Legendary bassist Ron Carter joins forces with acclaimed string quartet ETHEL for an unforgettable evening of collaboration across musical genres.
This celebratory event marks ETHEL’s Carnegie Hall debut as well as the 40-year anniversary of Carter’s recording Monk Suite. In concert together for the first time, Maestro Carter and ETHEL will premiere reimaginations of the original album’s arrangements of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington for bass and string quartet. Rounding out the program will be classics from the Ron Carter Nonet, as well as Carter’s ebullient reimagination of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #3.
Thursday, March 13, 2025, 7:30 p.m. Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall Seventh Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets
Tickets available: carnegiehall.org, CarnegieCharge (212) 247-7800, or at the Box Office at 57th and Seventh Ticket prices start at $100
Presented by ETHEL’s Foundation for the Arts www.ethelcentral.org @ethelcentral
Performed
Seasons of Change: Curtis Stewart's recomposition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is the frame for an Afrofuturist meditation
Composers
Gabriel Kahane
Jessie Montgomery
Vocalists
Gabriel Kahane
Karen Slack
Pianists
Rodolfo Leone
Jeffrey Kahane
Jon Kimura Parker
Conductors
Jacomo Bairos
Jeffrey Kahane
Vocal
Ensemble
Cantus
Winds
Amy Dickson
Anthony McGill
Demarre McGill
Orion Weiss
Strings
William Hagen
Andrei Ioniță
Rachel Barton Pine
Chamber Orchestra
Piano Trio
Gryphon Trio
String Quartets
Ariel Quartet
Attacca Quartet
Arod Quartet
Quatuor Danel
Miró Quartet
Pacifica Quartet
Parker Quartet
Shanghai Quartet
Sphinx Virtuosi
Woodwind Quintet
WindSync
Competition
Banff International String Quartet
Competition
Hagen Quartet
Ying Quartet
15 CHAMBERMUSIC
FEATURES
31
16 The Big (and Lasting) Bang
How Bang on a Can, recipient of CMA’s 2025 National Service Award, upended what we hear, and in what order.
BY Vivien Schweitzer
24
Grandfathered In
David Harrington, recipient of CMA’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, reflects on a generational shift in chamber music.
25
Roscoe’s Big Picture
A visit with Roscoe Mitchell, winner of CMA’s inaugural Executive Award, at his kaleidoscopic home studio.
COLUMNS
38 CMA TRIOS: Walter Smith III, Eric Harland, and Jason Moran
Three jazz stars, born and bred in Houston, reminisce about their hometown. BY Peter Margasak
45 BOOKS: Echoes of Jazz, at Home and Abroad
Three books explore how the music was made, taught, and received, as distilled through personal lives. BY Eugene Holley, Jr.
DEPARTMENTS
5 CMA LETTER: Looking Back and Dreaming Big BY Kevin Kwan Loucks
6 CMA NEWS: Envisioning a New Home for CMA; a Think Tank for Jazz
8 IN MEMORIAM AND SEGUES
ON THE COVER: The founders of Bang on a Can: David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon
PHOTOGRAPH BY George Etheredge
26
Six Awards of Distinction
Recognizing the diverse achievements of chamber musicians, presenters, composers, and advocates across the US.
31 Let Conscience Ring
PRISM Quartet’s Generate Music project expresses empathy and poses searching questions.
BY Shaun Brady
10 AMERICAN ENSEMBLE: Andromeda Turre, Marlon Simon, Huu Bac, Balourdet Quartet, Aperio, Merz Trio
54 ANGELA ANSWERS: Finding Yourself in the Story BY Angela Myles Beeching
55 END NOTE: Composers, Hanging Around BY Akhira Montague
STRING QUARTETS
Argus Quartet
Formosa Quartet
Ivalas Quartet
PIANO TRIO
Horszowski Trio
PIANO / CLARINET / CELLO
Polonsky-Shifrin-Wiley Trio
WOODWINDS
David Shifrin in Recital*
New Century Saxophone Quartet GUITAR
William Kanengiser
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Viva Tango!
British Invasion
Pierrot Re-Imagined In Triplicate
* In cooperation with CM Artists
CH AMBER MUSIC
Official publication of Chamber Music America
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CHAMBER MUSIC AMERICA
Kevin Kwan Loucks chief executive officer
Jenny Ouellette chief operating officer
Susan Dadian director of artistic planning
José R. Feliciano director of grant programs
Julia Filson director of strategic advancement
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Erica Murase director of development
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Chamber Music (ISSN 1071-1791), the official publication of Chamber Music America, is published quarterly, in Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall by Chamber Music America, P.O. Box 22248, Brooklyn, NY 11202. ��2024 Chamber Music America. Chamber Music magazine subscription price for one year ($35.00) is included in membership dues. Periodical postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to Chamber Music, P.O. Box 22248, Brooklyn, NY 11202. Articles, reviews, and letters reflect the viewpoint of their individual authors; publication by Chamber Music does not imply official endorsement by CMA. Partial support for Chamber Music magazine is provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Looking Back and Dreaming Big
As the year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on remarkable moments that have shaped our community over the past twelve months. Among these was CMA’s Jazz Think Tank at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York—a transformative gathering that united artists, presenters, and advocates to explore the evolving landscape of jazz. Over three days, we shared insights, celebrated musical artistry, and tackled pressing topics such as equity, sustainability, and the role of technology in education and music distribution.
What struck me most was the spirit of collaboration that defined the weekend. From the heartfelt performance by Donald Vega and Rufus Reid to the candid conversations over coffee, the sense of community was palpable. These exchanges reminded me of the power of listening—not just to music, but to one another— as we chart a path forward for our field. The Think Tank underscored jazz’s unique ability to connect us, leaving me inspired to build on this momentum. We’re already looking ahead to a New York State chamber music presenters’ convening in Spring 2025, where we’ll continue fostering collaboration across our community.
This spirit of collaboration and positive change guides CMA’s future in tangible ways. In early November, we successfully sold our office space at 12 West 32nd Street in New York City, a major milestone in CMA’s journey. This sale represents a prudent step forward and opens opportunities to imagine a new national hub for chamber music. Plans are underway to establish a space that will enhance CMA’s ability to serve our members and the field, fostering deeper connections and broader engagement.
This same forward-looking vision drives our 2025 National Conference in Houston, where we celebrate the achievements of this year’s CMA awardees. These honorees embody chamber music’s tradition, innovation, and transcendent power.
David Harrington, founding violinist of the Kronos Quartet, receives the Michael Jaffee Visionary Award for his unparalleled artistry and dedication to expanding the boundaries of chamber music. Bang on a Can founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe are honored with the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award for their exceptional contributions to the art form. Other honorees include the Apollo Chamber Players as Ensemble of the Year and Andrew Yee for Commission of the Year, recognizing the evocative Something Golden, commissioned for the Thalea String Quartet by Friends of Chamber Music of Troy, NY.
I am especially proud to present the inaugural CMA Executive Award to saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Renowned for his groundbreaking explorations of jazz, classical, and experimental music, Mitchell has profoundly shaped the trajectory of creative expression. During the conference, we are thrilled to highlight the premiere of his Metropolis Trilogy, co-commissioned by our Conference partner DACAMERA. This major new work encapsulates Mitchell’s interdisciplinary approach and enduring legacy in contemporary music.
Whether you’ll be with us in Houston or joining the conversation later, this Conference invites us to celebrate the undeniable and ever-vital power of chamber music—to dream big with us, and to collaborate in charting a thrilling path forward.
With gratitude and anticipation,
Kevin Kwan Loucks Chief Executive Officer
CHAMBER MUSIC
AMERICA BOARD OF DIRECTORS
chair
Bryan Young
president
Jennifer Grim
vice presidents
Jenny Bilfield
Oliver Ragsdale, Jr.
secretary
Nicholas Csicsko
treasurer
Jennie Oh Brown
chief executive officer
Kevin Kwan Loucks
Dawn Berry-Walker
Noah DeGarmo
Carlton Ford
Annie Fullard
Janet Green
Jennifer Grim
Natalie Haas
Juliana Han
Julian Hernandez
Edward Kim
Calvin Lee
Adriana Linares
Nicholas Phan
Sofia Rei
Rob Robbins
James E. Rocco
Sophia Contreras
Schwartz
Daniel Seeff
Wendy Sharp
Christopher Shih
Helen Sung
Samuel Torres
Dwight Trible
Melissa White
Pat Zagelow
Jeffrey Zeigler
Moving Out, Moving On , and Thinking Big
Following the sale of its Manhattan offices, CMA solicits feedback to create a New York City hub for all things chamber music.
This past October, CMA signed over its longtime office space on West 32nd Street in Midtown Manhattan to its new owners. That sale marks the close of an important chapter for the organization, as well as the start of a new one. Chamber Music America has had a physical presence in New York City for nearly all of its 47-year existence. The organization’s first official meeting, led by late founder and Early Music luminary Michael Jaffee, was held in List Hall at the Metropolitan Opera House. Its first permanent office was a borrowed, makeshift space in the corner of a textile workshop in Manhattan’s garment district. In the 1990s, as CMA’s staff grew, it found a more sustainable home on Seventh Avenue.
The office on West 32nd Street opened its doors in August 2014, and, during its 10-plus years of operation, was home to dozens of grant panels, countless advisory meetings, social gatherings large and small, and to the steady expansion of CMA’s programs and staff. Yet as the Covid-19 pandemic
gave rise to new norms for remote work and collaboration, the organization—like many others—began to reconsider where best to allocate its resources in service of its constituents and mission.
After considerable discussion within the organization, a vision began to emerge: a new hub for chamber music, with enough flexibility to host performances, rehearsals, recordings, convenings, and educational programming in ways that are responsive to the evolving needs of the chamber music community. To further refine this vision, CMA will convene a subcommittee within its Board of Directors and will actively solicit member feedback. With those goals in mind, CMA wants to know: What unmet needs can our new physical space address? How could we use a new facility to strengthen our existing community, while also drawing in new voices? CMA will distribute official surveys in the coming months, but in the meantime, feel free to share ideas with membership@chambermusicamerica. org with the subject line “New Space Idea.”
“At this moment, the future is ours to imagine,” says CMA Chief Executive Officer Kevin Kwan Loucks. “Though we are still in the planning stages of this major endeavor, we know that our new space in New York City will transform CMA’s impact, allowing us to create new access points, deepen our connection with the community, and serve as an innovative model for chamber music spaces on a larger scale.”
CMA’s former office space on 32nd Street in New York City.
Straight Talk and Listening Hard About Jazz
By the time the sun set over the bare trees and rolling hills of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park one Saturday in late Fall, the 16 musicians, presenters, and managers gathered in the Horses Studio had dug deeply into the joys and challenges of playing and producing jazz, and in balancing a century old tradition with a post-pandemic digital reality. Here in the charming town of Tivoli, in Upstate New York, these participants engaged in a variety of activities, ranging from playful, game-like exercises to deep-dive focus groups, sharing insights along the way and tackling topics such as equity, sustainability, and the role of technology in education and music distribution.
This three-day Jazz Think Tank— facilitated by José R. Feliciano, CMA’s director of grant programs, and made possible through generous support from the Doris Duke Jazz Ensembles Project, funded by the Doris Duke Foundation— raised questions and inched toward answers. Those assembled addressed, among other topics, new ideas and critical imbalances regarding artist support and models for sustainable creative communities.
Kaatsbaan Cultural Park—a 153-acre artist sanctuary on the site of the former Tivoli Farms, once the equestrian playground for Eleanor Roosevelt— provided a disarmingly tranquil and beautiful setting. In between meetings, the Think Tank’s members walked its undeveloped hay fields and woodlands, stopping here and there to admire magnificent views of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains.
Through writing exercises, open discussions, and informal anecdotes, those assembled discussed what has worked, what hasn’t, and wondered about a wide range of concerns: How do we create alternative, sustainable performance spaces? Is live streaming and digital distribution a boon or a bust?
Are artists also now managers, agents, and publicists, by necessity? How can artists manage work and personal life in a 24/7 promotional world? If music labels no longer support tours, what is the new ecosystem? These conversations often spilled into meals at Kaatsbaan’s Artist Farmhouse.
After all that talk came music. On Saturday evening, the gathering’s ranks swelled to 89 at Kaatsbaan’s Studio Complex Black Box Theater for a duo performance by pianist Donald Vega and bassist Rufus Reid. At the piano, Vega was just as inquisitive and articulate as he’d been during afternoon sessions, alongside Reid, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. They played standards and Vega’s original compositions from his recent release, As I Travel, which earned a Best Latin Jazz Album Grammy nomination. Their easy musical rapport belied the fact that this was their first performance together.
“What struck me most was the spirit of collaboration that defined the weekend,” said Kevin Kwan Loucks. “From the heartfelt performance by Donald and Rufus to the candid conversations over coffee, the sense of community was palpable. These exchanges reminded me of the power of listening—not just to music, but to one another—as we chart a path forward for our field.”
Over breakfast the final morning, Vega described the rhythms from his native Nicaragua he’d tucked within one of the tunes he’d played with Reid. Soon, the talk turned to how to keep the weekend’s momentum going and to build consensus. “There are opportunities for resource building and advocacy of, by, for, and with jazz professionals to address challenges around advocating for their work,” said Feliciano. “We look forward to continuing the conversations started here as we plan for future Jazz Think Tank events.”
CMA’s Jazz Think Tank considered the storied art form for a new era.
Segues
The management and booking agencies Dinin Arts and Epstein Fox Performances (EFP) have joined forces. As of December 2024, Dinin’s roster has merged with the classical division of EFP.
The Aeolus Quartet has named violinist Isabelle Durrenberger as its newest member. Durrenberger succeeds founding violinist Nicholas Tavani.
The Mellon Foundation has promoted Deana Haggag to the role of program director for arts and culture, where she will lead the organization’s arts grantmaking work. Haggag, who previously served as program officer in the arts and culture at Mellon, succeeds Emil J. Kang in the position.
