To lend historical perspective, the program at The Boston Conservatory Theater on December 8 opened with Schuller’s tart, animated concert band arrangement of Hector Berlioz’s Le Corsaire Overture (1844). Clarinets (cast as violins) were first to the fore, with treacherous runs yielding to a mellow introspective theme. Soon sailing melodies, etched in clean clear dramatic lines, underscored the sense of billowing sails coursing over the frothy main; martial derring-do, with brisk 2/4 timpani, climaxed with exhortatory call-and-response between reeds and brass.

Octandre by Edgard Varèse shifted the mood from festive candor to introspective irony. Starkly set for solo flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, and double-bass, this rare Fauvist piece (1923) bristles like a Braque collage. Bucolic oboe lines (derived as much from Debussy’s flute in Syrinx as from Stravinsky’s incantatory bassoon opening in Rite of Spring) spar with, then yield to mechanistic, ominous rumblings from French horn, trombone, and bowed bass, only to return, bereft. Harsh and strident Harmon-muted trumpet calls and brutal off-kilter ostinati mark this 7’ chamber trilogy as a sardonic slam at the gross, inhuman inroads of the lately defeated “Boches” (Germans).

Schuller’s Double Quintet (1961) echoed the Varèse in instrumentation, with wind quintet on the left, mirrored by a brass quintet on the right. The winds play leafy textures as the brass are furtive and muted; together the groups rise up and fade to flutterings. Side by side, the French horns — centered, rational, and modulated — ground and anchor the two quintets. Movement two’s opening unison legato sports staccato jazzy jabs, reminiscent of “The Little Blue Devil” from Schuller’s 1959 orchestral masterpiece Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. Jaunty pointillist surprises abound, and the finale, burbling and whooping merrily, climaxes on an Ivesian panchromatic yawp.

After intermission came four short, powerful pieces for large ensemble, three by Schuller. Festive Music (1992) pits strong ‘fun-filled’ contrasts in a dramatic tonal landscape: grand tutti lead to a smeared schoolyard ditty that seems to gesture playfully at out-of-tune junior-high bands. Suddenly, a stark solo flute, then oboe emerge against a shimmering backdrop of harp, celeste, marimba, and tintinnabulating hand percussion.

Nature’s Way (2006) spoke to me as an Al Gore object lesson in what may befall us Earthlings if we don’t get our eco-act together. Think of Mother Earth’s time-line, from the Cretaceous Period to a potentially disastrous near future, compressed into seven action-packed minutes of ‘data sonification’. Moody oscillating waves of primal ooze gradually crescendo, as scintillating glockenspiel, triangle, and snare rolls gather swelling brass and winds into an overwhelming pan-oceanic tsunami – and then that swooning slide back into oblivion. Whew. Schuller intended that the challenging score nudge questing students to explore heightened levels of achievement. Martin conducted.

Blue Dawn Into White Heat (1997) a rare foray for concert band into the world of jazz, was named and commissioned by Fred Harris, conductor of Belmont High School’s bands. Schuller whips out his “Birth of the Cool” harmonic palette (he wrote for and played French horn in Miles Davis’s legendary nonet); there are nods to “Peter Gunn” with flutes and muted brass; and languid wah-wah trombones wail “viper music.” As Vic Holmes’s walking bass lines dart and halt, they open up dramatic stop-time passages for brass and reeds. Trombonist (Keith Almanza or Matt Luhn?) handled his 64-bar improvised solo with the bluesy aplomb of a Dicky Wells, followed by sure solo spots for tenor saxophonist Joe Neale and pianist Nick Place. Would that all high school (and college) bands could play such hip charts!

Black Dog (2003), a bravura piece for clarinet and band by young (now 32) Scott McAllister blends Klezmer smears with bursts of Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock backbeat. Guest clarinet soloist Jonathan Cohler played with breezy command: searing glissandi, altissimo gossamer leaps, alternate fingered notes, and hackneyed Mickey Katz licks.

All night during the concert, the busy stage crew bustled about, stacking and moving chairs, opening music stands, lugging the harp and tympani, placing the piano, replacing scores. In the second half, instrumentalists numbered about 80, 65, 30, 80. Among the tubists, the frequent movement of mutes recalled traffic cones, and the industrious excitement attendant on road repair projects.

Schuller himself took a modest bow at the footlights to rousing cheers at the end; he had, in a companion concert a few nights earlier, conducted his own Jumpin’ In The Future and other equally demanding and rarely heard Third Stream works of half a century ago (when he coined and then defined the genre) by bad-boy geniuses George Russell, Charles Mingus, and Bob Graettinger.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

Lewis, a mere twenty-six himself, coaxed his young orchestra with grace and wit through Ravel’s stately, ordered, fairy-book world. The princess dreamed on in legato pastel bowers, and Tom Thumb was evoked in delicately expressive humors of piccolo and cello. Toy mandarins marched in measured pomp before their empress, as Lewis signaled for crystalline celeste and flutes or diminishing tam tam crashes with clear and precise gestures. Concertmistress Sharon Cohen was a poised Beauty to the stuttering Beast of contrabassoonist Luke Varland. Lewis laid down his baton for the Fairy Garden finale, kneading the air as he summoned the full orchestra to arrive at the fortissimo climax that seems to bloom majestically into ‘the real world.’

