Lerner, New Upstream Ensemble mesmerize Toronto jazz pianist Marilyn Lerner mesmerized Upstream Music Association fans and JazzEast fellow travellers in the Sir James Dunn Theatre Friday night as she and the New Upstream Ensemble sorted their way through a dozen new charts written specially for the concert. The Ensemble consists of Rick Waychesko (trumpet), Jeff Reilly (bass clarinet), Paul Cram (tenor sax/clarinet), Dawn Hatfield (baritone/alto saxes and flute), Lee Park (violin), Lukas Pearse (contrabass and electric bass), Jeff Torbert (guitar) and David Burton (drums). As the featured soloist, Lerner displayed an instinctively swinging style that infused itself into whatever textures and free-wheeling musical territories she led herself into and was led into by five composers, four of them members of the Ensemble. To maintain a jazz feel while scraping the strings inside the piano or running two-handed clusters up the keyboard with the ease of passing clouds troubling the sunlight takes some musical doing. Lerner’s taste, discrimination, spontaneous choices of what to play and where to play it made her contribution particularly listenable. She served mostly as a sideperson on the first half of the program, except for bass clarinetist and veteran Upstreamer Jeff Reilly’s Internal Combustion, which featured her as soloist in an extraordinarily clever and tightly written mini-piano concerto. Reilly conducted the ensemble in his piece with fearsome energy, throwing cues at them like a beserker karate black-belt attacking a lumber pile with his fingertips. The loud, violent accents that the sevenfold ensemble fired back at him failed to flap Lerner, who rode them as gracefully as a mogul champ on a particularly pockmarked hill. The second half was all Lerner. She conducted her Ding an Sich suite and also played in it. It began with The Isakower Phenomenon, named for a concept derived from her other life as a psychotherapist, which attempts to describe what happens when you fall asleep. Lerner’s program note explains the idea that you can ""experience perceptions of enlargement, altered states of consciousness, sensations of floating and impressions of the emergence and disappearance of an oral mass."" Wow. Over a lugubrious, chorale-like texture, solos and duets went around the circle, pairing amplified electric violin (Park) and acoustic double bass (Pearse), clarinet (Cram) and bass clarinet (Reilly) and the like. Within the cloud of musical unknowing that emerged, there was clarity and definition. Witwork, named after the Freudian idea of how repressed ideas emerge in the form of jokes and slips of the tongue, was supported by a steady flow of crisp short notes from percussionist Dave Burton in trochaic (DUM-tee) rhythm, which tested the ensemble’s mastery of lightness and quick responses — not really one of the New Upstream Ensemble’s strong points. Lerner played a fluent solo piece (Figure and Ground) that was both self-explanatory and absorbingly interesting. The Present Moment followed after an intro of Lerner scraping the piano strings and damping them into a resonant thud with a one finger on the string and another striking the key, which was also intriguing to hear. Her final piece, The Beethoven Free Association, required the players to play from previously unseen pages of Beethoven sonatas, which, as a concept, somewhat eluded most of the Upstreamers. I suspect it requires a classical/jazz background such as Lerner has to realize its wit and irony. In any case, as an idea for an improv it worked well enough, albeit somewhat superficially. The concert opened with Paul Cram’s Revolution, a well-written, well-conceived toccata-like piece, somewhat raggedly performed. Young Dalhousie composer Zachary Fairbrother contributed a very well-designed piece he called Cells 1 which, following an explosive cluster at the start, settled down into carefully balanced, well-established textures, some of which were played against a steady hip-hop beat from Burton. Saxophonist Hatfield’s Epistle for Eli was a re-orchestrated transcription of a quartet she wrote for flute, oboe, cello and piano that did not translate well in the Upstream context. It seemed self-conscious and shapeless, but it was hard to tell why. Bassist Pearse contributed a well-developed piece called Dissociation 2008 which was consistent, well-organized, full of musical event, personal and entirely original. On the whole, the New Upstream Orchestra sounded under-rehearsed for some of these pieces. The improvised sections worked well enough, but the written-out bits often sounded ragged, and not infrequently out of tune. The decision to amplify the sound puzzled me. The acoustic environment of the Dunn hardly needs reinforcement. Amplfication can contribute to a ragged-sounding ensemble, because what comes out of the speakers is only a grainy photograph of the sound and the efforts of the musicians to blend and balance, which is the skilful part of ensemble playing, is significantly compromised. ( spedersen@herald.ca)
CONVOY HFX
Soundscape invokes tension, maelstrom of battle
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Entertainment Reporter
It was a dark and stormy night. Huge seas rolled under your feet, lightning slashed across the clouds, the wind raged, tearing the skin off each gargantuan wave as it heaved itself up to the skies, and the air was filled with the awesome noise of it — gulls, sonar pings, scratching sounds from an electronic violin, the echolalia of a woman’s voice approaching hysteria, racing snare drums and toms, a double-bass massively stuttering the theme from Jaws . . .