Violinist Tessa Lark has been named the new artistic director of the Moab Music Festival. She succeeds co-founding directors Michael Barrett and Leslie Tomkins, who helmed the festival for the last 33 years.
The Argus Quartet has two new members: violinist Sam Parrini and cellist Drake Driscoll. They succeed cellist Mariel Roberts and founding violinist Clara Kim.
Marc A. Scorca, who for the last 35 years has led Opera America, has announced his intention to retire at the end of 2025. The organization will convene a search committee in the coming months to identify a successor.
Flutist Patricia Spencer has announced her departure from the Da Capo Chamber Players, capping a 50-plus-year tenure with the group. She will continue as a board member for the ensemble. Roberta Michel will join as the group’s new flutist.
This January, Limor Tomer became the new vice president of programming and production for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA, succeeding Judy Morr. Tomer served for the last 13 years as general manager of the Live Arts Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Memoriam
Adam Abeshouse, violinist and producer
Claire Daly, saxophonist
Lou Donaldson, saxophonist
Charlie Fishman, founder of the DC Jazz Festival
Roy Haynes, drummer
Zakir Hussain, tabla player
Tom Johnson, music critic and composer
Quincy Jones, producer, composer, and trumpeter
Barre Phillips, bassist
Herb Robertson, trumpeter and flugelhornist
Errata
In the Fall 2024 issue of Chamber Music, we incorrectly attributed the photograph of Elio Villafranca printed on page 90 to Erin E. Mickelwaite. The photograph was taken by Adriana Mateo.
CMS IS A TRUSTED PARTNER
for presenters worldwide, producing world-class chamber music performances with our incredible international cast of artists.
“This
NOW BOOKING 2026 - 2027 SEASON
COPLAND’S APPALACHIAN SPRING
OCT 2–11, 2026
BOLCOM Three Rags for String Quartet
BEACH Quintet in F-Sharp minor for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 67
HERRMANN Psycho: A Narrative for String Ensemble
COPLAND Appalachian Spring Suite for Ensemble
Anne-Marie McDermott, PIANO Richard Lin, Kristin Lee, Francisco Fullana, Lun Li, VIOLIN • Paul Neubauer, Daniel Phillips, VIOLA • Dmitri Atapine, Nick Canellakis, CELLO • Nina Bernat, BASS
Tara Helen O’Connor, FLUTE • David Shifrin, CLARINET • Marc Goldberg, BASSOON
MAHLER, BRAHMS, AND SCHUMANN
JAN 18–30, 2027
MAHLER Piano Quartet in A minor
BRAHMS Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60
SCHUMANN Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47
Wu Han, PIANO • Arnaud Sussmann, VIOLIN • Matt Lipman, VIOLA • David Finckel, CELLO
elite organization has the roster to present an endless variation of intriguing programs.”
—Washington Classical Review
DVORAK’S STRING SEXTET
FEB 26–MAR 10, 2027
BOCCHERINI Quintet with Two Cellos in G minor, Op. 29, No. 6, G. 318
ALFREDO D’Ambrosio Suite for String Quintet, Op. 8
DVORAK String Sextet in A major, Op. 48
Danbi Um, Julian Rhee, VIOLIN Paul Neubauer, Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, VIOLA • Nick Canellakis, Jonathan Swensen, CELLO
MOZART AND BRAHMS
APR 22–MAY 1, 2027
BRAHMS Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 115
MOZART Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581
Stella Chen, Chad Hoopes, VIOLIN • Tim Ridout, VIOLA • Clive Greensmith, CELLO • Sebastian Manz, CLARINET
David Finckel and Wu Han, ARTISTIC DIRECTORS
Andromeda Turre
Easing a Glacier’s Pain
The first sound you hear on vocalist ANDROMEDA TURRE’s latest album, From the Earth: A Jazz Suite, is the low hum of her crystal singing bowl, soon joined by the gurgling drone of an Australian didgeridoo and the voice of poet Betty Neals, via a sampled voicemail, describing these blended sounds as “the language of trees, glaciers, winds, beasts, birds.”
Turre’s parents are musical luminaries Steve Turre and Akua Dixon, who often play, respectively, conch shells or cello in jazz settings, so the younger Turre felt emboldened to play her own unusual instrument. As the goddaughter of Neals, who performed her poetry with jazz legend Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Andromeda felt confident staking her music to a narrative— in this case, about our accelerating environmental crisis.
“Neither of my parents has ever been afraid to make a statement with their music or to do something different,” Turre says. “Having a dad who plays seashells on stage, it was natural to use him for the album’s third section, ‘From the Sea.’ And since he was there, it made sense to use his trombone on ‘From the Sky’ and to have my mother sing on the last song. I knew this was a different kind of project, and having them right there, telling me that I was doing the right thing, meant so much.”
In December 2022, she found herself inside a glacier cave in Iceland. “I felt the glacier was sad,” she recalls, “as if it had seen all the dinosaurs go extinct and now it was facing the same fate.” She called her piano-dappled hymn about that
experience “Cryosphere,” using the word for the earth’s icy realm and channeling her sympathy for the melting ice. A walk along a black-sand beach inspired “Hydrosphere,” her wordless vocal evoking the watery realm.
These songs reflect her longstanding interest in ecology and her firsthand impressions, yet she wanted to know more. She set up Zoom calls with environmental activists, extracting excerpts from the recorded calls and setting these samples to music. “It would be one thing for me to talk about the way one-in-five kids in marginalized communities show up in the emergency room with asthma,” Turre says, “but it meant more to hear Miss Margaret Gordon, who’s been an environmental activist all her life, talk about it in her own rough voice.”
She broke her album into four parts—“From the Earth,” “From the Sky,” “From the Sea” and “From the Ice.” “The earth, sky, and sea sections came very quickly,” she says, “but I struggled with ice. At one point, I was ready to give up. Then I had a dream that I was walking across an ice field with a herd of caribou, and I heard a woman’s voice crying, ‘Amulena!’ I woke up, went right to the piano and sang that phrase.” The album’s penultimate track finds her chanting that word over her father’s conch shell and Chien Chien Lu’s vibraphone. “I’ve looked everywhere to see if that word means anything, but I haven’t found anything. But that’s OK; my parents’ friend Abbey Lincoln used words like that all the time.” andromedaturre.com ■ BY GEOFFREY HIMES
A Sense of Belonging
Sometimes, a seat at the trap set offers not only a view of the band, but of an expansive musical landscape. Such is the case with On Different Paths, MARLON SIMON’s fifth recording as a leader.
On one level, this album is the work of a master percussionist. Yet the music also reveals that the Venezuela-born and now Houston-based Simon is a diligent composer who prizes memorable melody, compelling harmonic gambits, ensemble unity, and a fluent interweaving of jazz and Caribbean rhythms above any virtuosic displays. During his four-decade career, he has also developed a personalized approach that combines the improvisational flair and rhythmic intensity of jazz with the introspective detail of classical music. On the new release, his acute awareness of chamber music textures and dynamics are evident through compositions such as “Searching,” “Pa,” and “Un Canto Llanero.” Alongside piano, reeds, brass, and congas (played by the acclaimed Venezuelan percussionist Roberto Quintero), the ensemble is augmented by bassoonist Monica Ellis and French horn player Kevin Newton, who add an unexpected tonal depth. Throughout, Simon’s attentiveness to harmonic and melodic texture calls the listener’s ear into carefully balanced group interaction.
For Simon, who emigrated to the United States from Venezuela in 1987 and then studied at Philadelphia’s The University of the Arts and The New School in Manhattan, such musical melds have deep implications. “If, as a composer, I can successfully blend instruments from different music genres
and different parts of the world to create a different sound and harmony, wouldn’t it be possible to use music as a way to bring people together?” he asks. “What I strive for in my music is to raise the level of consciousness and harmony among people with different backgrounds and belief systems. I believe that creative music has the power to express the emotions of the composer while bringing us closer to each other, creating a sense of belonging to a group.”
That closeness has to do with his approach to recording and performing, he explains. “I intentionally wanted to make a ‘music album’ rather than a ‘drum album,’ he says. “I don’t want to make things too loud. And when performing, I want a listener, even if they are eight feet from the stage, to hear everyone in the ensemble.”
Simon attracted early attention for his acute cross-cultural rhythmic feel, working with jazz luminaries such as Bobby Watson, as well as Latin jazz icons including Chucho Valdés, Jerry González, and Dave Valentin. He recorded his first album as a leader in 1999, which introduced The Nagual Spirits, an evolving ensemble that has included his brothers, pianist Edward and trumpeter Michael. “Nagual,” a concept derived from Simon’s readings of Carlos Castaneda, regarding those who serve as gateways to the spiritual realm, still informs his music-making. “It signifies the magical part of the human experience,” he says, “the spiritual part that cannot be explained by the thoughts of everyday life.” marlonsimon.com
■ BY STEVE FUTTERMAN
Photo:
Marlon Simon
Everything He Had Learned
The title track of HUU BAC’s 2017 debut album, On the Steps of St. Paul’s, is a ballad whose descending melody hums with an eerie vibrato. At first, it sounds like a theremin. Listen closely, though, and the sound lacks the theremin’s electric buzz. Instead, it has the refined lilt of a soprano singer.
Yet this is no singer. It’s a traditional Vietnamese instrument, the đàn baˆ ̕ u, which lends a distinctive flavor to this longtime Montreal resident’s jazz quintet. Its alluring sound is produced from a single string connected to the horizontal sounding board on one side and stretching to a vertical pole of buffalo horn on the other. The pole can be bent in any direction to change the pitch of the string as it’s plucked by a plectrum and dampened by the side of the right hand.
Huu Bac is the stage name of Huu Bac Quach, who left his native Vietnam with his family at the age of one, among the “boat people” fleeing postwar upheaval. He landed in Canada a year later and didn’t return to his homeland until he was a college student on a break. That’s when he first laid eyes on a đàn baˆ̕u, played by a fellow passenger on a river boat. “It’s a peculiar instrument,” he says over the phone from Montreal, “because it only plays harmonics, and that produces this very pure sound that just grabs you. For me, the attraction was a combination of getting in touch with my roots and falling in love with the sound itself.”
The discovery came at an opportune time. He had recently given up a promising career as a jazz guitarist because back problems made it hard to hunch over the instrument. In
Montreal’s Vietnamese Yellow Pages, he found a đàn baˆ ̕ u teacher, Pham Duc Thanh, who happened to be among the world’s top players. At a local Asian music festival, he heard the erhu and fell in love as well with this two-string Chinese violin. A scholarship to study music in Shanghai followed. There, a student from Ecuador turned him onto the quena, the Andean bamboo flute. Soon he was playing all three instruments—đàn baˆ̕u, erhu, and bamboo flute—professionally, if not lucratively.
“One day I wore my Vietnamese hat, the next day my Chinese hat, and the day after that my Peruvian hat,” he recalls. “Eventually, I realized I was versed in all these cultures, but I wasn’t expressing myself fully. I’m an Asian by background, but I grew up in Montreal, playing rock guitar as a teenager and jazz guitar in college. I realized that the only way I could express myself effectively was to start composing music that incorporated everything I had learned.”
He formed his own jazz quintet, in which his đàn baˆ̕u and erhu duets with violinist Marie-Neige Lavigne demonstrate both a fluidity the instruments share, and the stark contrast between the European instrument’s plump tone and the piercing quality of the Asian ones.
The result is an ensemble that sounds unlike any other. Huu Bac is now working on a quintet album that will reflect his newfound love for music from North India. Does that mean yet more instruments? “No, no,” he says in mock alarm, “no more new instruments. I want to focus on playing these instruments better.” huubac.com ■ BY GEOFREY HIMES
Photo: Noelle Garnier
Huu Bac
Brand-New Flying Machine
The four members of the BALOURDET QUARTET—violinists Angela Bae and Justin DeFilippis, violist Benjamin Zannoni, and cellist Russell Houston—gather for a Zoom interview in a rehearsal studio at Indiana University, where they have been the graduate string quartet in residence since 2023. Mounted on the wall behind them, a piece of paper maps out scheduled touring programs and the track order for an upcoming album on Phenotypic Recordings. This is where the quartet finds itself at this moment: still in school but looking ahead toward a busy future beyond graduation. “We’ve been students for a while now,” says Bae. “It’s time to be our own entity.”
Until now, the Balourdet has followed a traditional path— playing the standard string quartet repertoire, making its way through graduate programs and the competition circuit, earning prizes at the Banff, Borciani, Fischoff, and Yellow Springs Competitions. Last year, they won CMA’s Cleveland Quartet Award and a 2024 Avery Fisher Career Grant. The four musicians met as students at Rice University and formed the quartet in 2018, before landing in New England Conservatory’s Professional String Quartet Program, where they studied with Paul Katz of the Cleveland Quartet and members of the Borromeo String Quartet. At Indiana, they’ve been working with the Pacifica Quartet and Alain Barker of the university’s music Entrepreneurship and Creative Development Program.
These mentorships nurture not just the group’s artistry but also its direction. “At NEC we learned how to rehearse, how to listen, and how to understand each other better,” says Houston. “And now with Alain at IU, we’ve had the opportunity to think about our five-year plan, and to reframe our ‘why’ and our brand as a creative team.”
“Now that we’re in this post-competition life,” says Zannoni, “we finally get to be ourselves, picking the repertoire and programming we want to highlight.” Their upcoming touring program, called “Learning to Fly” (after the Pink Floyd song) will end not with the typical grand masterwork (such as Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, a Balourdet staple), but rather a contemporary work, Eleanor Alberga’s frenetic String Quartet No. 2. The Balourdet is also developing family concert programs called Expedition Strings for public spaces such as zoos, science museums, or libraries, with special commissions or thematic repertoire.