In preface to Julian Anderson’s Khorovod, a difficult chamber work for fifteen solo instruments, Lewis took a few cheerful moments to prepare the audience with listener call-outs: the opening cacophonous unison Cs, a swatch of Balkan folksong, a kaleiodoscopic malagueña (flamenco dance), a pastoral flute coda. Such amiable stake-holding tactics pay dividends — as Boston Pops’ Keith Lockhart and Lewis’s fellow Belfast native, Shakespearean Kenneth Branagh, know full well – helping listeners parse thorny works while befriending them. Indeed, Anderson’s fourteen-minute tour de force conjured sparse neo-jazzy Milton Babbitt, Harry Partch multi-mallet farragoes, George Crumb-like heady altissimo string and wind swirls, and multi-directional random “shoe-drops” (viz. George Rhoads’ Archimedes Excogitatus.) Lewis tamed this brawling earful with judicious and precise conducting of the ensemble’s sparkling musicians.

William Hudgins, principal clarinetist of the BSO, played a jaunty but warm and polished Copland Clarinet Concerto; Hudgins’s refreshing cadenzas balancing sotto voce asides with pungent shrill exclamations. The exuberant rondo freely blends American swing and Pan-American rhythms, which Lewis navigated expertly. Kudos to harpist Maria Rindenello-Parker and pianist Linda Osborne-Blackshe for supporting roles.

Lewis wrapped Papa Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 in a bear hug, bouncing emphatically on the rumbustious ländler dances while gently picking out the minuet’s spry, fairy-like flute solos. Repositioning the basses on his left allowed Lewis to capture antiphonal interplay between first violins (left) and second (right), which he accomplished with lightning figure-eight sweeps. He gamely shaded the dynamics of the dark and light adagio and used shorthand signals like a Roman traffic cop (like calling the basses’ recurring one-bar figure with a downward left throttle.) And when it comes time for jokester Haydn’s notorious fake ending (no, this isn’t even the “Surprise” Symphony), Lewis plays it to the hilt and takes the faked ending, like Count Basie’s April In Paris, irresistibly just “one more time” — twice! Yes, Lewis’ll be back in April – after stints as associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra and as (Music Director Gustavo) Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic – for Discovery Ensemble’s spring concert at Jordan Hall.

Note: A related article is here.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

Another facet of Josquin’s art (equally removed from his formal masses) opened the second half: “Faulte d’Argent,” a poignantly fierce plaint sung by a lover too broke to pay his hooker. Equally salty in content, if smooth in delivery, is Hampton Court star Philip van Wilder’s “Une nonnain refaite” (“A Lapsed Nun”); Sheehan’s treatment of the period’s glancing attacks (brisk crescendo and diminuendo on single notes, a bit like hocketing sandpapered) takes getting used to but often heightens dramatic impact. William Cornysh, prestigious Master of Children of the Court Royal, wrote lovely songs: “My love, she mourn’th” with the gambists doubling on bass, tenor and treble, interludes and pizzicato variants, the mournful “Ah Robyn, gentle Robyn,” and “Blow thy horn, Hunter” with derring-do equally fit for drawing room or the royal hunt. The small, attentive audience at soft-lit Slosberg Auditorium, crowned by its neo-Gothic organ, clapped well, but neither demanded nor received an encore. Ah, so often is less more!

The program repeats this weekend with concerts at The Olin Auditorium, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY and June 25 at, The Daniel Arts Center, Simon’s Rock College, Great Barrington, MA. Aston Magna and Aston Magna’s summer season ends next weekend (same locations) with a program enticingly titled “The Italian Madrigal and its Legacy.”

Aston Magna, founded in 1972 with Daniel Stepner (also Lydian Quartet and concertmaster of Handel-Haydn) as Artistic Director, is America’s oldest annual summer festival dedicated to music performed with proper technique on period instru­ments and inter­preted as the composers might.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine (Chicago) and New York City Jazz Record, and about wine for Beverage Business (Boston); he teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music, and occasionally lectures on jazz history at Boston University.

Rumelia, according to Turkish history, was that vast expanse that ran from Belgrade to Bucharest in the north, Corfu to Istanbul across its middle, Athens to Anatolia across the Aegean Sea. It encompassed today’s Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Greece and its archipelagos, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, and European Turkey. From this melting pot, Nez has scooped a sampling of folk tunes, speared gnarly rhythms, and simmered them into a stringent but satisfying potpourri, spiced with paprika wit and wisdom.

