intersection wasn't invented by Blackbird; what this chamber group brings to the neighborhood is enormous discipline (very classical), sharp ears and fearless open-mindedness (very jazz-like), and a group spirit that actually rocks.

During its concert, presented by San Francisco Performances, Eighth Blackbird at times sounded like a seamless grafting of the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Steve Reich Ensemble. Vibes wove lines across a landscape of shimmering, pulsing and even mambo-ing rhythms on Frederic Rzewski's "Les Moutons de Panurge." In composer Jennifer Higdon's "Zaka," the music was shot through with an elegiac Stravinsky grace. In "Critical Moments 2" by composer George Perle, a wisp of song emerged out of a deep silence, then grew, trails of notes traded among instruments, round-robin-style, ending with a cymbal crash.

The six musicians, all virtuoso players who've mastered the unorthodox, "extended" ranges of their instruments, perform on flutes (Molly Alicia Barth); clarinets (Michael J. Maccaferri); violin (Matt Albert); cello (Nicholas Photinos); percussion (Matthew L. Duvall); and piano (Lisa Kaplan). But there is a second band within the sextet: a trio of flutes, cello and piano, which performed two compositions, including George Crumb's "Vox Balaenae." The stage was bathed in deep-blue light for this one and the players wore, not war paint, but black Zorro masks to put the focus on, as the composer has written, "the powerful impersonal forces of nature (i.e. nature dehumanized)."

"Vox" evokes the voice of the humpback whale: Barth sang through her flute while clacking keys and holding long whooshing tones, a modal wail of the whale. Then came piano: a rumble of bass notes and gentle zhooms strummed zither-like inside the instrument, more underwater noises, before the amplified cello's entrance with long bowed harmonics, conjuring the humpback's high-pitched, faraway singing; you know these sounds from old Judy Collins records.

It was eerie: the illusion of music rising straight from the natural world, physical sounds that aren't really knowable. The effect was heightened by the Kabuki-esque theatrics: Pianist Kaplan ended the piece by pantomiming more notes amid rich silence on the darkened stage.

A U.S. premiere

The concert ended with a U.S. premiere: Derek Bermel's "Tied Shifts," which pulsed its way through the Balkans, chock full of ungainly difficult clarinet runs, raw fiddling and crazy stop-time rhythms, songs growing out of embellishments, which grew into more songs. It all ended with a tolling hymn, part rock song, part Beethovian exaltation, a neat summation to a far-reaching evening.

© 2005 San Jose Mercury News