The ensemble plans to make its boldest announcement of identity yet with its forthcoming album Strange Machines. Named for Karim Al-Zand’s fourth string quartet, the album features “music that relates to the intersection of technology and the string quartet,” and which combines both man and machine. The titular work is quirky and humorous, its three movements evoking three imaginary musical automata: “Alberti Machine” (a sputtering steam-punk device), “Goldberg Machine” (a Rube Goldberg device that spits out quotations of Bach), and “Mannheim Machine” (an AI “cliché bot” that churns out symphony quotations). The album includes another recent commission, Paul Novak’s Impossible Inventions; arrangements of a player-piano piece by George Antheil and a Dufay motet; and a new work, “Galaxy Back to You,” for which composer Nicky Sohn used ChatGPT to determine the piece’s form. The Balourdet Quartet is indeed now its own entity—one just taking flight on a singular path. balourdetquartet.com ■ BY ROBERT McCLUNG
The Balourdet Quartet: Justin DeFilippis, Russell Houston, Angela Bae, and Benjamin Zannoni
New Views of the Hemisphere
APERIO, MUSIC OF THE AMERICAS is unique among performing arts presenters. Since its formation in 2006, it has showcased contemporary and classical music exclusively from North and South America. In Latin, the root language of both Spanish and English, “aperio” means “to reveal or uncover.” This aligns directly with the organization’s motto—“to hear with new understanding”—and its mission of changing the way audiences understand the connections between Latin America and the United States through new and underperformed music from both continents.
Aperio’s founder and artistic director, Michael Zuraw, speaks effusively about the overlooked and obscure classical and contemporary music of Latin America. He likes to champion music he describes as “endangered.” His passion for this repertoire began in 2005, when he stumbled upon the music of the Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino. As a doctoral student at Rice University at the time, Zuraw had developed an expertise in contemporary American music. For him, Guastavino’s sensuous, romantic aesthetic opened a window into a living tradition of Latin American art music that was distinct from the European strain of modernism and postmodernism. Zuraw’s interest in Guastavino led to the discovery of other Latin American composers whose work was little known beyond their native countries.
Zuraw has been programming Aperio’s concerts for nearly twenty years. These programs lean into the cultural, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity of the Americas to celebrate an array of sounds, artistic voices, and themes. “I try to program music
that audiences haven’t heard before or may have overlooked,” he says. The 2024-2025 season opened with a program that chronicled a particular strain of romanticism in twentieth and twenty-first century American chamber music. Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor, op. 67—an unbridled work in the style of Brahms and young Mahler—opened the program. The remaining pieces, arranged chronologically, became increasingly restrained but no less transcendent: vocal music by Aaron Copland and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and three pieces by the Argentine Osvaldo Golijov, including his meditative Tenebrae for string quartet.
This is certainly true of the two films. Both album and film follow Alvin, a miner who forges the very first bullet, reaps unthinkable profits from firearms, and turns his idyllic town into a dystopia. triggerLand carries the weight of myth, charting a fall from grace—the first gun-related homicide. Onscreen, its characters appear as masked, speechless figures. Sean Neukom, the film’s director-producer, heightens visual impact with color saturation, contrast, and shifts in hue. In the first film, an intensely yellow stop-motion excavator crawls across a psychedelic landscape of black pastures and icy blue mountains. An electric bass pounds a rhythmically-charged pedal point as the quartet burns, in unison, through a modal tetrachord. This introduction captures the otherworldliness of triggerLand and compels listeners to think big.
In a sense, that’s the point of triggerLand and Beo’s previous output, all of which Neukom calls “concept albums.” The concept? “A linear experience where each point along the way helps build a whole larger than any of the individual components,” he explained. “Especially in today’s climate of streaming and digital players, the label of ‘concept album’ helps denote the intention that the entire album is the experience.”
Beo’s experimentation with genre-crossing textures and studio effects such as live sound processing suggests a paradigm established more by The Beatles than the Borodin Quartet. Their adventurous spirit has led to an album whose harrowing opening should captivate listeners and keep them engaged through a cathartic ending, along the way registering powerful musical and political statements. www.beostringquartet.com ■ BY ROBERT McCLUNG
Each Aperio program is unique: A performance might feature a soloist, a chamber ensemble, or even a chamber orchestra. Zuraw designs the programs and then draws from the large network of musicians he has developed over the years to play this music. Many, such as jazz clarinetist and saxophonist Ernesto Vega and composer Clarice Assad, are based in Houston; others, like the violinist Sasha Callahan, travel from other American cities or, in some cases, from abroad. In April 2025, Aperio will host Alexis Cárdenas, the Venezuelan violinist who shreds with jaw-dropping elan whether he’s playing Joropo music or a Baroque concerto. Cárdenas can draw forth the earthy, folk-like qualities of a Bach partita, simultaneously leaning into its vivacious dance rhythms. In a way, his experience as a Joropo player informs his approach to Bach, which in turn makes audiences hear Bach differently. This beautifully befits Aperio’s design—to hear with new understanding. aperioamericas.org ■ BY ROBERT McCLUNG
Photo: Lynn Lane
Ernesto Vega (clarinet) and David Dietz (cello) perform at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston, January 2023.
Building a Playlist, One Concert at a Time
Conventional piano trio programs typically consist of a couple of familiar works by well-known composers such as Brahms, Haydn, or Fauré, and perhaps one piece by a contemporary composer. But the MERZ TRIO likes to shake things up. While it plays its fair share of standard repertoire, those classic works are often preceded by what Australian violinist Brigid Coleridge calls “playlists,” with the sort of unexpected juxtapositions listeners are used to on Spotify and other streaming sites.
In 2022, for example, the group presented Music Speaks: Undiluted Days at the Kaufman Music Center in New York and New England Conservatory in Boston. This semi-theatrical program, directed by Jonathan Levin, began with shorter selections, including the Merz’s arrangements of songs like the Édith Piaf favorite, “La Vie en Rose,” giving listeners a preview of what the group’s accompanying program note called the “universe of emotions” in Tchaikovsky’s more weighty Piano Trio in A Minor, op. 50. “We wanted to have a first half that is really in dialogue with that piece, and that gave a sense of space and flexibility and possibility to an audience,” said Coleridge, who is also a published poet.
Music Speaks revealed both the ensemble’s intrepid spirit and its ease in mixing full-blown trio repertoire with its own well-crafted, shorter arrangements of songs drawn from a wide range of styles and periods. The Merz trio boasts three strong solo players who share an intuitive sense of ensemble dynamics and are versatile enough to bring sharp intensity to Jeffrey Mumford’s stark undiluted days, and a contrasting lyricism to its arrangement of Alma Mahler’s
Trio:
1910 art song, “Laue Sommernacht” (“Mild Summer Night”).
The ensemble’s beginnings can be traced to a snowy night in Manhattan in 2016, when three young musicians got together to play some trios for fun. “We had all been playing chamber music for a long time at that point and knew that trios are what we wanted to do in terms of our careers. But, of course, you need to find the right people to do that,” Coleridge said. The group quickly gelled and went on to take the top prize at several competitions, including two of the most important for chamber ensembles—the 2021 Naumburg International Chamber Music Competition and 2019 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
Two of the founding members remain—Coleridge and Julia Yang, a former principal cellist of the New World Symphony, a Florida-based training orchestra. After the original pianist, Lee Dionne, left in September 2023, Amy Yang (no relation to Julia) replaced him. She serves as a faculty member and as director of chamber music and piano studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
One new program that the trio has proposed to presenters concludes with Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Trio no. 3 in F minor, op. 65, and opens with explorations of 13 wildly varying folk and folk-tinged works, along with excerpts that range from the Introduction to Chen Yi’s Tunes from My Home and the Irish folk tune, “On Yonder Hill.” It includes original arrangements of Astor Piazzolla’s “Fuga y Misterio,” George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” and a 1632 madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi. Thus, the playlist grows. merztrio.com ■ BY
KYLE MacMILLAN
Miles and Ziggy Johnston
Luciana Souza
Merz
Amy Yang (piano), Brigid Coleridge (violin), and Julia Yang (cello).
Bang on a Can’s founders—Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe—in 1993.
For nearly 40 years, Bang on a Can’s theory has been to alter what we listen to, where we hear it, and in what order.
BY Vivien Schweitzer
The (and Lasting)
The Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award is “presented to an individual or organization who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the chamber music field and enriched our national culture by fostering a greater appreciation for chamber music.”
IN 1987, WHEN THE INAUGURAL
Bang on a Can Festival took place at Exit Art, a loft in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, composers and their followers in New York City were split into two camps. The modernist crowd huddled uptown in tuxes while black T-shirt-clad minimalists congregated downtown. David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe had arrived in New York City a year earlier. Back then, they were composing music that didn’t neatly fit into either scene. Out of necessity, they created Bang on a Can, a nonprofit whose initial festival set out to create a less judgmental and more inclusive space for composers of varied aesthetic stripes.
In his review for The New York Times, Bernard Holland described that 1987 event—which included pieces by Milton Babbitt, Steve Reich, John Cage, George Crumb, Igor Stravinsky, and a bevy of then-up-and-coming composers such as John Zorn—as “a 12-hour orgy of contemporary music” offering a “laid-back, supermarket approach” with “every brand and generic name imaginable.” That “Marathon,” as they would officially become known, represented a first step towards dismantling strict musical demarcations. Babbitt and Reich, who respectively represented the dueling uptown and downtown schools, didn’t stay to hear each other’s works. Even so, this festival represented a musical truce, if perhaps an uneasy one.
Bang on a Can—now a multi-faceted arts organization whose energy hasn’t abated in the 38 years since—had announced itself. Ever since, it has had a profound impact on a generation of composers and the wider chamber music field. While Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe each also have notable individual careers as composers, they’ve never lost their mission as a collective. According to Donald Nally, conductor of the contemporary chamber music choir The Crossing, which commissions works that address social, environmental, and political issues and has performed many of Lang’s works, the BoaC founders have long grappled with “the value of observing the suffering of others and how to either describe or transcribe that in music.” As one example, Nally cited Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion, a choral work based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a dying girl’s dreams and hopes, for which Lang won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Wolfe also won a Pulitzer, in 2015, for Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about the dangerous and lonely lives of turn-of-the-20th-century Pennsylvania coal miners, which has been performed by the New York Philharmonic.
WE DON’T HAVE TO BE IN THE same room, but we do like being in the same room together,” Wolfe said, as I chatted with the three founders on a mid-November Sunday
“People knew who the new painters were, the writers, the filmmakers. But music was perceived as this really elitist thing— academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible.”
—Julia Wolfe
in the light-filled Lower Manhattan apartment that Wolfe and Gordon (who are married) share with their two dogs and adult daughter. Now in their 60s—Wolfe is 66, Lang is 67, and Gordon, 68—the three all still innovate as both composers and artistic directors. In the 1980s, they occupied the same space, in terms of their field: They were writing music “that wasn’t formal like a lot of chamber music at the time, and it wasn’t improvisation,” Wolfe explained. “So out of necessity, we made a space for new chamber music in the very first year.” In his review of that first 1987 event, Holland mentioned that Bang on a Can’s festival was foreseen as an annual event. “One hopes as much,” he offered. “It makes a nice diversion from the constraints of usual concert formats.” Yet the founders weren’t actually looking years ahead at the time: In fact, they called it the First Annual Bang on a Can Festival as a private joke, assuming it would more likely be a one-off event.
Schisms like the uptown-downtown divide that BoaC encountered in 1987 are nothing new in music, or in the arts in general. Gordon recalled a concert by the Guarneri Quartet in Miami in the early 1970s, when he was still a teenager, during
The chamber music world was conservative when Bang on a Can came along. Amplification was unheard of.
which a large contingent of audience members walked out before Lutoslawski’s String Quartet (1964). Gordon was confused about the exodus. His mother explained to him that listeners had assumed they wouldn’t like the piece because it was by a living composer. He found it baffling that people would decide to hate a piece before even hearing it. “And then I still became a composer,” Gordon said, laughing now at the recollection.
“We put pieces together that were really strong and belonged to different ideologies or not to any ideology, defying category, falling between the cracks,” Wolfe wrote of BoaC’s beginnings in the program notes for a 1995 concert, presented by Great Performers at Lincoln Center, of Bang on a Can All-Stars, an amplified ensemble the organization had introduced three years earlier. “We wanted to provide a place for new music in society. It wasn’t like other art. People knew who the new painters were, the writers, the filmmakers. But music was perceived as this really elitist thing—academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible. Nobody cared if people came to the concerts. And the music reflected that. It got so removed from life. It was important to us to find a new audience.” This required a new approach. To build their audience, they bought mailing lists and sent out postcards to people that had proven receptive to contemporary art,
cinema, dance, and literature. It was a successful strategy: More than 400 people showed up for that inaugural event.
Fittingly, for an organization that broke barriers between so-called uptown and downtown communities, the Bang on a Can Marathon migrated all over New York City, performing in large uptown institutions like Lincoln Center and downtown, experimental theaters like La MaMa.
In 2011, nearly a quarter century after the inaugural Bevent, I attended a joyous Marathon at the Winter Garden of Manhattan’s World Financial Center. By then, the event was no longer just about juxtaposing differing aesthetics but more so focused on contrasting moods and emotions. An exuberant marching band called the Asphalt Orchestra snaked through throngs of listeners playing a new work by the Balkan composer and musician Goran Bregović and arrangements of music by Frank Zappa and Björk. This stood in vivid contrast to “Exalted,” an anguished choral work Gordon wrote in honor of his father, based on the first four words of the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead).
APART FROM THE KRONOS Quartet—founded in 1973 with a mission to build out the repertoire for string quartet and to
commission, perform, and record music by composers including 20th century classical masters, jazz legends, and genre-crossing artists such as Laurie Anderson—the chamber music world was conservative when BoaC came along. Amplification was unheard of. From the start, Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe set out to eliminate hierarchies, and to create a format in which composers from varied backgrounds, aesthetics, genres, and ages would receive equal treatment. Famous composers weren’t given better players or more rehearsal time. Amplification was encouraged.