The ample honey-hued expanse of St. Paul’s Church, Brookline welcomed the coffeehouse-sized audience of eighty, largely young adults, with few under twenty but barely a dozen of retirement age. Bare maple beams and mobiles of skeins and bobbins added to the effect of rustic simplicity contradicted by Nez’ complex, agile score over a story line that played upon the vicissitudes of fortune (Tarot readings and chance encounters)two wordless romps chased by a growling black bear and other more  sprightly interpersonal histrionics.and sprightly interpersonal histrionics.

A keen vocal quartet was kept busy with snippets of recitative, many snappy ariettas, and frequent choral stretches of overlapping lines. Tenor Gregory Zavracky was clear-voiced as a shepherd boy or aged storyteller. Elissa Alvarez, as Roma, gypsy card-reader, sang alto with strength, articulation and sly resignation. Rebekah Alexander sparkled aplenty as strawberry sprite — a voice to die for but cooking that kills — engaging in lightning repartee over high winds and glissando strings. Ulysses Thomas, baritone, beguiled as Hadjuk, with arched eyebrow and elbows akimbo, playing on female emotions when not his fiddle.

The soloists, clad in brightly red-striped traditional costumes of Macedonia and Bulgaria, sang and acted with equally festive brio. Thomas as the sportive fiddler Hadjuk and Alexander as the village coquette found especially expressive gestures and countenances as ritually teasing lovers. The resonant acoustics made it difficult to understand the sung English (not recitatives) even at fifty feet. The grim sixth scene might benefit from discreet trimming.

The Xanthos Ensemble, conducted briskly by Jeffrey Means, were (in this avatar) Brenda van der Merwe, violin (and director); Alexis Lanz, clarinet; Eunyoung Kim, piano; Zachary Jay, flute, piccolo; School of Music Leo Eguchi, cello; David Tarantino, percussion. Nez’s agile, flexible writing for sextet may recall the spare spikiness of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat and the bristling ululations of his primeval Les Noces, but her harmonic language and palette of rhythms range far and wide; she draws from enticing folk tales and wedding songs and off-beat dances (7/8, 9/4) from Kodaly’s and Bartok’s Transylvania. Underwritten by BU’s Humanities Foundation, the performances were presented by Boston University presented the performances, including one at BU’s College of Fine Arts, School of Music concert hall tonight (April 1).

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

Performers at the ICA have the option of keeping the curtains open or drawn; in this case, the decision to allow the harbor visuals filter into the audience’s absorption of the music was a happy one: the full moon made glinting reflections and occasionally ghostly boat images came and went. The Noise Between Thoughts was the more aurally challenging quartet; the strings shrieked and grated, with gritty electronic enhancements and filters, though the notation was often in quasi-unison or ‘simple’ harmonies. The lines, often open-toned tutti, stopped and started and stuttered in crazed patterns, like ice-cracks, contrasting with the watery reflections from the harbor. My ear caught on agonizingly shrill tremolos under an ululating glassy lead violin. A section of feathery flicking of the bows brought textural relief, and some countrified sawing reminded one of Henry Brant’s string writing. The ending came on cat’s breath: the eerie whisper of muted high harmonics.

Percussionist David Shively, who premiered the solo piece Resonance Alloy three years ago, used a startlingly stark and unconventional set-up: the metallic surfaces of 12” cymbals (upturned and resting on a snare drum and small tom-tom) with a hanging 16” Chinese gong between them. These he stroked with fine metal wands in an unerringly brisk 8/8 rhythm, spreading hypnotic waves of shining sound through the steeply cambered room, echoing off the glass walls, and of course, interplaying with the water gleams. Initially intriguing, the piece kept up for twenty-five minutes with only tiny incremental shades of direction (switching to small mallets, then sticks); I found myself drifting off, watching the water rather than listening carefully. Perhaps that made a point.

Though the newest piece, Washed By Fire was far more traditional in line and theme, with a deliberately slow-paced introduction, a sequence of simple quasi-folk (Appalachian? Amish?) themes, and occasional thematic dips into Eastern modes (Iranian?). High points were a fast chugging hymn (a sample sound-byte is on composer’s on the website ) and a charmingly off-kilter hoedown. Originally conceived for Benjamin Levy’s dance company, the essentially simple suite might have fared better with choreography, though harbor traffic provided a little.

Trained as a violinist, Makan has degrees in music and religion; Brian Sacawa plays his baritone saxophone solo Voice within Voice on American Voices [Innova, 2006]; a CD of his music, In Sound [Tzadik, 2008] features Kronos Quartet and Paul Dresher Ensemble. See the composer’s website for local concerts this spring.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

List’s Visions re-imagines creation legends of the cosmos in four linked movements, from protozoic miasma through the songlines to dances of unbridled frenzy: I. Introduction (“In the beginning the world was featureless, flat and grey“); II. The Dreamtime (“Giant mythical beings rose up out of the grey plains where they had been slumbering for countless ages“); III. Love Is a Gift From the Dreamtime (“The mythical beings create universal love“); IV. Corroboree (“Spirits from the Dreamtime show the people how to live“).