Wait a minute. We weren’t aboard the HMCS Sackville in the middle of the North Atlantic, but safe and dry in Dartmouth’s Alderney Landing Theatre. And Denyse Karn’s video projections backing the set for Eastern Front Theatre’s current production of Corvette Crossing accounted for the oceanic tumult.
But the uproar, and the dominating theme from Jaws were real enough. Upstream Ensemble — voice, violin, trumpet, bass clarinet, tenor sax, double bass, piano, drums and electronics — were performing Paul Cram’s CONVOY HFX.
The players were improvising over a soundscape prepared by Cram, who played sax and clarinet, conducted the forces arrayed in a line along the lip of the stage and on both sides of the raked set, urging them to keep up the manic tempo.
If it was an attempt to put each of us inside the maelstrom of battle and ocean storm who can say if what we felt was anything like the real thing? It certainly released a torrent of energy, but I couldn’t help feeling that the real excitement and involvement was down there on the stage acting and reacting, co-operating in the recreation of chaos, rather than passively sitting in our seats, paralytically taking it in.
Yet the textures were rich and varied with a thousand opportunities to savour details, had it given us time to do so.
CONVOY HFX was split into two parts, interrupted by a medley of war-pops performed by The Shop Girls (Lucille Niven, Lena Horn, Lynda Rosborough) as Shore Leave — String of Pearls, Bill Bailey, Goody-Goody, I’ll Be Seeing You. The screen at the back showed Bedford Basin with a convoy forming in it, looking across it and through the Narrows with George’s Island a distant lump, and no bridges, since neither had yet been built.
The medley, reproduced with a fuzzy halo of reverberation, did not flatter the sweet singing of the trio. The segment ended with Horn singing Lili Marlene in a very slow tempo.
Then it was back to the second part of CONVOY HFX, the transition marked by what sounded like the Marlene Dietrich version of Lili Marlene (causing Horn to do a double take), and with the Shop Girls taking part in the resumed mayhem, as the screen filled with gigantic bursts of exploded sea-water from depth-charges. Sentimental Journey helped to end the work.
The Shop Girls continued with The Ripple Effect and more photo montage and high energy, with Jamie Gatti running bass lines.
A word about the sound reproduction. Basically loud. Unremittingly unsubtle. Intentional it may have been, but I wanted to hear the harmonies of the vocal trio more crisply focused. And, no slight on Gatti’s fine playing, but the bass was much too loud all evening.
The evening began with Jeff Reilly’s take on Edward Lear’s The Hills of the Chankly Bore, home to the Jumblies. It was an entertaining aperitif, a modern score with radiant textures and well-modulated energy, ending, as befits those who "go to sea in a sieve", not with a bang, but a whimper.
The final work on the program, Cram’s B-Flat Restaurant, ended the concert with a different kind of continuous uproar, seasoned with a little heavy-handed whimsy. Underlying the musical chaos, as often is the case in Cram’s music of late, was a straightforward, rhythmic foundation delivered by bass, piano and drums regulating the flow by driving all before it like a bulldozer.
The prolonged coda made certain of the ending after the fashion of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
( spedersen@herald.ca)Sax Face Off
Sax coupling satisfies
A goldmine of sonic effects from Quasar, Upstream quartets
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Sax quartets have legs. While never exactly in fashion, they have never been out of it either. They are good to play romantic music, and un-matched, outside of percussion instruments, for playing contemporary music.