According to the composer Anna Clyne, who studied with Julia Wolfe as a graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music, BoaC “really smashed open boundaries. They’re inclusive of all genres of music, and the fact that the All-Stars is an amplified ensemble immediately opens up new sonorities.” For the composer Annie Gosfield, “Bang on a Can created a very open environment for chamber music at a time when many chamber music groups could be very closed-minded and sometimes even hostile to new music.” Her piece The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory (1995)—inspired by her grandmother’s work in sweatshops in the Lower East Side of Manhattan—includes a cadenza for detuned piano, prepared piano sounds, and electric guitars. Gosfield, who hadn’t
Scenes from Bang on a Can’s 2023 Long Play Festival. Left to right: Ash Fure, Conrad Tao, and Meredith Monk with the BaoC All-Stars.
Photos: Peter Serling
then notated the piece because she always performed it with her own band—wanted to play it at a BoaC marathon. She sent a cassette tape to Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe shortly after composing the piece. They suggested that the All-Stars perform, record, and tour the piece, which they did in 1997. The subsequent publicity led to further commissions from other chamber groups for Gosfield.
According to the composer Missy Mazzoli, “The feeling I had studying composition in college was not always joy. There was a lot of bitterness. With Bang on a Can everything felt like a celebration and that was so attractive at the time.”
The sense of a genuine community spirit also impressed Mazzoli. “Why would composers not help each other?” said Mazzoli. “It’s not fun to be super successful and super lonely at the same time. Supporting an ecosystem is a way of creating opportunities for yourself and your friends. Bang on a Can showed multiple generations of composers that the two are not at odds with each other or even separate from each other.”
The organization not only empowered composers to experiment but offered help with the practicalities of making a living and advancing their careers. Mazzoli, who is currently writing a work for the Metropolitan Opera, credits BoaC with teaching her how to establish an ensemble as a nonprofit and to develop her own skills as an entrepreneur. “They’ve impacted my life on so many different levels,” she said. “I felt like I could see the
steps I needed to take in order get my music out there, be financially stable, and work with other people to create organizations that could sustain not only my career but help the community as well.”
Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe take obvious pride in their efforts to broaden the horizons of young musicians, who “no longer have to choose anymore between being a pop musician or a classical musician,” said Wolfe. “People do both, and their musicianship is very broad. It’s this hybrid musician that is indicative of the chamber world that we’ve developed. Many other younger groups have come along that have been inspired by that.” BoaC indeed set a precedent that encouraged the formation of ensembles and initiatives such as the sextet Eighth Blackbird and the chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound in 1996, the quartet Sō Percussion in 1999, and the independent label New Amsterdam Records in 2008.
The BoaC universe also includes the Cantaloupe Music label, whose website declares “principles of community, artistic diversity, and stylistic freedom,” and the People’s Commissioning Fund. The latter was launched in 1997 to solicit contributions from hundreds of individual donors, which are pooled to commission
Bang on a Can’s founders, faculty, fellows, and staff gather at their 2024 Summer Music Festival at MASS
new works for the All-Stars. (Donors of any amount are invited to a reception with the artists.)
BoaC’s egalitarian ethos extends to their programming decisions, which are taken after Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe consult their four-person office staff and the six-member All Stars band. The Long Play festival—introduced in 2022, after 35 years of Marathons, as the organization’s cornerstone event—was created after one such discussion. The team realized that instead of slotting groups into 15-minute slots at a one-day marathon, they wanted to offer listeners a chance to hear more of a composer’s work and give musicians more time on stage. This idea “set a fire under everyone in our office to do this big, ridiculous and more inclusive thing,” said Lang. “Why keep this community going?” asked Wolfe. “Why bother? We’re always asking ourselves this question so we’re never on automatic. This is only worth doing if you’re staying current, reinventing, and welcoming in more voices.”
The Long Play festival unfolds over three days and takes place at multiple venues. The 2024 festival focused on Steve Reich, and included the All-Stars performing their own arrangement of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The 2025 festival, which will take place May 2-4 at venues in Brooklyn, NY features the world premiere of a piece by Henry Threadgill and celebrates the 90th birthday of Terry Riley with performances by musicians including Pete Townshend, the pioneering rock guitarist behind The Who’s greatest achievements.
“The feeling I had studying composition in college was not always joy…. With Bang on a Can everything felt like a celebration.” —Missy Mazzoli
MoCA.
“Why keep this community going? Why bother? We’re always asking ourselves this question so we’re never on automatic.” —Julia Wolfe
DURING A MID-DECEMBER performance by the All-Stars devoted to Wolfe’s compositions, at National Sawdust, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I sat among an enthusiastic crowd, including young composers who have studied with BoaC’s founders. Her four pieces juxtaposed a range of emotions and styles and included Reeling, her contribution to BoaC’s Field Recordings, an ongoing multimedia project that asks composers to select a recording of a voice, sound, or snippet of melody, and to base a new work upon it. For one past piece “A Wonderful Day,” composer Anna Clyne recorded the voice of a man she heard singing on a Chicago street. Other pieces have used audio samples of John Cage reading his diary, a recording of a NASA Voyager hurtling through space, and, for Lang’s Unused Swan, the sound of people sharpening knives. Wolfe, whose music often draws from folk music, chose a clip of the French-Canadian folk singer Benoit Benoit for Reeling. According to her program note, “He sings a very beautiful kind of music that’s basically the music that you make when you don’t have a fiddler and you don’t have a banjo. You just use your voice. You sing syllables in a sing-song, twirly way.” The piece starts on a genial note, with the band members snapping their fingers before building in energy to achieve a joyous cacophony.
Right before that piece, Wolfe’s Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, which she composed in 2002 as a response to 9/11 attacks, was volatile and gripping. Wolfe and her two small children were just two blocks away when the planes flew into the Twin Towers, she explained from the stage while introducing the piece. “We can all relate to dark and scary now,” she said. The performance conveyed these unsettling emotions, and it offered further illustration of an ongoing effort by BoaC’s founders to explore social and political issues in searching ways meant to spark genuine dialogue between ideas and music. “I think there are a lot of forces which are trying to make everyone feel separate, uncooperative, and suspicious of each other, and to question what commonalities we have,” Lang had told me during our interview. “And I think when you go to a concert, what you’re really seeing is people who’ve come together, and who believe that it’s possible that they can do something together and make something beautiful together. And that is core to democracy.”
During BoaC’s annual three-week summer chamber music festival at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires (nicknamed “Banglewood”), some 40 young international composers and musicians are mentored by and collaborate with established artists, who perform public
concerts together each day. The festival culminates in the LOUD Weekend. The BoaC website describes LOUD (which runs July 31 through Aug 2, 2025) as a “fully loaded, 3-day, eclectic super-mix of minimal, experimental and electronic music.” Reviewing the 2024 edition, Michael Andor Brodeur wrote in The Washington Post that “an air of defiant joy charged every moment, like the black thunderheads that barged over the hills. If there’s a single word to describe this music, it could be one that doubles as a descriptor for the audience: curious.”
Streaming platforms may have enabled listeners to experience ever greater ranges of music. It’s now rare to see an exodus before a performance of a new piece, as Gordon did in his teens, although such works are often still buffeted by a warhorse to appease any reactionary listeners. Bang on a Can has undoubtedly and in novel ways helped ignite listeners’ curiosity over the decades, and has done so via live performances of new music. As Gordon put it, “Our ears collectively, as a society, have changed.”
Vivien Schweitzer is a Jersey City-based writer and pianist. A former New York Times music critic, she is the author of A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2021.”
The dancer Miranda Danusugondo and members of the Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari peform at Bang on a Can’s 2024 LOUD Weekend.
Photo: Stephanie Berger
The Art of Collaboration
Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques and Team Building
This book is an invitation for all who aspire to the highest level of ensemble artistry and wish to work more productively and joyfully within a musical ensemble. The concepts and techniques included help artists find their own unique vocabulary and tools to refine their music making process and learn how as a team to direct their group endeavors. The book offers a systematic approach to individual preparation for rehearsal, score study, planning and implementing a constructive and effective rehearsal, and the interpretive process. The authors address tension and conflict within groups, including strategies for working well together and creating an empathetic and healthy environment for rehearsals and performances.
Features
Demonstrates innovative, proven rehearsal techniques for collaborative and inspired ensemble work developed over the course of a multifaceted career in music performance and teaching
Provides insights and inspiration from over 30 professional chamber musicians
Provides instructions and techniques via both written and video format
Paperback edition features many color images
THE AUTHORS:
Annie Fullard, Violinist Cavani String Quartet, Director of Chamber Music, Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University and The McDuffie Center for Strings, Mercer University
Dorianne Cotter-Lockard , PhD, faculty, Saybrook University February 2025 Paperback 9780197673133 248 pages
$29.99
$20.99 (USD)
Camerata Nordica Octet From Sweden
Premiere N. American tours in '25-26
“Warm, sweeping . . . brilliant . . . full and fleet . . . memorable.” —WASHINGTON POST
“Outstandingly good . . . magnetic. . . the empathy between the players is unique . . . deeply felt mutual intentions and good old fashioned eye contact and body language.” —MUSICAL OPINION, UK
“Absolute purity of intonation . . . [and] that supernatural ‘one-ness’ of interpretive intent that animates the best quartets.” —NEW YORK CONCERT REVIEW
“A superb concert . . . invigorating and deeply satisfying.” —NEW YORK CLASSICAL REVIEW
Repertoire highlights of this half-Mexican ensemble include works by LATIN GRAMMY-nominated Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, and Beo’s own violist, Sean Neukom.
Poulenc Trio
Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Poulenc’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano in 2026!
In their first two decades, the Poulenc Trio has . . .
l Performed hundreds of concerts l Reached thousands of school students l Appeared in 46 States (Alaska, Maine, Montana, Wyoming, we’re coming for you!) l Commissioned 22 new works and numerous arrangements
“Beautifully played . . . effortless lightness and grace.”
—WASHINGTON POST
Special collaborations with Hanzhi Wang, accordion and Shawnette Sulker, soprano
800-923-1973, 510-428-1533 l lsapinkopf@aol.com l www.chambermuse.com
KOPF ARTISTS
Lincoln Trio
2024 LATIN GRAMMY nominee for Best Classical Album
GRAMMY-nominee, Best Small Ensemble Performance
“The playing is sensational.”
—THE STRAD
“[FOUR STARS] Lincoln Trio’s performance is imbued with vitality.”
—BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Fandango!
Four multi-award-winning, globe-trotting virtuosi in a spicy mix of classical, Latin, Spanish, Sephardic and Balkan sounds.
“Exciting and refreshing . . . a nearly sold-out audience . . . gorgeous sounds . . . brilliant execution . . . a captivating performance . . . [a] variety of articulations, colors, and panache.”
—SOUTH FLORIDA CLASSICAL REVIEW
Spanish Brass
“Everyone who heard them was completely blown away and elated . . . They have transformed not only the brass quintet, but indeed the idea of chamber music itself. Over 30 years of playing together they have become one instrument with five players.”
—MERRIE KLAZEK, Professor of Trumpet, University of Victoria, BC
Vida Guitar Quartet
From the UK
“It’s so easy to imagine you’re listening to an entire orchestra . . . exquisite musical instinct . . . There’s only one word for it: Magic.”
—GRAMOPHONE
“Vida conjure up an orchestral palette of colour and effect . . . technical brilliance and precise ensemble.”
—CLASSIC FM MAGAZINE (UK)
The Queen’s Six
A cappella ensemble from Windsor Castle
Featured in People Magazine and on CBS Sunday Morning and Late Night with Stephen Colbert “Barely contained excitement . . . this music is in the blood of these singers.”
—GRAMOPHONE
Italian Saxophone Quartet
“Exquisite . . . spanned the globe and musical styles . . . perfection of style, timing, and showmanship . . . they had us all dancing and frolicking right along with them . . . Bravissimo!”
—SARASOTA HERALD TRIBUNE
“As close to a religious experience as you could get without being in church.” —L.A. OBSERVED
Flute l Guitar l Violin l Cello
Grandfathered In
David Harrington receives CMA’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, celebrating remarkable artistry and a commitment to advancing the boundaries of chamber music through innovation, exploration, and experimentation.
THE ADVENTUROUS APPROACH
of Kronos Quartet, which forever changed how we think about a string quartet, dates to 1973. Back then, violinist David Harrington formed the group after hearing George Crumb’s Black Angels, an innovative, Vietnam War–inspired work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken-word passages, and electronic effects, which the quartet still regularly performs.
Harrington, now 75, cites earlier inspirations, too, including a moment of clarity at age 14 that he recalled for Tom Stewart in The Strad magazine: “I was looking at the globe we had at home, and it dawned on me how weird it was that all the quartets I’d played up until that point—by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—had been written by four white guys of the same religion who all lived in a tiny geographical area. I realized then that I had to find out what music from other cultures sounded like…” Through thousands of concerts, more than 70 recordings, collaborations with composers and performers representing many cultures and styles, and via more than 1,000 commissioned works, Kronos has indeed fostered the vast, diverse chamber music world Harrington envisioned.
On the phone from San Francisco—”in the very chair I rehearse in”—Harrington mentions a young composer working on a piece for Kronos. (“If somebody writes
for us, I find it important to talk with them about life,” he says.) She was a new mother, which led Harrington to mention that he’s a grandfather. “I explained that such life passages don’t make us feel older, but rather take us back to an earlier, and in my case rebellious, energy.”
Harrington has never stopped searching or rebelling. He spent four months last year digging into far-flung archives, as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. He’s planned three ambitious Kronos releases for the first half of 2025, and a March Carnegie Hall concert of music by Norwegian artists Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjøgersen, for which Kronos will play a bespoke set of Hardanger instruments.
Now, he’s immersed in creating Triptych: US at 250 (its working title), slated for premiere in 2026 to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It draws inspiration from Crumb’s Black Angels, which is a triptych, and Hieronymus Bosch’s three-paneled oil painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Harrington’s Triptych will be three pieces “that connect much like the painting’s hinged doors”— a panoramic work focused on the contributions, joys, suffering, sounds, and images of three groups: Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Harrington describes it as a curated piece drawing upon several
composers and a variety of sonic and visual sources (for instance, Charlton Singleton, a South Carolina trumpeter and composer of Gullah descent, will compose the second “panel.”) “It’s the most ambitious thing Kronos has ever taken on,” he says.