A sotto voce prelude leads to high violin harmonics, signaling a gentle dawn; then oscillating lines lead to an acerbic 2/4 of martial drama and sudden conflict, with subtle references to Stravinsky and Bartók. A bucolic legato 4/4 (violin and clarinet) signals the love theme; a dulcet clarinet melody rides over piano triplets and soars with violin alone before the piano returns with neoclassical underpinnings. A hard 4/4 piano ostinato (with added sforzando final beats) brings forth playfully rumbling dance figures, with linear echoes of Eastern Europe. A rolling clarinet figure, picked up by piano and violin, carries the piece to a bold, satisfying conclusion. List’s serene celebration of “the oneness of all living beings.” like that of the Aborigines, aims at preserving ancestral heritage, in this case by revisiting honored traditions within European classical music.

While the Zodiac Trio played Philip Glass’s Music in Fifths – a fleet straight eighth-note toccata in fifths and octaves chosen by the performers — in fixed synchronicity, a five-minute silent film was screened. Created for this performance by French film director Nicolas Hauser, the film mimicked the music’s urgent, re-cyclical forward motion by showing repeated footage of a perplexed man jogging on a city street. The jogger’s apparent intransigence when faced with a woman in scenes of emotional import may have been intended by Hauser to be reflected in the angular, unpitying score. While the film registered vague impressions of misunderstanding, aloofness, and unhappiness in this reviewer, the music did not particularly suit such an emotional — if indeed any — dramatic scenario.

Vores’s Fabrication 17: Stunt is a playful if complex conceit that unravels a skein of ten virtuosic variations on five iterations of a recent popular tune. (Did I hear ‘Britney’ mentioned?) Mysterious susurrant patter opens matters; then a clear, hearty, yearning tune soars – first unison, then in thirds – shared by violin and clarinet over a simple piano ostinato. Gradually the variations run off the rails: wisps of melody return – tousled, messed with, frizzed, smeared. A violin cadenza goes wild, the clarinet shrills, the piano part goes ditzy, then grinds down to sludge: a ‘technical’ breakdown. Vores toys with modulations, rhythmic and pattern shifts: it’s all amiably disrespectful, yet polished and witty, with a little Roy Harris-like dance motif making itself heard toward the end.

The program culminated with Ned Rorem’s End of Summer, a bravura triptych that — ‘remembering things past’ — whirls headlong through a plethora of styles and moods. The Capriccio’s astonishing collage opened with Mollard’s icily ripping cadenza and a graceful American folk melody, separated by furtively scurrying ostinati. The sweet song returned in Higuma’s hands, added deft interplay between violin and clarinet, then built hell-for-leather to a dashing tutti. The Fantasy, with its heady whiffs of Poulenc’s grace and elegance, made complex ideas perfectly lucid, opposing fierce autumn gales with placid stretches of golden leaf-fall for Krylovskiy’s limpid clarinet. The Mazurka contrasted ironic gestures, genteel one moment, ferocious the next. The Zodiac Trio made this delightful, surprising work come alive.

A few nights later at Berklee College’s David Friend Recital Hall, the trio played the program in a different order and added world premieres of pieces by Berklee and Boston Conservatory students. One goal of this happy coalition is to foster future concerts featuring Zodiac Trio and expand the project to include other area schools.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

You want to listen for jazz/classical links at Tanglewood’s Jazz Festival. Now in its 10th season, TJF presented some performers who rank high in that luminous crossover ionosphere.

Donal Fox and Laurence Hobgood, classically trained pianists and composers, utterly embrace the jazz spectrum. Maya Beiser, guest cellist with Fox, studied with Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider, and Isaac Stern and today collaborates with Philip Glass, Mark O’Connor, Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger Concerto), if also Brian Eno and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). She studied with Aldo Parisot, Uzi Weizel, Alexander Schneider, and Isaac Stern. Guitarist Julian Lage, at 22 a poster boy for new world-crossover ‘genre’ encompasses flamenco, rock, folk, country, jazz, tango, Latin dance … and on.

The weekend on Sept. 4 and 5 unfolded with John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey’s Radio Deluxe, back from ‘09 for a Saturday matinee, drew the blue-rinse BSO set who sit on their hands or applaud at off-times but guffaw at John’s wink-wink one-liners and shtick. Demographic shifts from summer’s symphony set are minimal inside: you note few blacks and Asians, maybe one-third under 50. Among several good tunes were a light blues, with smoothly coordinated unison scat, a pleasing waltz (“Haven’t We Met?”) and deft medleys (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with “Killing Me Softly”, and “The Mooche” with “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”). Their amiable living-room patter, name-dropping, and random dialog on food fads and Red Sox are well-oiled and may be tolerable for an airing on NPR, but overlong onstage.