The sound of a sax "consort" — soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxes — is a perfect blend, a rich, sonorous, vibrant sound with an astonishing dynamic range from just barely audible to ear-splitting. At the same time, the four instruments can be made to emit a repertoire of shrieks, squeaks, squeals, multiphonics and key and tongue slaps, which makes them a goldmine of sonic effects.
The versatility of the saxophone lends itself to virtuosic runs and turns and rippling passage work, while the range of attacks of which it is capable gives it a huge percussive edge over strings and other winds.
All these qualities came together in force Tuesday night in Dalhousie University’s Ondaatje Hall for Upstream’s Sax Face Off program in which the incomparable Quasar sax quartet Marie-Chantal Leclair (soprano), Mathieu Leclair (alto), Andre Leroux (tenor), Jean-Marc Bouchard (baritone), met and mingled musically with Upstream’s Halifax Sax of Dani Oore (soprano), Chris Mitchell (alto), Paul Cram (tenor) and Dawn Hatfield (baritone).
While a mistake on my part about the 7:30 start time caused me to miss the first two works on the program — Quasar’s Procession (2002) by Jean-Francoise Laporte, and Halifax’s Melcante by Chris Mitchell — the remaining six works left little to wonder about in the way of possible sax licks.
The music ranged from Oore’s Dixie-land Ocelot, a sort of Tiger Rag in the Rain Forest, to Klaus Torstensson’s monumentally demanding Licks & Brains I, a score so dense with notes and effects — timed squeaks, pointillistic counterpoint over quivering measured vibratos, instant shifts of texture and style and a thesaurus of sax techniques.
Impressively, the Quasar players kept steely control over this unwieldy music, endowing it with shape and energy in resonant and exact ensemble playing — even when the notes were attacked seemingly at random in perfect rhythmic unison with flawless intonation. One of the players told me afterwards it took them four years to learn the work.
Ocelot featured solos from all four Halifax Sax players, with Oore showing an increasingly impressive ease and mounting rhythmic excitement in his hot improvisation. The piece began and ended with a chorus of jungle roars, whistles, chirps and squeals from the uninhibited audience, invited by Oore to take part.
Cram’s Four Horseman began with a four-beat rhythmic framework into which running diatonic lines flew like ribbons, sometimes in unison, at others independently in an invigorating melee of free-wheeling, contrapuntal energy.
The two sax quartets combined for the final two pieces. In Bouchard’s In and Out the eight players positioned themselves around the audience like the cardinal points of a stereophonic mandala, panning the sound around and over our heads in response to gestures from Dalhousie composer Jerome Blais, who stood in the centre and conducted.
The last piece, Conductus I, written and directed by Blais, used a more conventional, semi-circular setup at the front of the auditorium. It was a conducted improvisation in which fragments of renaissance melody and dance forms, such as an almost unaltered estampie, were integrated into clapping, rhythmic key slaps, and free blowing, leading to an impressively full-out climax.
( spedersen@herald.ca)
ROSA ENSEMBLE CONCERT and Upstream meets Rosa
Hot concert by one of Holland's premiere new music ensembles and a rare Trans- Atlantic meeting of musicians where 7 Upstream musicians combined with Rosa to make a highly satisfactory outcome and sow seeds for the future.
SONIC COURAGE great success!!!
Upstream's 2005 fall season saw 9 concerts over a 9 week period and with a steady appreciative audience. There were world premieres by Lukas Pearse, Dani Oore, Janice Jackson, Jeff Torbert and Tim Crofts.
COMPOSE YOURSELF finishes with a BANG!!!
47 students from Darmouth and Sackville performed on Friday December 2nd with the Grrilla Orchestra in a concert for 300 students at Dartmouth High. The show showcased 4 student works newly composed under the tutelage of Dani Oore, Paul Cram and Jerry Granelli. The student works were conducted by the composers themselves; often in teams when the pieces were co-written.
Other works performed were Musical Chairs/Dani Oore and Ambulatory/Skatellites. Dani Oore contibuted some madcap conduction and encouraged audience participation. The initially cool crowd was won over.
Altogether an auspicious finish to a process begun in early November with initial concerts of the Grrilla orchestra at Sackville High and Dartmouth High. From there 4 sessions in each school with workshop leaders working with student composer/performers led to the aforementioned outcome.
Upstream is committed to continuing this valuable outreach in the foreseeable future.