What a privilege to
hear Anthony Davis play two sets of solo piano at the Western Front last night.
His performance—a return to Vancouver after thirty years—also marked the
release of past - piano - present, an
LP anthology of audio recordings from the Western Front’s archive featuring
tracks by Anthony Davis, Paul Plimley, Al Neil and John Kameel Farah.
In her sleeve notes,
pianist Dana Reason notes how, in his 1985 performance of “Behind the Rock,”
Davis’s “ease mobilizing and maximizing the piano . . . suggests a careful
study of Duke Ellington’s rich orchestral tradition.” Not that Davis’s playing
sounds studied or academic; his aesthetic – his performance style and his
method – seems to offer an idiosyncratic mix of (what
George Lewis has called) Eurological and Afrological sensibilities,
blurring composition and improvisation, chamber music and blues, Olivier
Messiaen and James P. Johnson, recital and gig, to generate a vital, kinetic
music of layered possibilities. He played two sets lasting almost an hour each.
The first set opened with a piece built from variations on cascading intervals,
which Davis later identified as fragments
from his compositionWayang No. IV.
The second piece, which Davis did not identify, spun magisterially through components
of what felt like a 32-bar song, unpacking and reassembling melody with a
recognizably Ellingtonian grandeur. The third piece was a version of “Ankle and
Wrist” from his
1997 operaAmistad; built on
shards of a blues motif, the music surged in swathes gathered and propelled by
Davis’s powerful sustain pedal, while his strong left hand offered up lines
recalling Sir Roland Hanna
or Earl Hines.
Davis’s touch is fierce and firm, but he also has a keen capacity for
tenderness, as the concluding piece of the first set, a gently deconstructed
jazz waltz, suggested. The second set opened with what he called his “Goddess Variations,”
improvisations developed around the “orchestral material” from the aria“They come as if
from the heavens (Goddess of the Waters),” also from Amistad. He followed with an extended
wordless version of “Five Moods from an English Garden,” a work he described
composing when he found himself stranded in Munich – after touring with
violinist Leroy Jenkins – sleeping on a studio floor; on a snowy May morning,
he said, he walked through the city’s English Gardens –
listening to birdcalls – and into an exhibit of Wassily Kandinsky paintings –
“moods” – at a gallery there. The composition draws on
these two palettes to create a vivid tone poem. The closing piece from the
second set involved a return to Wayang
No. IV, extending Davis’s exploration of the material in intense overlaid
chords to produce what felt like kinetic densities, a powerfully mobile aural weave.
As an encore for an enthusiastic, deeply
engaged audience, Davis played a remarkable meditative version of “Monk’s Mood,” a suitably
elegant and resonant conclusion to a brilliant concert.
Last night at the
Western Front, Ches Smith’s trio (with
him on drum kit and vibraphone, Mat Maneri on electrified
viola, and Craig Taborn on piano)
offered two sets of provocative, engrossing and powerful music drawn from The Bell, their recent
album issued by ECM. Each set consisted of extended suites of Smith’s
compositions; his writing practice sounds to me typically to involve a logic of
serial disjunction, assembling each piece from layered rhythmic and melodic
cells—emerging in the recording as fractal loops, insistent frittered ostinato,
reminiscent at times of Steve Reich’s music for percussion—conjoined in
distinct, contrasting sections. In performance, those assemblages—close to coruscating,
unfixed fragments of wordless art songs—link up, often with turn-on-a-dime jump
cuts, to produce a compelling admixture of meditative resonance and hard-driving,
impactful disturbance. The music feels both openly improvisational and
exactingly through-composed, as it moves from the intimate lyricism of chamber-jazz
to—I’m not exaggerating—bone-shaking heavy-metal thrash. The first set emerged
as a single suite, gradually ramping, like “I Think” and “Wacken Open Air” do
on the recording, toward a propulsive, drum-driven wall of sound; the recording
itself is quieter, with the drums mixed down a little, while in performance
Ches Smith will build a thunderous and gleeful abandon. (I don’t know which
compositions were played in which set, although I think they began with “The
Bell”; they may have played extended version of the album tracks in order,
since the second set—which featured two more compact suites instead of
one—closed with “For Days,” the final cut on the recording.) Craig Taborn’s
lines concentrated principally on repeated motifs, either locked chords or looped
shards of melody, but he also provided an insistence, a fierceness, that
introduced a provocative and—if this is the right word—actively contemplative
energy into the potential stasis or fixity in such unwavering recurrence to
push the sound forward. Gilles
Deleuze names a philosophical version of this practice, simply, the
imagination: “The role of the imagination, or the mind which contemplates in
its multiple and fragmented states, is to draw something new from repetition,
to draw difference from it. . . .Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition
which was deployed and conserved for us in the space of repetition, there was
difference, . . . the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition” (Difference and Repetition 76). Mat
Maneri’s contributions on viola either established electronically-enhanced bass
drones, or, more frequently, negotiated the interstices of upper-register tonality,
pulling at the spaces between notes, microtonally fraying and re-stitching
phrases. All told, it was a truly powerful gig, the trio collectively laying
down a spate of compelling trajectories through variegated tensions and
multiplicities: overlapping lines that attend on, that sound, I’d say, the
“barely intervallic” collisions and differences inherent in present-tense
collaboration, to grant an audience moments of shared, unsettled, and
imaginatively rich listening.