Jane Monheit’s brief guest cameo (‘09’s was Kurt Elling) was cute if forced. She and John sang “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”; duetted “Tonight You Belong To Me” (Billy Rose ‘20s ditty, dusted off in the ‘60s by Patience & Prudence); and made an anodyne rehash of “Twisted,” Annie Ross’s bop-rap museum piece. The leaders’ sixth-grader Madeline’s lame teen chitchat might help grandfolks bridge the yawning G-gap on NPR radio, but for a live set, gee, give the kid a uke and a harmony chorus!

Show-stealer dad Bucky, guitarist with rich voice at 85, brought out some of the best music and John’s better quips, visual licks, and rich duets voices on their matching d’Aquisto’s hollow-bodied guitars. On “Nuages” Bucky shifted into Django mode: firm, forceful, Euro, vibrant, resonant lines. The obligatory Benny Goodman Medley  (“Savoy,” “Memories of You”, cascading “Sing Sing Sing”) featured more hard-driving Bucky, Tony Tedesco on drums, and brother Mike Pizzarelli on bass.

Breezy remnants of hurricane Earl sunk the thermometer, summoned squalls, brilliant rainbows, and a chill back breeze for the evening lawn stalwarts. Pianist Laurence Hobgood recalled three eminent black pianists: rhapsodizing (Don Shirley), rhythmic surprise (Ahmad Jamal), big vistas (Sir Roland Hanna). He may echo Scriabin or Liszt as well as Bill Evans or Herbie Hancock. After an unsettling “White Cloud Way,” “Sanctuary” pitted deep and challenging piano chorales (of 6-7 bars) opposite Ulysses Owens’s brushes, hollow-sticks, a device the trio again worked to good effect on “God Bless the Child” (morphed as slick backbeat with speedy turnarounds). As a blindfold test, Hobgood teased but lulled the audience with “Que Sera, Sera” as a pensive ballad, featuring bassist Harish Raghavan.

Kurt Elling’s arrival brought the touch of a suave genius. “My Foolish Heart” simmered on a back-beat under a wise, sinewy, adenoidal baritone that might spin a note from a platinum filament to a knotted rope over eight bars. His art-song poetry-slam excursion – part improvised rap? – lifted the line ‘and again’ up two, three octaves on a beauteous moonbeam. “Dedicated To You” showed his mastery of ultra-hip lyrics and heady excursions; even a touch of Ray Charles falsetto was fresh, passionate, richly disorienting. A new look at The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” nodded toward agile ‘new’ producer Don Was with its odd-shaped lines and meanings. Elling led off David Amram’s Beat anthem “Pull My Daisy” with Indian takalak hand-claps (lots of interplay with Owens), skittered the antic lyrics into bop beat, then summoned ‘God’ Mark Murphy in an “On The Road” reading as transcendent sprechgesang. Elling as Über-crooner bent notes, ideas, minds, in his “Stairway To The Stars” and his John-Hancock “Nature Boy” soared off into the ionosphere. Oo-wee!

I had a frisson of giddy teenage discovery one afternoon in 1958 at the Newport Jazz Feestival, when the Newport Youth Orchestra leapt onstage under Marshall Brown’s baton: an eerie déjà vu revisited me as NYO alumnus Eddie Daniels’ clarinet skipped into a Thad Jones chestnut (“Tip Toe”?) with veteran pals Bob James (piano), James Genus (bass) and subdued, silky drummer Peter Erskine. That tipped off a classy, savvy set, my happiest surprise of the weekend. James played ineffably cool piano, far from his slick electric stuff, frequently evoking the understated Jimmy Rowles on originals like “Mood Swings” and the jumping closer “Broadway Boogie.” Covers of a Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” ballad, Hoagy Carmichael’s “New Orleans” and “Makin’ Whoopee” were a cross between genial revisits and smart revelations. Daniels’s self-deprecatory (if hammy) goofing about his “Tango, No” (not a tango dedicated to Jorge Calandrelli!) belied his effortless mastery scooting through clarinet solos that leave him untouched by peers. Bach’s Air on a G String, a piano/clarinet encore, lacked rigor – hell, it sailed off into a Finzian fantasia – but it was way cool, anyhow.

Outgoing Count Basie Orchestra director Bill Hughes and ‘straw-boss’ tenor sax Doug Lawrence strove to convince us that the swing juggernaut, at 75, has not devolved into a mastodon. Carmen Bradford, a force to embrace us in her chartreuse shift, did wonders to dispel any aura of fuddiness in her three numbers, with a behind-the-beat “Shining Hour,” a bluesy “Young And Foolish,” and belting “Love Being Hear With You” over giddy-up brass and buffed-up call-and-response. The just-50 singer was a kid of 23 again, warmly recalling when Count Basie first hired her. Two young hefty trumpeters and some blazing section work on hoary charts did their part, too.

