Bridge-Crossing Music - Colin MacDonald's Pocket Orchestra
Friday, November 01, 2013
My world in 1960 was full of my mother’s
music. There was Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and
Chopin.
But that sonic world changed gradually for
me when I discovered Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and sometime around 1962 I
heard a record called Third Stream Music – The Modern Jazz Quartet and Guests. There
was a particular cut in that record (still one of my favourite pieces to play
very loud in my living room) called Sketch in which the MJQ plays alongside the
Beaux Arts String Quartet. It was in this piece that I first heard and liked the
sound of an “angry” cello. The record also exposed me to musicians who were then
experimenting with the idea of new music and of melding it with jazz. Two of them
were clarinetist Jimmy Jiuffre and French hornist Gunther Schuller.
It was this record and trips to concerts of
20th century music at the University
of Mexico that exposed me,
but I did not always like, to music that was not of the 19th century romantic
stream. A record from my ever favourite Stan Getz, his 1961 Focus (with
music composed and arranged by Eddy Sauter) helped to introduce me to the sound
of dissonance. In particular there was “I’m Late, I’m Late” which had an
unceasing background that unsettled and gave me relief when it all ended 8
minutes later. I soon grew to like this sort of thing.
It all clicked in my mind tonight at Fantasia
at the Orpheum Annex in a concert featuring Colin MacDonald’s “compact” Pocket
Orchestra.
But before I can explain myself let me go
back to 1980 when writer Les Wiseman and I were returning from working on a
story that featured Vancouver, Washington and how the city was poised to either
vote or not vote for then President Jimmy Carter.
It was late evening and we were driving
through that covered section of the Seattle
freeway in my mid-engine Fiat X1/9 with the Clash playing London Calling very
loud. I noticed how the lights of the city streaked by fast and how the
repetition of the music all made me want to floor the gas pedal. It was then
that I began a list in my mind of music to drive fast on freeways or to cross
long bridges.
And tonight at Fantasia I can assert that not only are there London Calling by the Clash, Focus with Stan Getz, Sketch with the
MJQ, and a piece by 18th century composer, Joseph Haydn, his 21st
Symphony that can all be played loudly in a car while driving fast on a
freeway, preferably at night. but that there are others. I heard four more tonight, sitting on the front row, nice and loud (unfortunately stuck to my chair). These are
are Knowing the Ropes by Michael Nyman (1944), Kick by Steve Martland
(1954-2013) a composition associated with English football and I could imagine
Brixton hooligans trashing trains, Bunny’s Day Off by Pocket Orchestra cellist
Stefan Hintersteininger and Colin MacDonald’s (he plays all kinds of
saxophones) Skillful Means.
All of the pieces featured a repeating theme
that this amateur can only call a vamp much as the one by the piano, bass and
drums in Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. This “vamp” seems to inexorably become
louder and faster. You find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for a resolution.
This amateur happened to be sitting between
two professional musicians. To my left was soprano Alexandra Hill and to my right
composer Jocelyn Morlock. Just as soon as the night’s program began with Nyman’s
Knowing the Ropes I could not but smile, as Morlock was who told me when
it ended, "they began with something really difficult!"
Morlock was at the concert perhaps for the
very same reason I was. Where else but in concerts such as these and others of
Vancouver’s New Music Scene, like the performances of the Turning Point
Ensemble give you the privilege and pleasure of listening to music that is
brand new. Sometimes you leave these concerts with the melancholy that music played
for the first time might just be its last.
But thanks toYouTube and other on-line
music venues you can listen right here to at least two of the pieces I heard
tonight.
The rest of the program had music that I
must listen to again, if that is possible. There was Steve Martland’s Mr.
Anderson’s Pavane, something that I would call a Bulgarian In Paris (complete
with the sounds of Gershwin, the trumpet of Chet Baker (and yes Pocket Orchestra Geeta Das did play a Fluegelhorn!), some Benny Goodman and
Bulgarian folk songs I have no knowledge of) Fantasia by Bentzion Eliezer (1920-1993) and a
rather challenging piece by Pocket Orchestra trombonist Brad Muirhead called You
Can Get There From Here. Of the latter if you would convert it into a question,
and if Ives were alive he would have said, “It is still unanswered.”
Perhaps I will have the opportunity not only to listen to it again but all the
other works that so satisfied me in an evening of delightful new music in which
the smile on the musicians’ faces (and in particular on saxophonist and clarinetist David Branter) reflected not only their fun in playing but
that they were sharing something that we must not forget, music has the
obligation to not only challenge but to entertain and please. The evening’s
concert succeeded in all three.
Of Hintersteininger’s Bunny’s Day Off, described
in the program notes : It is a breezily cheerful musician adventure
illustrating what might happen if a rabbit takes the day off work and gets
behind the wheel of a high-powered sports car, I can only add that it need not
be high-powered, a bright red Miata cruising through Seattle’s covered freeway
at night would do just fine. And below some fine bridge-crossing music.