These days in Kronos, alongside violinist Gabriela Díaz, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Paul Wiancko, Harrington sits among musicians roughly half his age. “Playing every day with these remarkable musicians, who seem to know more about the history of Kronos and its effect on music than I do, lifts me up and changes my perspective,” he says. “It’s a little like becoming a grandparent in the musical sense.”
Photo: Danica Taylor
Roscoe’s Big Picture
Roscoe Mitchell is the inaugural recipient of CMA’s Executive Award, in recognition of profound impact on the field of chamber music, inspiring others and paving the way for future generations through leadership, mentorship, or creative contributions.
IDON’T WAIT ON ANYBODY TO DO anything for me,” Roscoe Mitchell says over the phone from his home in Madison, Wisconsin.
Such was the sentiment among the Mitchell and his colleagues in Chicago in 1965, when the saxophonist and composer became an inaugural member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organization that is now an engine of inspiration and outreach touching nearly all corners of modern music. Mitchell’s sextet, the first AACM group to record, soon evolved into the Art Ensemble of Chicago, including trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Malachi Favors, saxophonist Jarman and, a bit later, percussionist Famoudou Don Moye. It stands as the most successful and enduring band to emerge from the AACM, and the most consistently daring.
The critic Whitney Balliett once quoted an unidentified AACM member: “If you take all the sounds of all the AACM musicians and put them together, that’s the AACM sound, but I don’t think anyone’s heard that yet.” Yet if any “big bang” announced the AACM’s ethos, it was Mitchell’s 1966 album Sound, which featured standard jazz instrumentation
alongside the pan-cultural sounds of toys, bells, gongs, and an array of “little instruments.”
“We made up our own conclusions about how our destiny would work out,” Mitchell says of those formative days in Chicago, where he grew up. His destiny, at 84, turns out to be a world of seemingly nonstop, self-directed creativity. On 2023’s The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris, recorded in concert, The Art Ensemble is a 19-piece group that still introduces its members onstage to the strains of “Odwalla,” the bluesy theme Mitchell composed a half-century ago.
During our interview, Mitchell had me switch to FaceTime, to show me a painting he’d worked on that morning. This led to a tour of his sunlit studio— dozens of canvasses full of bold, brightly colored motifs. Soon, Mitchell—who once designed a “percussion cage” of instruments from around the world— leads me, virtually, into his basement, which is sort of an underground bespoke gamelan, full of drums, cymbals, and found objects fastened to wood.
“I’ve got a take on everything,” he tells me. Indeed, Mitchell’s severaldozen recordings and more than 250 compositions range from classical to
contemporary, from free improvisation to chamber and early music. His instrumental expertise spans the saxophone and recorder families, from sopranino to bass, and includes flute, piccolo, clarinet, and the transverse flute. Through the decades, he’s formed several ensembles and, during his tenure as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Music Composition at Mills College, he created his own 36-piece chamber orchestra.
The Art Ensemble’s motto is “Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.” Mitchell extends the idea of spanning past and present through all his music, which now includes a steady stream of classical commissions. Case in point, Metropolis Trilogy, which he composed for the combination of flutist Emi Ferguson, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s quartet, and the baroque ensemble Ruckus. The piece will have its premiere at Houston’s DACAMERA on February 14, with a discussion earlier that day at CMA’s annual conference.
“I still am focused on learning,” Mitchell tells me. “Because music never stops and there’s always more to explore. You’ve never going to run out of things to do.”
—Larry Blumenfeld, Editor
Six Awards of Distinction
These 2025 awards highlight the diverse achievements of chamber musicians, presenters, composers, and advocates across the US.
1) ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR: Apollo Chamber Players (Houston, TX)
The work of Houston’s Apollo Chamber Players combines passionate advocacy, worldclass musicianship, and fearless programming. Since its founding in 2008, the ensemble has commissioned more than 60 new works, including collaborations with Jennifer Higdon, Libby Larsen, Pamela Z, Leo Brouwer, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, Vanessa Võ, and Tracy Silverman. This award recognizes the ensemble’s curation of timely and groundbreaking programs that tackle controversial yet critical issues, including censorship, democracy, history, and immigration.
2) INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION OF THE YEAR: Meeting of Minds, presented by Musiqa (Houston, TX)
Through its innovative collaborations and educational programming, Musiqa makes contemporary music accessible and vital to a wide range of audiences. Meeting of Minds, premiered in January 2024, ingeniously combined interdisciplinary performance and neuroscience. The work featured music by Anthony Brandt, choreography by Andy and Dionne Noble, and brain-computer interface technology (worn by the dancers as they perform) by Jose Contreras-Vidal and the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center.
Photos: Lynn Lane (Apollo Chamber Players and Musiqa)
3) COMMISSION/NEW WORK OF THE YEAR: Something Golden by Andrew Yee (New York, NY)
A founding member of the Grammy-winning Attacca Quartet, Andrew Yee is a cellist, composer, and co-founder of ChamberQUEER, an organization that highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary and historical music. Yee’s Something Golden, composed for the Thalea Quartet, is described by that group as “a deep work that explores the gritty parts of our soul.”
4) COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD/PRESENTER OF THE YEAR: William Ransom, Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta (Atlanta, GA)
For more than three decades, Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta has enriched the lives of the greater Atlanta area and cultivated a new generation of chamber music enthusiasts and advocates. Under the helm of artistic director William Ransom, ECMSA has grown into one of the largest chamber music organizations in the Southeast and presents more than 60 concerts, masterclasses, and events each season that are all free to attend. Pictured: Ransom with the Vega Quartet, Emory’s string quartet-inresidence.
5) ARTS ADVOCATE OF THE YEAR: Thomas Rosenberg (Saint Paul, MN)
In his 40-plus-year tenure as artistic director of the Fischoff National Chamber Music Association, Thomas Rosenberg has played an outsize role in the artistic development of generations of chamber musicians. An in-demand educator, performer, and chamber music coach, Rosenberg teaches cello and chamber music at Carleton and MacAlester Colleges and maintains an award-winning pre-college home studio. A nominator writes: “his nurturing of countless ensembles, including those in the junior division, has been an incredible boon for small ensemble growth.”
6) ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Insects and Machines: Quartets of Vivian Fung by Jasper String Quartet (Philadelphia, PA)
Celebrated as one of the preeminent American string quartets of the 21st-century, the Jasper String Quartet is known for its evocative connections between the music of under-represented and living composers with the canonical repertoire. The quartet received CMA’s Cleveland Quartet Award in 2012, and has commissioned more than 20 new works in its nearly 20-year career. Insects and Machines is the quartet’s eighth recording and is the first commercial release of Fung’s first four quartets.
CELEBRATE WITH CMA The 2025 Awards Luncheon and ceremony will take place on Saturday, February 15, during CMA’s National Conference at the InterContinental Houston hotel, in Houston, TX. Tickets for the Awards Luncheon are included with conference registrations for Saturday attendees. Single-day and multi-day conference passes are available at cmaconference.vfairs.com. Tickets will not be available at the door.
Curtis Artist Management represents a select roster of world-class alumni and faculty artists.
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Michelle Cann, piano
Avery Gagliano, piano Ji Su Jung, marimba
Elissa Lee Koljonen, violin
Dover Quartet
Trio Zimbalist
Rosamunde String Quartet
Let Conscience Ring
An ambitious commissioning and presenting project generated not just music, but also empathy and searching questions.
BY Shaun Brady
LAST JUNE, AT PHILADELPHIA’S World Cafe Live, a popular performance venue where drinks and food are served at communal tables, Ursula Rucker revisited the most painful memory of her life. The poet and performer delivered from the stage her account of
her eldest brother being shot and killed on Christmas Eve 1985 in Warminster, a suburb just an hour away, by a Jewish pharmacist who, she declared, “felt threatened by my beautiful Black brother.” It was a story she’d reckoned with before. In her “The Return to Innocence
The poet Ursula Rucker and drummer Tyshawn Sorey during a performance of Generate Music at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia.
Photo: Gregory Rogers
“I saw the connections: the cry of a cantor is the cry of James Brown. It’s the cry of Sidney Bechet’s soprano saxophone, or of John Coltrane or Coleman Hawkins, my great heroes to this day.” —David Krakauer
Lost,” on The Roots’ 1999 album Things Fall Apart, Rucker abstracted her brother, who struggled with addiction, into the character “First Son” for a fatalistic lament over the way that cycles of abuse and addiction can become self-fulfilling prophecies. “It is my belief that from the moment of conception, a human’s life can be pre-determined,” she wrote in the liner notes to that Roots album, and then offered a glimmer of hope not evident in the text she recited on the track: “Some can fight pre-determination.”
Her new poem, “Let us gather and all go together,” arrived midway through the premiere performance at World Cafe
Live (and the following night, at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY) of Generate Music, an ambitious commissioning project created by PRISM Quartet, involving a diverse group of composers, musicians, and poets. Rucker’s piece formed an emotional core of each evening. Shifting the focus from her brother’s tragic story to its ongoing effect on her life, she now framed the shooting as a fork in her road, a moment when she was forced to choose between anger and forgiveness.
“I got to a makeshift place of forgiving,” she wailed, as David Krakauer unfurled short, haunted clarinet trills and the PRISM saxophones traced mournful lines
around one another while bassist Reuben Rogers bowed low, creaking groans. The musicians surrounding her seemed as if howling in sympathy. “That kind of unforgiving type hate / would have surely destroyed me,” Rucker continued, “or had me destroy me.”
CONCEIVED AS AN EXPLORATION of the historic, cultural, and creative ties between Black and Jewish Americans, Generate Music yielded original pieces from its nine commissioned composers, each interpreting a dauntingly complex subject through a lens of personal experience. The project was inspired, during a PRISM tour in Croatia in 2018, by a visit to an exhibition exploring the history of Entartete Musik —“degenerate music,” which is the label the Nazis applied to work that misaligned with their racist and antisemitic ideology. That concept was embodied in the image of “Jonny,” a caricature of a Black saxophonist wearing a Star of David on his lapel, which was prominently displayed at the exhibition.
For PRISM co-founder and director Matthew Levy, such grotesque iconography stirred contrasting memories of his own history, growing up Jewish in the majorityBlack Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown. “The image of ‘Jonny’ conflated Black and Jewish identity and culture and debased them,” Levy said from the Germantown home in which he was raised and to which he has returned to live. “Not to paint an overly utopian picture, but I formed some of the most foundational relationships of my life with my neighbors by understanding and absorbing the culture around me. Seeing this image made me reflect on how beautiful that was, and it resonated so deeply at this time, when antisemitism and racism are skyrocketing.” The recent
David Krakauer
Generate Music live at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, NY.
Photos: Peter Gannushkin
“The image of ‘Jonny’ conflated Black and Jewish identity and culture and debased them.”—Matthew
Levy, in response to the 1938 Nazi propaganda poster above, which inspired PRISM’s project, Generate Music.
rise of white nationalism in the US and a proliferation of anti-Black and antisemitic propaganda online made that 1938 poster seem, to him, horrifyingly contemporary.
To combat legacies of racist and antisemitic tropes and to honor the spirit of his upbringing, as well as celebrate the PRISM Quartet’s 40th anniversary, Levy conceived of creating new music by Black and Jewish composers in opposition to the notion of so-called “degenerate music.” His title, “Generate Music,” seemed an obvious choice. In developing the project,
PRISM partnered with Helen Haynes— who served as chief cultural officer under former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and was a director of exhibitions and programs at the African American Museum in Philadelphia—to curate and help assemble the ensemble Levy rightly calls “a supergroup.” The ensemble augments augments PRISM’s saxophonists—Levy on tenor, Timothy McAllister on soprano, Zachary Shemon on alto, and Taimur Sullivan on baritone— with six instrumentalists and Rucker.
During a panel discussion at Philadelphia’s Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in May, Haynes reflected on the idea of “music as change agent,” pointing in particular to Billie Holiday’s harrowing 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit”—a song about the lynching of Black Americans written and composed by Abel Meeropol, who concealed his Jewish identity with the pseudonym Lewis Allan. “Our heritages have woven in and out of each other over the last few hundred years in this country,” Haynes said. “That song helped to change the awareness of what was going on against the Black body.” It, as well as the new Generate Music works, she said, result from the “interaction of Black and Jewish musicians, writers and artists to express our experience in this country, both politically and socially.”
BLACK AND JEWISH communities in the US have often worked together for common causes, as they did fruitfully in the Civil Rights and Labor movements. Also, Black and Jewish identities have long been inseparable in the minds of those who denigrate them as “others”— they sometimes form a single image, as with Black “Jonny” and his Star of David.
As clarinetist Krakauer pointed out at Temple University during another panel discussion, groups such as the KKK “talk about Jews and Blacks in the same breath.”
Yet the struggles of Blacks and Jews have not always been fought in solidarity. In a 1967 piece for The New York Times published under the headline “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re AntiWhite,” the Black writer, poet, and activist James Baldwin asserted that because African Americans in Harlem dealt directly with Jewish landlords and shopkeepers, their experience of and resentment towards racist treatment from whites focused largely on the Jewish community. More than a halfcentury later, the same newspaper published Michael Eric Dyson’s “Blacks and Jews, Again,” recounting the history of Jewish racism and Black antisemitism in the wake of controversial remarks by rapper Kanye West and basketball star Kyrie Irving. Both pieces were included in a reading list shared among the participants in Generate Music, a resource that fueled discussions as the project took shape. Levy allowed that those conversations were at times tense and divisive, but that ultimately the interactions became fruitful through “dialogue and empathy.”