Sunday night went as classical as the weekend got — cellos in both quintets! — in a sea of hybrid jazz/Bach from Donal Fox’s veteran ensemble, preceded by a heady cocktail from Julian Lage’s Panamerican youth brigade. Lage, in his third Tanglewood visit and first as leader, painted lively pastel canvases with cozy colleagues as what might be joshingly billed Le Hot Club de la Nouvelle Hemisphere: Aristides Rivas, cello (Colombia); Dan Blake, tenor sax (US); Jorge Roeder, bass (Peru); Tupac Mantilla, percussion (Venezuela). They wielded a bright palette, blending and twisting fine lines, breezed through “This Man Walk” (furious two-beat swing); “However” (Sun Ra, outside); “Telegram” (bluegrass). “L’il Darlin” was an on-the-spot inspiration from the Basie band’s molasses-sweet Neil Hefti classic.

Donal Fox’s busy, business-like blend of jazz-meets-classix is still ‘confounding the genre police.’ Fox mines deep resources as a classical pianist in crafting an expanding repertoire of original materials smoothly grafted to jazz vernacular. He will groove an ostinato under sophisticated lines and harmonies for a fusion that titillates your toes as it fires your synapses. Famed for collaborative efforts (David Murray, Stefon Harris), Fox brewed his latest potion, “Piazzolla to Bach Project,” to feature dramatic Israeli-Argentine cellist Maya Beiser. Fox’s last appearance at TJF ‘08 (majoring in Scarlatti) was a hit, and the success of this new collaboration – effectively melding his grit and rigor with Beiser’s suave charms — should assure his annual slot in this niche roster: nobody’s doing anything like this in modern music.

With longtime colleague John Lockwood, Boston’s first-call jazz bassist, Warren Wolf on vibes, and Cuban drummer Dafnis Prieto, Fox whipped up a blazing set that mesmerized, edified, and kept everyone on the edge of their seats until well after 11 pm, despite blustery breezes. Fox crosses Monk x Bach (Partita #5) to produce prodigious offspring in interplay with Prieto’s rimshots and Wolf’s rising glissandi. The band tapped into Hispano-Cuban Joaquin Nin and Argentine tanguero Astor Piazzola with equal aplomb, as Beiser’s reedy, melodramatic cello blended in, whether theremin-swooning to the fore or barely audible in the welter. Bach’s Two Part Invention in F went tight, straight, and hot. Fox’s peaceable opening of a John Dowland lute ballade was just as surprising as his stops-out closing jam on — what do you suppose? “Le Coucou and the Funky Chicken,” based in part on Louis-Claude Daquin’s cuckoo emulation in his 1735 harpsichord suite! Get down, squares!

The Jazz Café — a white tent with table seating, buffet and bar — aired small acts at noon and five both days; I caught two singers. Kelly Johnson is a lively sprite from Seattle whose ‘lithe, velvety’ voice brings her Lincoln Center gigs and fresh charm to standards, “Lucky To Be Me” and “The Tender Trap.”  Audrey Silver, a Manhattan regular, shows some warm style, with deep roots in song gurus Bob Dorough and Sheila Jordan.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

The Imani Winds — flautist Valerie Coleman, oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz, clarinetist Mariam Adam, French hornist Jeff Scott, and bassoonist Monica Ellis – played a lively and cheerful, yet consistently challenging contemporary program to an enthusiastic full house in a Sunday matinee on June 27 at Rockport. It’s their third Rockport visit, and they feel like family.

The group’s overall sound is smooth and suave, conceptually rich, with spiky attacks, spicy flavors, and a perpetually sinuous rhythmic momentum. Formed in 1997 by graduates of Juilliard and Mannes, Imani has honed a fresh, iconoclastic edge for their quintet. Working, touring, and teaching full-time, their attitude of loose, cheery professionalism is more in tune with jazz groups or rock bands than ‘chamber ensembles.’ Imani’s obvious delight in exploring the intention of each composer commits them to a sense of ownership and exhibits a collective energy smacking of rock and pop groups. Traditional they ain’t: among other gigs, Imani toured European festivals in 2009 with premier jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter. “Imani” (“faith” in Swahili) reflects both the members’ African-American heritage and their innovative leap in launching an on-going venture that commissions new works from a multi-cultural coterie: Cuban clarinettist Paquito D’Rivera, Shorter, Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, Thelonious Monk shoulder-stander Jason Moran, and Palestinian oudist Simon Shaheen.

The Imani players set a genially familiar tone in the handsome Liu Hall by taking turns announcing the music. (Architectural highlights of the space include a glass wall backdrop (à la Brooklyn’s Bargemusic), patch-worked Asian (not Rockport quarry) limestone, slats of Douglas fir woven with wrought iron, teardrop and egg-case light sconces, and stretches of sea-foam green paint. For thorough analysis of the exquisite acoustics, read David Griesinger’s June 15 column here.

Imani boldly programmed works by living composers, the first by their own flautist. Coleman (b. Louisville, 1970) wrote Red Clay: Mississippi Delta as a bravura blues piece, crisply ornamented, demanding much from Ellis and trumpet-like calls from Adam, with finger-snaps for all. It had the earmarks of an exhilarating showstopper in the manner of pianist/composer James P. Johnson. (Coleman and Scott as composers lean markedly into jazz’s syncopated rhythms, improvisatory gestures, and crossbred Hispanic dance forms. Their completely original concept album — one of four Koch International releases — on the life of American-born Parisian danseuse and entrepreneur Josephine Baker works jazz singer Rene Marie and percussionist Joseph Tompkins into their merry troupe.)

Arturo Marquez (b. Mexico, 1950) whisked a fluid continuum of summer and river in his Danza de Mediodia that linked languid and hectic pacing and contrasted a warm inviting rumba melody line shared by Diaz and Ellis with more blustery, fluttery comments and raggedy staccatos by Scott and Ellis. Danza suited the contrast of dark skins in white outfits, silhouetted against a blue harbor with flitting gulls and sails.

Five Poems of Karel Husa (b. Prague, 1921) portrayed stark, quixotic imaginings of bird-life from ‘unwritten’ poems: walking (bustling Ellis), happy (exuberant Adam), lamenting (piquant, plaintive Diaz), fighting (wildly peculiar sonorities). The last, “Bird Flying High Above,” pitted Scott, mightily striving for lift against the deep, gravity-bound chorale of his colleagues, for all the world like a loon or swan, paddling hell-for-leather and bell-beating to rise from a pond.

The Elliott Carter (b. New York, 1908) selection was the short, spiffy Woodwind Quintet (1948), not the brittle centenarian’s better-known Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (1949). Two four-minute movements flitted between lightning shifts – buffo (Ellis strutting) to grazioso (Diaz eyebrow-arching) as quick as a face reflects mood swings.  Imani negotiated thorny disputations and easy agreements with a well-oiled familiarity and tight dynamic shading.

Miguel del Águila (Montevideo, 1957): Woodwind Quintet #2 presented four tableaux that transported the audience in space and time over half a fleeting hour. Unison voices with orotund Scott intonations depicted a rolling vessel; tapping keys gave shape to a lively danzón where over-the-top fortissimos, Diaz smears cutting Scott howls and Adam wailing over all threatened chaos before a woozily exaggerated rallentando calmed matters. Offstage Diaz and Coleman conjured dark shades of the spirit world, while Scott and Ellis chugged along in a limbo of Hallowe’en haunts. The finale, a swirl of turbans and robes, evoked the Arabian Nights, with Diaz mimicking a Turkish düdük and Scott wielding a tambour. Scott’s dashing, dancing take on late Argentine bandoneon guru Astor Piazzola’s Libertango brought down the house, but neither the glass curtain nor the glass ceiling on Imani Winds.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

On day two, Steffen Schleiermacher (1960, Halle) opened his stark, dense solo piano recital with his own Lilâ, a measured, quizzical homage to Olivier Messaien. The piece, alternating lock-hand eastern-mode lyric passages with gong-like open pedal bass notes and plucked strings, reached a pure quiescence (even luminescence) not to be duplicated in the spiky, angular program.

Immediately followed several terse miniatures from Ein Kinderspiel by Helmut Lachenmann (1935, Stuttgart) that seemed to revel (yes, perhaps like an obdurate child) in hammering the extreme ends of the keyboard and cross-hand vexations. Odd time signatures peppered these meccano dances.

With scant pause — just a Groucho Marx head-twist toward the audience -— the pianist launched into Gabbro (Steinstück #1) by Nico Richter de Vroe (b. 1955). The stony ostinato pattern (chord, chord, rest, rest) eventually slowed, quieted, broke with hairsbreadth pauses, split into miniscule variations that provoked an increasing, internal drama.

Next. Four Piano Pieces of Friedrich Goldmann (1941-2009) proved dynamic and pianistic, with splashy quasi-octaves, Messaien-like bird calls, and faint Parsifal snippets. Complex interplay unfolded between puckish Paul Klee-like twitter-machines and heavy-weather microbursts.

Then. Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2008) based his Klavierstücke 1-4 (1962) on mathematical relationships that unfold in a severe pointillism, hard and fast passages whizzing through moments that are jaunty, arch, ponderous, whatever.

Schleiermacher’s reading was studied and careful, yet cohesive and masterful.

Finally. Nachstudie (1992) by Wolfgang Rihm (1952 —), at twice the length of the other works, was dry, spacy, difficult –- une pièce de grande resistance. The pianist (and listeners) duly weathered the sforzandi that dotted its sere expanses, the protracted outcrops of squealing ostinati. But this reviewer was drifting, observing the youthful if sparse audience to be respectful, even enthusiastic. A prominent pianist in the audience regretfully commented, “No poetry here” and another agreed: “Not a single curved line all evening.” Cutting-edge, indeed. Encores? I didn’t wait: with a Teutonic headache, I sought Celtic consolation.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

Personnel were three, three, four, and three; and durations were about 20, 10, 15, 25 minutes. BCMS artistic director Marcus Thompson played acerbic, russet viola in the first two; Ida Levin’s violin shone richly in the latter two; Tom Hill’s clarinet elucidated the middle two; Randall Hodgkinson’s piano — immense and iridescent — moved ever forward and briskly shook each piece.