During one Generate Music panel, violinist and composer Diane Monroe talked about the strife between the two communities in terms of both public tumult and personal disagreement, as she detailed the frictive second movement of her commissioned piece, “Ironies.” She recalled her formative years as a Black woman in Philadelphia’s folk and classical music communities, forging lifelong friendships with Jewish colleagues while engaging in oftenheated debates. “Some were terrible, but we did it and we’re still friends.” Seated
next to Monroe on that panel, trumpeter, vocalist, and composer Susan Watts was blunter, butting her two fists together to illustrate the idea behind her composition “Convergence,” the first part of which is “representative of the screaming match that has gone on between African Americans and Jews in our histories together,” she said. In her program note to her piece, she explained: “To the Jew and to the African American, there are important songs and sentiments that define each culture’s tropes. At times, both cultures may have difficulty hearing each other. My composition works toward bridging that gap with musical reciprocity.”
Both Monroe’s and Watts’ compositions take divided shapes that trace narratives from conflict to understanding. Monroe, who as a child attended both a Baptist church and a Jewish synagogue with her grandparents, layered these two traditions together in “Ironies.” Here, Watts intoned melodies inspired by cantorial song accompanied by Krakauer’s klezmerinspired clarinet passages, all subsumed within drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s vigorous grooves. The PRISM saxophonists played snatches of the hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” and the Spiritual “Let Us Break Bread Together,” while Monroe’s violin traced the theme of another Spiritual, “Didn’t It Rain,” best known from Mahalia Jackson’s rendition. These two musical strains—from Jewish and Black liturgical repertoires—sometimes flowed harmoni-
ously into one another and at other moments grew fragmented; yet eventually the music achieved a funky unity.
In Watts’ piece, the convergence alluded to by its title arrived when she sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as “the Black national anthem,” in Yiddish—translation as a form of empathy. Watts, who represents the fourth generation of a klezmer dynasty dating back to 19th-century Ukraine, depicted conflict through urgent, staccato unison blasts from the ensemble to create a tense, unnerving foundation. These suddenly ceased as Watts raised her trumpet for a stirring doina, a traditional improvised lament played over a drone, which was here provided by Rogers’ arco bass.
COMPOSER YOTAM HABER
who was born in Holland and raised in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and Israel before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin—experienced a very different dynamic between Black and Jewish communities when he arrived in the United States. “I was very dismayed and disappointed,” he said at a panel discussion, “to learn that the brotherhood that I thought that one could just fall into as a Jew is not always there.”
Haber began writing “commotio cordis” in response to those experiences, musing on the similarities and differences in the ways that the Black and Jewish
communities interpret the word “Zion” (which, interestingly, was also the subject of pianist Myra Melford’s collaboration with poet Erica Hunt for Generate Music). He sensed a kinship in the fact that, for both communities, Zion “means going to a place of peace, a place of home.” However, Haber’s focus and the shape of his piece changed on October 7, 2023. He was in Jerusalem with his wife and children on the morning of the Hamas attacks in Israel, and the early days of the devastating war in Gaza that followed. He had intended to spend the remainder of the year teaching there as a Fulbright Fellow. Instead, he rushed his family home to Kansas City, Missouri, and wondered whether to even continue composing in the face of such staggering violence.
Thus, the “commotio cordis” Haber landed upon is, he said, “a work of dissolution and disentanglement,” reflective of his disjointed experiences while working on it. In performance, its first half, penned prior to the attacks, made stunning use of the PRISM saxophonists’ ability to blend their sounds to create shimmering, borealis-like hues over David Gilmore’s pulsing guitar as Rucker read from the hymn “The Old Ship of Zion.” Sorey interrupted with a staggering, lurching rhythm to open the second half. Now, the saxes grew discordant and piercing, the clarinet keening, hinting at uncertainty and even alarm.
David Krakauer’s “The Unknown Common Ancestor,” reflected his early embrace of jazz. Inspired by the jazz legacy of PRISM’s home city (and the site of the premiere), Krakauer dedicated the piece to John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as the lesser-known Jewish bebop drummer Stan Levey, all of whom spent formative years in Philadelphia. During a late May discussion at Temple University, he recalled a “crisis of conscience” in his
PRISM Quartet: Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, Taimur Sullivan, and Matthew Levy.
Photo: Peter Gannushkin
“To the Jew and to the African American, there are important songs and sentiments that define each culture’s tropes. At times, both cultures may have difficulty hearing each other.” —Susan Watts
early 20s when he realized that he was unable to escape his towering influences to find an original voice in a music shaped by mostly Black innovators. That changed when he discovered klezmer music.
“Suddenly I saw the connections: the cry of a cantor is the cry of James Brown. It’s the cry of Sidney Bechet’s soprano saxophone, or of John Coltrane or Coleman Hawkins, my great heroes to this day. Getting deeper into my cultural heritage was how I could find my way into playing creative music.” Krakauer’s work has long delighted in melding influences in irreverent fashion, whether blurring the lines between klezmer, jazz, and folk idioms as a member of the Klezmatics, or mixing klezmer with funk and hip-hop in Abraham Inc., alongside Canadian rapper/producer Socalled and James Brown/P-Funk trombonist Fred Wesley (the latter also wrote a commissioned piece for Generate Music).
While these fusions strive for seamless combinations, with “The Unknown Common Ancestor,” Krakauer delighted
in letting the seams show. His piece began with the composer’s fluttering, swooping clarinet lines set against the PRISM saxophones’ deconstructed funk patterns. Soon, Sorey and Rogers shocked the ensemble into the strident rhythms of klezmer. That shifted quickly enough into a swaggering groove, from which David Gilmore’s blistering, distorted guitar solo erupted. The piece continued to shift back and forth as if a switch kept getting thrown, until, as in Monroe’s piece, the accumulating ensemble swelled to a raucous and unified funk climax.
ON GENERATE MUSIC’S program, the untroubled spirit of Krakauer’s composition was an outlier. Though often joyous, most of these pieces were laced with unsettled or elegiac feelings. “Music is more powerful when played for a memorial service,” Monroe had said during the Weitzman Museum panel. To end each evening, during Fred Wesley’s “Requiem for AJ,” a
rollicking ode in memory of his friend who died young in an automobile accident, Rucker recited an original text. Here, she extended his memorial to also pay homage to James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the three young men—one Black, two Jewish—famously murdered by the Klan while working as civil rights activists in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
“Do you...?” Rucker implored, again and again, beginning a stream of pointed questions meant as challenges, but culminating in a simple “Do you care?” Those three words, emphasized to the point that they seemed to grate her throat, seemed intended to ring in the listeners’ ears long after the concert ended, an afterimage of conscience seared into our hearts.
Shaun Brady is a Philadelphia-based journalist who covers jazz along with an eclectic array of arts, music, and culture. He contributes regularly to The Philadelphia Inquirer, WRTI, and Bandcamp Daily, and his writing has appeared in DownBeat, JazzTimes, and Jazziz magazines, among other publications.
Left to right: David Krakauer, Diane Monroe, Susan Watts, and David Gilmore.
Photo: Gregory Rogers
Empowering musicians and launching careers since 1951 Empowering musicians and launching careers since 1951
ASCAP CONGRATULATES OUR 2025 CHAMBER MUSIC AMERICA AWARD WINNERS
ANDREW YEE
COMMISSION OF THE YEAR
BANG ON A CAN
RICHARD J. BOGOMOLNY NATIONAL SERVICE AWARD
INSECTS AND MACHINES: QUARTETS OF VIVIAN FUNG
ALBUM OF THE YEAR
MUSIQA
INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION OF THE YEAR
ROSCOE MITCHELL
CMA EXECUTIVE AWARD
Trios Togetherness in the Lone Star State
Three jazz stars, born and bred in Houston, reminisce about their hometown.
BY Peter Margasak
Saxophonist Walter Smith III didn’t set out to make a love letter to his Texas roots when he began working on his latest album, three of us are from Houston and Reuben is not. But, as his title implies, three-fourths of his quartet—himself, pianist Jason Moran, and drummer Eric Harland—all got their start in Houston, where they all attended Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA, or more informally, just PVA), a magnet school that claims many jazz stars as alumni. (Bassist Reuben Rogers is the exception, hailing from the Virgin Islands). Houston has long been a hothouse for jazz, from the days of saxophonists Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb to, more recently, pianists Robert Glasper and Helen Sung and drummers Kendrick Scott and Chris Dave. Since moving to New York in the 1990s, both Moran and Harland have grown to be among the most influential and versatile artists in jazz, honing a deep rapport together under leaders including saxophonist Charles Lloyd, with whom they play alongside Rogers. Considering their relentless touring schedules, these three musicians rarely get time to talk together offstage. For this conversation, via Zoom, Moran joined from Chicago while on tour, Smith from his home in Boston, and Harland from London, where he was called away partway through for a soundcheck. They revisited formative memories of their hometown, reflecting on a shared sense of community, especially at their former high school..
Walter Smith III: Jason and Eric—you’re always people that I want to play with, but you’re not always available. I think for everybody, at least for my age group and younger, you guys were the people that we always modeled our stuff after— the two of you and Chris Dave. We wanted anything you played on, anything you talked about; that was what inspired us.
Eric Harland: Really?
Jason Moran: Eric, what did you think when we were in school?
Harland: The community had already started, the musicality and the
friendship. Everybody was evolving and growing. I remember seeing Walter and Kendrick and Glasper, [bassist] Mark Kelley and [guitarist Mike] Moreno, y’all playing at Cezanne, and I was like, “Woo,” you know—just felt like a proud big bro, because y’all was dealing. Me and Jason were up in New York doing our thing by then, but the community never stopped, no matter how far apart we were. You brought up Chris Dave. I remember when Chris left, went up to Howard and started playing in Mint Condition. He always came back and gave me encouragement, like a big brother. We all found a way to
I used to wonder: Well, what was Houston’s sound?
keep each other engaged in the music and to not be slacking on what you’re doing. I think that was a huge thing.
Moran: When we were in school, Eric, I used to wonder: Well, what was Houston’s sound? Because at that time, in the early ’90s, a lot was really about New Orleans, Wynton and Branford, and what they were up to. But in Houston, I didn’t know if we had a sound, you know what I mean? I knew there was a Texas tenor thing, and we knew about Joe Sample and the Crusaders, right? I would say one thing was clear for me is when people who were leaving PVA
Left to right: Eric Harland, Walter Smith III, and Jason Moran.
Photos: Courtesy of Newvelle Records (Harland), Travis Bailey (Smith); courtesy of the artist (Moran)
were not moving to New York. I was like, why? What’s happening? DC is cool. Howard [University] is amazing, and Berklee [College of Music] is cool in Boston. But isn’t New York the reason? I wanted to get to New York. I was scared to go there but once I got there, I realized that the scene, at least at Manhattan School of Music, wasn’t nearly as accomplished as the kids I was playing with at PVA. What did Outkast say on the Source Awards? “The South got something to say.” Cats from Houston were about to come up here and say some stuff on the stage. I just couldn’t wait for cats to come up to the city. It felt like we were ready. And the teachers we had, like “Doc” Morgan [HSPVA’s director of jazz studies from 1976-99]! He was a great band director because he invited great musicians to come talk to us. Eric, remember when we played for McCoy Tyner, and what that felt like?
Harland: Yes, sir!
Moran: Walter, who came through when you were at PVA?
Smith: Roy Hargrove came, and Kenny Barron came, and Mark Whitfield…
Harland: I had Milt Hinton; yeah, that was great.
Moran: Billy Harper came. Dizzy Gillespie came. Barry Harris came. Marcus Roberts came. Billy Cobham, Ellis Marsalis. It seemed like almost once a month there were cats in the school.
Harland: Wynton, man, he did the master class. We played for him. All I was doing was playing the ride cymbal during the whole master class. But he didn’t want much more except to swing. That just kind of opened the door. He was like, “Man, I want you to hang out with me for the day.” I had to call my parents and be like, “Well, Marsalis wants me to hang
out with the sextet.” I just remember [drummer] Herlin [Riley], because Wynton straight-up introduced me to him, and said, “Man, you gotta check this kid out.” And Herlin was like, “Oh yeah,” with the toothpick in this mouth. He pulled out a phone book, he pulled out some brushes, and he was like, “Aight, show me what you got.” I was like, brushes? Wait, I need sticks! He gave me a whole brush lesson just right there, backstage. Wynton wrote me a great recommendation, which got me into Manhattan School of Music, along with the audition. But like you said, “Doc” Morgan, having the vision for those people to be able to come through to the school, was a great influence. It not only introduced us to them but built relationships going forward. I can call Branford or Wynton anytime. I couldn’t imagine that when we were at PVA.
I had an uncle who everybody knows, Leo Polk. He ran a session at this club. It wasn’t really like a jazz session, it was just kind of his own thing. I was too young to get in but because he was my uncle, I was able to play there.
I also grew up in the church. Me, Mark Simmons, Chris Dave... A lot of the drummers that you hear from Houston, we had the whole gospel music thing. We played for the Gospel Music Workshop of America with James Cleveland. That started a whole other tradition within gospel drumming that just wasn’t there
before. So, there were a lot of influences on both sides, and we were able to bring that more into the jazz community, even though we didn’t know as much about jazz then. But we knew about church— how to play in church, how to listen to a choir and follow the choir director, from the drum perspective.
Smith: Yeah, I played a lot of church gigs, all on soprano. My dad was a saxophone player from New Orleans. He went to Southern University and studied with Kidd Jordan. When he moved to Houston he became a band director, and he would take me around to see people. I went to see Leo Polk, and I used to get in there and play with him. My saxophone teacher was a guy named Conrad Johnson who had a legendary stage band at Kashmere High School in Houston. I used to study with him every week. My favorite saxophone player in town was David Caceres and from an early age, anytime I would find out he was playing somewhere, my parents would take me to see him play. Nobody could drive, so our parents had to take us. When we started driving, interestingly enough, we went to less shows but bought more CDs, and we would go to each other’s houses and listen to stuff.