The Imbrie, “fraught with potential energy,” opened with a lively Allegro vivace. Motoric in tempo (despite abrupt pauses) and classic in shape and interaction, it paused only for Fenwick Smith’s flute and Thompson’s viola cadenza, then wound down like an analog clock. Siciliano, a languid taffy-pull, showed panache in its decorative touches, where echoing motifs overlapped, reacted, and slowed down even further. Adagio emerged as a jazz ballad — its dissonant ostinatos recalled Thelonious Monk’s interpretation of Alex Stordahl’s “I Should Care” – and again dissipated pianissimo, but recouped its forward energy with an Ives-like thrust in a whirlwind of overlaid chords and bells.

Larsen wedded glowing vignettes to six desert paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe in rarely encountered visual/musical reflections. The first took simple impressions of sere tomato-red sandhills. The second, a study of a gray-brown truffle-like boulder, echoed Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. A molten lava-flow captured slow motion wisps of carnal pleasure (esker lips, skeletal teeth) in a stately Greek strophe. The last snapped a raven — mid-flight in ¾ time — soaring through a sun-flash. All shone with that painful aqua lucidity and bracing creosote air of a New Mexico spring.

Crumb typically coaxes tiny, eerie natural sounds – flutter, whistle, hum, breath, strum, hammer, wheeze, pluck – from odd, creative sources, here in “dark, intense” tapestries that tax performers in pan-technical challenges as they puzzle listeners. Levin had to strum her fiddle like a mandolin, later daintily saw the neck above her left hand. Hodgkinson scudded the piano strings, whistled, whispered, and rattled raw ostinati as the winds – Hill (with amazingly shrill attack) and Smith (alto-flute quasi-Native American chant) – moved to the piano to read snippets hung like dry leaves from its lid and blow cavernous overtones into its strings.

An imaginative leap leads us to Ravel, in summer along his rugged Basque coast, where chaotic storm forces crashing upon rocky fastnesses inspire his writing the sonorous, majestic Trio. Levin and cellist Astrid Schween gracefully limn the piano’s rumbling bass ostinati; summoning expressive fervor and dazzling synchronicity, they sweep all along in a triumphant processional and unison song praising Ge, Mother Earth. Here Hodgkinson’s prodigious piano etched Ravel’s powerful lines with a diamond-cutter’s precision, and anchored the keening strings with a deep and clear understanding.

See related article here

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University, and teaches journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.

As of 2009, its name has been provocatively shortened to Rockport Music; next season, its venue moves two blocks to a sparkling new waterfront site. Architecturally impressive and sensitively designed, that new— finally permanent—home will permit Rockport Music to embark on longer, more adventuresome journeys, encompassing expansions in capacity (250 to 325), repertoire (casting a net to widened genres), season (into high-summer months) and refreshed audiences.

In a brief introduction, artistic director David Deveau wryly promised us “the ride of your life,” as these genre-defying youths were fast-track “travelers on the fly.”

TF3 lived up to that image: they ran onstage with their instruments and   unleashed a bevy of carefully rehearsed pieces. Graduates of Curtis Institute (class of 2001), TF3 exhibit purebred classic schooling and disciplined ensemble, while its repertoire is tail-wagging mongrel, rich in texture and quick-cut, memorized arrangements.

These were often well-crafted pastiches of American folk (“Amazing Grace”, “Turkey In The Straw”, “Old Gray Goose”) with Celtic reels; harmonics-laden pop chorales (Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Leonard Cohen’s theme for Shrek); western hoedowns, smooth jazz ostinati, and light touches of rock.

The gleeful threesome flitted about in varied musical personas, as well. Tall, slender blond Zach De Pue blithely reeled off glittering cadenzas and technical fireworks with debonair aplomb, while short, feisty Nick Kendall, with his spiky modified Mohawk, sawed away at gritty folk themes and country swing licks. Bassist Ranaan Meyer played the role of leader, composer, and self-important spokesman, as the fiddlers poked fun at him from both sides. Forays into light classics were equally successful, with Bach’s theme from Two-Violin Concerto sporting a raggy gloss (De Pue’s Stephane Grappelly dueling Kendall’s Yehudi Menuhin), gypsy dash applied to Vittorio Monti’s “Czardas” and a double-dollop of schmaltz to Brahms’ Hungarian Rhapsody No. 5.

Giddy patter and self-deprecatory jokes leavened the pleasant evening and further ingratiated a mixed audience of strait-laced classical listeners and impressionable ingénue teenagers.

Rockport Music’s season-closer on July 1 will present another string-oriented ‘cross-over’ act: Esperanza Spalding plays extraordinarily deft acoustic bass, writes jazz/pop songs of charm and merit, and sings them in an unaffected, refreshingly nuanced voice.

Fred Bouchard writes about music for Downbeat Magazine and All About Jazz, and about wine for Beverage Business; he lectures on jazz at Boston University and teaches music journalism and literature at Berklee College of Music.