Mike Moreno had a thousand CDs, and we were trying to borrow stuff and listen to all of it. When Eric and Jason would come back to Houston, we
A lot of the drummers that you hear from Houston, we had the whole gospel music thing. That started a whole other tradition within gospel drumming that just wasn’t there before.
became obsessed with trying to find out who was playing in New York that wasn’t famous. We started buying any Criss Cross record we could find, just looking at all the names on them and trying to figure out who these people were. In Houston, we had so many cats that were playing around town, like [drummer] Sebastian Whittaker and the Creators. Getting called to sub in bands with some of these guys and getting to meet them and play with them—for me, it felt like these are the best musicians in the world, because all this other stuff was very abstract to me.
Moran: I’m glad you bring those names up, especially Conrad Johnson. Those Kashmere Stage Band records are now worth hundreds of dollars, they’re collector’s items. My dad had them, and I remember listening to those in high school. I was like, “God damn! They sound like a professional funk band in the ’70s, but it’s a high school crew.” Conrad Johnson had a Summer Jazz Workshop,
which was a thing I remember doing when I was in eighth and ninth grade. When I got to PVA as a 10th grader, I didn’t even know what chords were. I felt like the students were the ones that pushed me.
It was important to be playing out in the city, because the city wouldn’t ask for your abstract music all the time. They may want a little bit more funk on it, or they may want a little bit more backbeat, a little bit more gospel, a little more blues. Walter, you said this thing about looking for people who weren’t necessarily famous. I think that kind of became a Houston thing, that it didn’t need to be in the center. It could flirt with the edge a bit more, and not in a crazy way. I didn’t play in church. Every Monday kids would talk about all the stuff that happened at church on Mondays. My church was so boring— boring music with a boring sermon—so I didn’t really have that experience that Eric and Walter have been talking about.
Smith: The fact that Eric played in church brought a certain aesthetic to it—sound, energy, all that kind of stuff—and the same with piano players. It’s not that they’re bringing a gospel thing, it’s just how they play, right? It’s the same when you hear a saxophone player that checked out Charlie Parker. We can say that they play a certain style but really, it’s just part of how they hear music.
Moran: If I pull back for a second, the school pushed us into the professional world really fast. They sent us out into the city playing shows. When I was there, we made a record in the studio, and we were asked to represent. You couldn’t act a fool out there playing these shows across the city because you were being paid like you’re a professional band. It meant you had to dress a certain way, you had to know certain songs, and you had to not act foolish in between sets. Most of my friends who were making money playing music in high school were making it in church. But
Left to right: Eric Harland, Reuben Rogers, Walter Smith III, and Jason Moran
I think because we all had to leave the city, we knew that the scene could get stronger if we shared it rather than if we feel like we’re trying to dominate it. Maybe that’s also part of the Houston thing.
then we started making that money playing the music we played. That was confirming something. It meant that there was always an audience, but it wasn’t necessarily happening in the jazz club. It could have been a reception at the VA, or a bus company was having a morning reception, and you were there at 8 a.m. playing some jazz for an hour and a half. That meant that there was an economy around the music, and for me that was important to understand. It also gave us a sense of agency as kids who didn’t necessarily have summer jobs. And it said that you could earn a living playing music.
When I got to New York. I couldn’t really get gigs because I was still trying to practice. When Eric arrived, it was clear that he was on a whole other level. Eric was the first one to really break all the way through. He started playing with McCoy [Tyner], he started playing with [saxophonist] Greg Osby, he started making records, he started having thousands of dollars in his dorm room. He was working, and he sounded great, and people heard it right off the bat. That was kind of inspiring.
Smith: I was remembering the whole experience of being in combo and doing those gigs, and how you say it prepared us for the professional thing. Doc would come in and give us these sheets. They would list the venue, what was expected as far as the music, how many sets, and
he would talk to us about all the details. He would teach us how to build a set, which is something I still fight against now. I went to Boston for school and when I got there, I already knew all this stuff that other people playing gigs didn’t. All these details that were just professionalism, pieces of the equation that we got being in high school in Houston, in addition to making the money, which was crucial at that time.
Moran: There are kids still doing it right now in Houston. It’s a big part of how the school keeps its reputation.
Smith: We’re talking about music, but all the arts were represented there. My best friends were in the visual art department. The only art I knew would be the Mona Lisa or something. To see people doing the same thing you’re doing with music, creating new stuff but in a visual form, or in dance or theater... people writing plays. Even if someone didn’t continue with the arts for a career, during that time everybody was engaged with the arts. A bunch of artists in a small school, it was a very cool community to be around.
Moran: And that continues today. While we were at the [Village] Vanguard [jazz club in New York City], I can’t tell you how many people I didn’t know came up to me and said, “Yeah, we went to PVA!” It’s a wide umbrella that you become a part of. I remember my first day at
HSPVA. I was like, “Who are these weird motherfuckers here? I don’t know about these kids.” And then I became one of those kids. What about you, Walter?
Smith: The first person I met was Kendrick [Scott] at the ice cream social. We were just both looking in the window at the jazz room, getting to meet people and know them. I learned a lot about differences in how people are brought up and how people lived, getting to know people that aren’t just like you— broadening my horizons in terms of people and what they were into, how they lived. It was an eye-opening experience for me.
Moran: At my previous high school, I didn’t feel like people were free to be. Houston is a very traditional city— racism is traditional in Houston, not integrating is traditional in Houston, and they want to keep that stuff intact— so to walk into a school like PVA, where all that was blurred, that felt different from Houston as a city. I think that’s what you’re speaking to, Walter. I was so thankful to have years to work in the school, and to be in that neighborhood all the time, so that you could get over the crazy things that maybe your parents or your family might be saying about people. This is where the world is, and especially where the creative world is. We have to wrestle with these things. When I say it felt weird to me, it was just because it was culture shock in the best way. People should feel culture shock more frequently.
Smith: Everybody in Houston knew each other through the summer jazz workshop you touched on earlier, and all the best musicians in town also had teaching gigs. That still continues, to this day. Going back to Houston to play the DACAMERA series, every now I’ll make it
over to the new HSPVA building, which is downtown, and get to talk to students there. You always hear about these guys—they go to New York, or they go to Boston. A name will be in your in your ear, and then you meet them at the Blue Note or somewhere, and then you know that they’ve arrived, and you look out for them if you can.
Moran: That last part you said—we look out for one another. When you called us for this record—which is always an extreme honor—it reminded me that, if you went back through my records—my Fats Waller record, for instance—you’d see that the musicians on there, Lisa E. Harris and Leron Thomas, went to PVA. You would see that we’re always tying each other into our work to make sure that the community is keeping in touch with one another and trying to enable the future of it, too. I think because we all had to leave the city, we knew that the scene could get stronger if we shared it rather than if we feel like we’re trying to dominate it. Maybe that’s also part of the Houston thing. For us, going from Houston to New York is a very long way and if you go that far, you’re going to need a community with you. You cannot do this stuff alone, and the music itself is so broad that you want people who at least know where you’re coming from—so you know what my slang is, and then we can play that way together. You’ve got to exhibit that you still want to play with people after 35 years of knowing them. I’ve known Eric since I was 14. It means a lot, and when people came to the Vanguard to hear us play, they’re like, “Yo man, y’all like a family up there.”
Just to point further back, we’re so thankful for a group like the Crusaders and for Joe Sample, who had such an attitude at the piano. And then going back to that tenor stuff with Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb, and all this Texas sound that came out of Houston. Parts of that were said but never shouted to us; we felt it within, you know what I mean? When I talk to Rob [Glasper], it feels like the same thing as when I talk to James [Francies] Helen Sung. I always say it’s in the slang for us, and it’s subtle. And I always want to acknowledge Milt Larkin and Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins, and that rich, rich, music scene that comes from Houston. There’s one gripe I have, about Austin proclaiming itself to be the music capital. Are you kidding me? And it’s very Texan for them to say that.
Smith: Well, I’d give it to Dallas before Austin.
Peter Margasak is a Berlin-based music journalist who spent more than two decades as a staff writer at the Chicago Reader. He’s currently at work on a book about the intersection of jazz, experimental, and rock music in Chicago between 1992-2002.
FRY
BRANFORD MARSALIS, TIMOTHY MCALLISTER & LIZ AMES
DALÍ QUARTET
WEISS KAPLAN STUMPF TRIO
JASON VIEAUX & JULIEN LABRO
JASON VIEAUX & TIMOTHY MCALLISTER
MARK KAPLAN & DAVID KAPLAN
JASON VIEAUX & YOLANDA KONDONASSIS
FRY STREET QUARTET
STREET QUARTET WITH TOBY APPEL
COLIN CARR
Three books explore how the music was made, taught, and received, as distilled through personal lives.
BY Eugene Holley, Jr.
Echoes of Jazz, at Home and Abroad
AS AN EXPORTED ART FORM, jazz has found particularly welcoming homes in Paris, Tokyo, and London. A strong jazz presence has existed in South Africa for decades, too, yet that story is more complicated.
One important strand of that tale, focusing on an educational imperative and its surrounding political truths, is told in Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and On the Road (University of Illinois Press), by Darius Brubeck, a pianist, educator, and the eldest of Dave Brubeck’s five sons, and his wife Catherine, who, while studying at the University of Natal in Durban, organized concerts, conferences, and classes for the university’s Centre for Jazz and Popular Music, which Darius directed. Their book chronicles an
American couple’s sometimes harrowing and sometimes heroic efforts to establish a university-level jazz curriculum in an African country then under apartheid rule. It is an insider’s view of the development of jazz in South Africa and throughout the continent, addressing race, politics, and the healing power of music, while documenting the ambassadorial efforts of an American musician who has made his famous father proud.
In 1960, Dave Brubeck famously canceled a tour of the American South after presenters asked him to replace his bassist, Eugene Wright, who was Black, with a white musician. Inspired by both his father’s pioneering stance during the Civil Rights Movements as well as his artistic brilliance, Darius grew up immersed in both social justice activism and swinging grooves. His own abiding interest in South Africa began in 1976, when he performed in Johannesburg with his father. Darius grew most fascinated by impassioned and embattled jazz musicians struggling to make a living, in contrast to the few—such as Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim—who became international superstars. In 1983, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Natal and invited to create a jazz studies program offering the first degree of its kind on the continent.
For Darius, who lived in South Africa for two decades and now resides in London, what started as a two-year commitment became “almost a quarter century of improvisation”—not the musical sense, but
The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America
BY Larry Tye MARINER BOOKS
Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool
BY James Kaplan
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and On the Road
BY Darius Brubeck and Catherine Brubeck UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
rather the administrative savvy required to overcome a lack of funds, curriculum, and supplies. Beyond such practical challenges, the Brubecks dealt with the horrors of apartheid, mostly from the safe confines of an ivory tower. Nevertheless, the couple was subject to police harassment, as well as Afrikaner hostility toward the mixedrace ensembles the Brubecks put together (which echoed the very controversy his father had faced in the US).
As often happens in such situations, music spoke louder than words. The democratic nature of jazz improvisation is poison to a political philosophy based on the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of Black inferiority. As comes alive in these pages, jazz’s democratizing nature was manifest in the racially mixed ensembles Darius led, including the Jazzanians, the Afro Cool Concept, and the Nu Jazz Connection. “We had come to South Africa to be on the left side, politically speaking,” Catherine Brubeck writes. “These were the days of international boycotts, but also the early days of exiles preparing for change. Many of these people told us that the time had come for transforming institutions from within. Jazz, after all, was on the side of the struggle...”
In addition to helping provide a stirring soundtrack to apartheid’s eventual demise and to Nelson Mandela’s rise from prisoner to president, their efforts helped seed a new generation of jazz players and educators in Africa. “The special charm for us is that the music came from people we met when they were young students, who are now successful artists, raising successful children, touring the world, getting jobs at other universities, and bringing their expertise into schools in their own communities,” Darius wrote. “I am proud of what we did. With no master plan, we pursued special goals and made a contribution.”
AS AMERICAN JAZZ HELPED usher South Africa into an imperfect democratic union in the late 20th century, the status of jazz musicians and their art form in the United States—particularly how African-American originators of the music went from being perceived as musical illiterates, drug hustlers, and jive cats to pioneering artists and cultural leaders—got radically transformed. This change forms the thesis of The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America (Mariner Books) by Larry Tye.
A biographer and researcher whose previous books dealt with subjects as diverse as the Pullman Porters, Bobby Kennedy, Satchel Paige, and Superman, Tye knows how to illuminate a historical figure’s path of development, and he has the skills to bring their individual natures to life. This book’s three main characters are musicians with distinct sonic signatures that are forever engraved in the book of jazz: Duke Ellington, the DC-born pianist, composer, and bandleader, who drew from a “Black, brown, and beige” palette of musicians to create over 2,000 aural
Duke Ellington in Hollywood, 1930
Photo: National Museum of American History Archives Center, Frank Driggs Collection
portraits of what it means to be human; Louis Armstrong, the poor waif from New Orleans who became the first major jazz soloist, the first true jazz singer, and arguably the music’s first real ambassador; and Count Basie, the Jersey boy who went west to Kansas City and founded the most swinging big band in the world.
Tye’s book will appeal more to general readers than to the jazz scholars and erudite fans familiar with, say, Albert Murray’s Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, Harvey G. Cohen’s Duke Ellington’s America, or Gary Giddins’ Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. “I tried to make a strength out of being a newcomer to music history,” Tye writes, “filling in my gaps by tracking down and talking to 250 of my subjects’ aging bandmates and friends, relatives, and biographers.” Tye’s succinct biographical chapters on Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie gather foundational information about their respective upbringings and musical influences. He portrays each musician’s musical contributions with tidbits about their personal lives. Ellington, who wrote beautiful and sensitive songs about women, was a voracious womanizer. Basie, who came of age musically in the rough-and-tumble Kansas City of the 1930s, had a long-standing gambling problem. And Armstrong, who grew up in the slums of New Orleans, pioneered new versions of jazz expression despite his lack of formal training.
Naturally, major works like Ellington’s hit “Take the “A” Train” (composed by Billy Strayhorn), Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” and Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” are highlighted, not so much in strict musicological terms, but rather to build a case for these works as artistic ammunition in the battle against racism and Jim Crow. Tye describes how Ellington’s 1943
Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie were all armed with the improvisational imperative and democratizing implication at the heart of jazz, much in the same way that, later, jazz would help melt apartheid’s iron curtain in South Africa.
opus “Black, Brown and Beige,” “spanned the gamut of the Black experience—from slavery through emancipation, segregation, and increasing integration.” In Tye’s view, Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie were all armed with the improvisational imperative and democratizing implication at the heart of jazz, which helped slowly bend the moral arc of our American civilization toward justice, much in the same way that, later, jazz would help melt apartheid’s iron curtain in South Africa. “Each defied and ultimately overcame racial boundaries not by waging war over every slight, which would have accomplished little in that Jim Crow era,” Tye writes, “but by opening America’s ears and souls to the magnificence of their melodies.”
IF TYE’S BOOK TRACES THE separate lives of jazz heroes on their way to immortality, James Kaplan’s Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (Penguin Random House), follows the interwoven paths that led three towering jazz figures—trumpeter Miles Davis, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, and pianist Bill Evans—into a New York recording studio in the Spring of 1959 to create Kind of Blue, Davis’s masterpiece for which he also recruited alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb.
Kaplan, whose previous books include biographies of Frank Sinatra and Irving Berlin, essentially weaves together three small biographies here, describing how musicians from different musical and cultural spheres were drawn together to
craft an enduring work of art: Davis, the temperamental trumpeter who often played with his back to the audience; Coltrane, the solemn saxophonist whose later innovations forever changed jazz; and pianist Evans, whose love of Ravel and Debussy lent his music hypnotic power. Kaplan explores how their collaboration led to new conceptions of beauty in jazz as well as how the ugly underside of their respective dealings with racism and drug addiction affected their lives during that time. Kaplan doesn’t shy away from musicology, and shares some worthy observations about Davis’s innovations, often through interviews with musicians. (Yet Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece should be consulted for a more detailed musicological reading of that recording).
Kaplan rightly points out that Kind of Blue was one of a handful of deeply influential recordings recorded or released in 1959, including Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah Um. Yet even within that context, Kind of Blue has stood out for both jazz aficionados and casual fans. Kaplan’s book—part biography and part social history of a bygone age—doesn’t tell us anything revelatory about this timeless work, but it forms a thoroughly accessible testament to the music’s power.
Eugene Holley, Jr. has written for Publishers Weekly, Hot House, and Humanities magazines. His byline has also appeared in The Village Voice, Wax Poetics, and The New York Times He’s contributed to the books Writing Music: A Bedford Spotlight Reader and Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story
From Karim Al-Zand’s
String Quartet no. 4: Strange Machines
(2022)
For two violins, viola, and cello
Strange Machines was made possible with support from the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Mellon Foundation.
Afew years ago, composer Karim Al-Zand stumbled upon an online, AI-powered “Doodle,” hosted by Google, that encouraged users to compose a two-measure melody, and which made a tantalizing claim: “With the press of a button, the Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature style.” The software, Google explained, “was trained on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations.”
For Al-Zand, who has been on the faculty of The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University since 2000, and who teaches a class devoted to Bach chorales, the offer seemed irresistible. He’d been thinking about AI and ChatGPT, and the relationship between such technologies and musical language. He tried out Google’s Bach Doodle. Soon, he was bringing the results of this experiment into class to demonstrate “just how wrong it was,” he said, in that it successfully modeled elements of Bach’s approach without any of its musicality or balance. Instead, it created “a concatenation of phrases that might independently seem plausible,” he said, “but in combination made no musical sense.”
Still, he kept thinking about how technology could be applied to the music he loved and that he wrote, but with sensitivity and sophistication. There has to be a better machine, he thought. When the members of the Balourdet Quartet—all of
whom had studied with him as graduate students at Rice—approached him about a commissioned piece, he decided to set his imagination loose on this question. His “Strange Machines” imagines three quirky musical automata through three connected pieces. The first one, “Alberti Machine,” named for the lefthand accompaniment common in 18th-century keyboard music, proposes “a steam-punk music box,” according to Al-Zand, “its buttons, levers, and dials adjusting a familiar accompanimental pattern in ways that are at first clear and then gradually more complex, until the machine breaks.” The third one, “Mannheim Machine,” is “a cliché-bot, an unhinged device that furiously spits out distorted musical tropes from the dawn of the symphony.”
In between, his “Goldberg Machine,” the first four pages of which are shown here, conflates both Bach’s Goldberg Variations, as elemental a musical composition as the classical canon knows, with the beloved machines dreamed up by cartoonist Rube Goldberg, which turned ordinary tasks into gloriously complicated, chain-reaction operations. This piece “careens precipitously from one Bach variation to another in a musical chain reaction,” Al-Zand explains, “taking advantage of the Balourdet’s capability for tight ensemble work that turns on a dime.” Like Rube Goldberg’s contraptions, which ultimately perform tasks as simple as pouring coffee or buttering bread, here the final measures simply quote the first lines of Bach’s opening theme.
“Strange Machines” is the title piece of the Balourdet Quartet’s next recording. The quartet will perform the piece within the Fischoff Gala at The Shepherd School of Music during CMA’s annual conference, held this year in Houston, TX.
Photo: Dereth Phillips
2. GOLDBERG MACHINE
Capricious*; tempo and mood are volatile, constantly changeable = 112 grand and imposing
= 120 light and playful
* Most of the frequent changes of character and tempo in this movement—usually indicated with double barlines—are sudden and immediate, like ipping a switch.
Violin I
Violin II
Viola
Cello
Angela Answers
Have a question about how to move forward in your professional or creative life? Email angelaanswers@chambermusicamerica.org.
Finding Yourself in the Story
Dear Angela: This time of year, I’m usually excited to take on new projects. But with all that’s going on in the world, I’ve lost nearly all my motivation. How can I get it back?
LET’S FIND OUT. FIRST, I SUGGEST YOU take a break from the news and all social media. Take a few days to regroup. And in that pause, expand your perspective—think beyond this season and the immediate years ahead so you can…
Tune into a larger truth
To reframe how we experience challenging times, let’s turn to narrative. Here’s an ancient creation myth, most often attributed to the people of the Lakota Sioux nation, that speaks to the present moment:
Deep in an undiscovered cave, an old woman sits weaving a marvelous tapestry. She’s weaving the world using pine needles and porcupine quills which she flattens between her teeth. She works tirelessly—and only leaves the weaving to occasionally stir what simmers over the fire at the back of the cave: a stew made of all the necessary seeds.
As the old woman slowly makes her way to the back of the cave to stir the cauldron, her black dog sniffs at the precious weaving. Biting at a loose thread, the dog pulls and pulls at it, unraveling everything.
When the old woman returns to her work, she finds what the dog has done. For a moment, she just stares at the tangled chaos of colors, the scattered threads and quills. As she takes all this in, she starts to see new possibilities. She envisions a new design for the tapestry—a design more wondrous than ever before. Bending over, she plucks up one of the loosened threads, and with it, begins to weave the world anew.
BY Angela Myles Beeching
As the story goes, if the tapestry were ever completed, it would mean the end of all existence. So everything depends on the old woman’s weaving, on her stirring the seeds that sustain life, and on the dog that unravels it all, again and again.
Life is cyclical: it is creation and destruction—alternating forever.
That’s the larger story, and within it is your own
We are all in a collective dark time now, and we each have a crucial role to play in the reweaving of the world. How will you proceed? It’s your choice.
In folk tales, the dark times happen when the main character finds themself in an impossible situation. Somehow, they must find a way to transform it. And they always do.
Think of the unsung heroes who came before you—who made the life you live possible. They, too, faced dark times. Yet they put their beliefs into action and planted the seeds for a better tomorrow. And because they did not give up on you and the future, you must not either. You owe it to those who came before you and those who will come after.
In this brave new year, you get to choose the role you’ll play in the larger story: victim, survivor, or resilient citizen-artist.
Angela Myles Beeching is a career consultant and the author of Beyond Talent: Creating a Successful Career in Music. Angela works with individuals, ensembles, and organizations to facilitate positive change.
Composers, Hanging Around End Note
Miller Theatre’s celebrated Composer Portraits series puts its very idea on display.
BY Akhira Montague
IN THE SPRING OF 2024, MELISSA
Smey, executive director of the Miller Theatre program at Columbia University, and Shannon Ebner, chairperson of photography at Pratt Institute, reached out to me with the idea of curating an exhibition of photographs from the theatre’s Composer Portraits series. For 25 years, this innovative series has served as an incubator for emerging composers and musicians, often championing unknown or overlooked artists while simultaneously building a community of adventurous listeners.
My assignment was to install these images in the lobby of the theatre, where these evening-length immersions in each composer’s works and ideas are held. Built in 1924 as McMillin Academic Theatre, the place was extensively renovated and established as Miller Theatre, Columbia University’s performing arts producer, in 1988. My challenge was to reflect the diversity of artistic spirits behind this
vital presenting initiative while honoring the space’s rich history—and to do so without puncturing the walls or disturbing the architectural details.
As with the musical series, which includes public interviews, the exhibition focused squarely on the magnificent composers that Melissa works with in close collaboration. The image of composer Du Yun, shot by Matt Zugale at Columbia’s Butler Library, is one of my favorites. This portrait is striking, just like her compositions. All vantage points here lead to Du Yun. Her golden scarf twinkles, reflecting the lights above that she looks up toward and which form a series of halos. Even though I’ve never been a student at Columbia, Melissa explained to me that this library is
among the most popular spots on campus for students to gather and to study.
Jessie Montgomery’s portrait, also taken on the Columbia University campus, speaks to the mechanics of the camera as well as to one fascinating aspect of Montgomery’s music—a separation of foreground and background that builds contrast and enhances both perspectives. Here, photographer Rob Davidson achieved that effect by adjusting the aperture while maintaining a good amount of light exposure, creating a portrait that showcases an artist both blending into and standing out in this city.
Du Yun
Photo: Matt Zugale
You can find Morten Wanvik’s image of composer Øyvind Torvund on a wall I curated to include only portraits taken outdoors; it hangs alongside other portraits featuring aspects of nature. To me, this shot of Øyvind looks mystical and mysterious, with the muted light peeking through blurred trees to frame his body. The portrait greatly reminded me of The Exotica Album, released in 2019, on which he includes sounds of waves, birds, wind, and other elements of nature.
The portrait of Miguel Zenón was taken on Columbia’s upper campus, looking north to West 120th Street. Rob Davidson composed the portrait with Miguel’s face slanted away from the camera as a play on the angles of the architecture. The architectural elements in this portrait remind me of a 1928 woodcut print made by James Lesesne Wells, titled Looking Upward, of a man in the middle of towering buildings. Wells was an influential professor and artist during the Harlem Renaissance, when much of the music that influences Miguel’s compositions was created.
Akhira Montague was born and raised in New Jersey. Montague’s practice revolves around dissecting the moving image as both an object and an idea. She layers printed material, video, ink, paper, and wall space to demonstrate that life extends beyond our current experiences.
Miguel Zenón
Øyvind Torvund
Jessie Montgomery
Photos: Rob Davidson (Montgomery, Zenón); Morten Wanvik (Torvund)
2025 CHAMBER MUSIC COMPETITION
2025 CHAMBER MUSIC COMPETITION
2025 CHAMBER MUSIC COMPETITION
December 8 - 9, 2025
December 8 - 9, 2025
New
PRIZE
PRIZE
$15,000
$15,000 New York City Commissioned Work New York City Recital
City
APPLY
APPLY BY Oct 15, 2025
PREVIOUS WINNERS
PREVIOUS WINNERS
PREVIOUS WINNERS
American String Quartet
American String Quartet
American String Quartet
Brentano Quartet
Brentano Quartet
Brentano Quartet
Eighth Blackbird
Eighth Blackbird
Eighth Blackbird
Emerson Quartet
Emerson Quartet
Emerson Quartet
Empire Brass Quintet
Empire Brass Quintet
Empire Brass Quintet
Eroica Trio
Eroica Trio
Eroica Trio
Merz Trio
Merz Trio
Merz Trio
Pacifica Quartet Telegraph Quartet
Pacifica Quartet
Pacifica Quartet Telegraph Quartet
Telegraph Quartet
FUTURE NAUMBURG EVENTS
FUTURE NAUMBURG EVENTS
FUTURE NAUMBURG EVENTS
Naumburg at MSM
Naumburg at MSM
Naumburg at SFCM
Naumburg at SFCM
Naumburg Looks Back
Naumburg Looks Back
Charles Neidich & Carol Wincenc
Naumburg
Charles Neidich & Carol Wincenc
Feb 2, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Feb
Greenfield Hall, MSM
Feb 2, 2025 at 2:00 PM Greenfield Hall, MSM
Naumburg
Jonathan Swensen, Cello Award 24
Jonathan Swensen, Cello Award 24
Feb 5, 2025 at 7:30 PM (PT)
Feb 5, 2025 at 7:30 PM (PT)
Feb
San Francisco Conservatory
San Francisco Conservatory
Naumburg
The Telegraph Quartet
The Telegraph Quartet
Apr 17, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Apr 17, 2025 at 7:30 PM
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall
The San Francisco Cello recital is generously underwritten by Mr. Sin-Tung Chiu, in honor of his parents Bella and P.P. Chiu
The San Francisco Cello recital is generously underwritten by Mr. Sin-Tung Chiu, in honor of his parents Bella and P.P. Chiu
In 2026, Naumburg will celebrate 100 years as the longest continous classical music competition.
In 2026, Naumburg will celebrate 100 years as the longest continous classical music competition.
About Naumburg
Formed and
Chamber Music
In 1971, the Naumburg Foundation instituted an ongoing chamber music competition. Since that time, 41 chamber music groups have won the award, and over 40 new chamber works have been commissioned.
Recordings
Recorded commissions, chamber groups and solo winners are available on our YouTube Channel. View at www.naumburg.org
