Dallas, 2.27.2022

Introducing the last night of the Nasher Sculpture Center's "Sculpting Sound: Twelve Musicians Encounter Bertoia," Nasher director Jeremy Strick remarked that another title for the series -- six successive nights of duets between musicians performing on their regular instruments and interacting with Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures -- might have been "Proof of Concept." Strick was referring to Bertoia's hope, expressed to an interviewer for the Archives of American Art, that serious musicians might one day use his creations to "explore some possibilities to express their personality."

That idea was brilliantly realized when pianists Kris Davis and Craig Taborn took the floor at Nasher Hall, a Steinway baby grand surrounded by 40 of Bertoia's "tonals." The two have been collaborating since 2016, touring and recording under the rubric Octopus, but this was far from a typical duo performance for them. From the moment they entered the space, both musicians were mobile and active, engaging with the Bertoias more completely than the other duos I witnessed, demonstrating the range of sounds residing in each of the pieces. Both are familiar with prepared piano, and they treated the Steinway as another found object, albeit one with great expressive potential they could access.

Davis and Taborn utilized a number of objects inside the piano: metal objects that looked like chess pieces (magnets?), a pair of eBows (reminding me of the time Paul Quigg showed me I could use one to activate a kalimba Terry Horn had made using the tines of a garden rake), strips of duct tape, the beaters that were provided for use with the Bertoias. Although I don't believe either is a trained percussionist, the pair (Taborn in particular) used sticks and beaters very effectively. They were also the first musicians I saw or heard of this week using the wet sponges provided to create friction-generated sounds from the large gongs.

The musicians' movement provided visual evidence of their thought process and communication, and the way they created musical form in the moment. Once they realized that the suspended "singing bars" didn't contact each other as soon as they were activated, they changed their method of handling them. Something Taborn played on piano sent Davis rushing to the gongs to respond, while something he played on the gongs sent her with haste to the piano to play a rumbling response from the bass notes. At one point Davis circled the area rapidly, activating all of the Bertoias and eliciting a crescendo from Taborn. (This effect became a theme that was repeated later in the performance.) A rhythmic figure Davis played with beaters inspired a driving ostinato from Taborn.

At the piano, the two were alternately ruminative, lyrical, and visceral, with moments of dissonance and wide intervallic leaps that invoked the spirit of Cecil Taylor. There was excitement in their performance, but not the stagey, showboating kind. It was the thrill of watching a high level of spontaneous creation take place in real time -- emblematic of this week at the Nasher, and of Octopus, whom we look forward to hearing perform a totally different set of material tonight at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

FTW/Dallas, 2.25.2022

What a difference a couple of icy days make. Watching the ongoing drama of Russia's invasion of Ukraine unfold, including the brave response of the Ukrainian people and Russian protesters, President Biden and NATO allies applying sanctions while US Republicans jeer. All my digital devices have been wonky, so I'm sitting out the last couple of days before the Texas primary, but still heading to Dallas tonight on hopefully ice free roads for the "acoustic strings" night of the Nasher Sculpture Center's "Sculpting Sound: Twelve Musicians Encounter Bertoia."

My buddy Mike Webber caught the trumpet and saxophone nights and while, from his report, it sounds as though the wind players' interaction with Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures was more reserved than Nels Cline's, he was particularly taken with saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and JD Allen doing a call-and-response walk-on and exiting the same way. Also the way they held the bells of their horns near the sculptures to activate them, keeping the "tonals" ringing throughout the performance. Transportation delays kept some of the musicians in town longer than planned, causing producer David Breskin to quip that "by the end of the week, we could do a Bertoia Big Band concert."

Flight drama was the cause of tonight's delayed start. Jen Shyu and Brandon Seabrook arrived late and came directly from the airport to the Nasher. This meant that they had only a cursory introduction to the Bertoias, but it didn't detract from their performance, which had an aura of ritual and ceremony, with an emphasis on small gestures and ample use of silence and space. 

Shyu is a mesmerizing performer, with remarkable vocal control. She moved about as though exploring the area and discovering the sounds that resided in each artifact she encountered. Seabrook approached the Bertoias in a more rhythmic manner, except for a gong that he spent a few moments exploring tonally, and provided more tonal relief with intervals of his highly idiosyncratic banjo playing that included staccato picking, rapid-fire runs, and the use of a violin bow. But it was Shyu who set the tone for the evening. At one point she lifted her gayageum, a Korean zither, and carried it to where she could play it while holding it upright and activating one of the Bertoias. When she set it down, I feared it might have been damaged, but after the performance ended in silent stillness, like the end of a walking meditation, the musicians were all smiles, and our hearts were lifted.

The drummers Marcus Gilmore and Dan Weiss were in the audience, taking notes for the following night's performance. We're looking forward to two nights with the pianists Kris Davis and Craig Taborn -- Sunday at the Nasher, then Monday in our zip code at Fort Worth's Modern Art Museum. Grateful to have these experiences in troubled times.

Dallas, 2.22.2022

Took off from making phone calls for the Dems to celebrate this palindrome week and ambigram day with a visit to the Nasher Sculpture Center for the first night of "Sculpting Sound: Twelve Musicians Encounter Bertoia" (which I wrote about for the Nasher's magazine), in which, on six succeeding nights, duos of world class musos interact with Harry Bertoia's sounding sculptures. 

My sculptor buddy Mark and I arrived early to receive a tour of the Bertoia exhibit, which encompasses monotype prints, jewelry, furniture, and larger metal pieces as well as the "tonals." It's an imposing body of work, showing the influence of nature and industry, perhaps undervalued because of its ubiquity in domestic spaces (his famous chair) as well as public ones (over 50 commissions from architects for large pieces) in the mid-20th century.

Producer David Breskin told me it took three days to prepare the Nasher Hall space for the performance, which required wall treatments to deaden the sound for six nights of live recording, using hanging microphones like the ones Bertoia employed to record concerts of his sounding pieces in his "Sonambient barn" -- basically a big sounding chamber. The sound in Nasher Hall was drier than Bertoia's barn, which was probably necessary to capture the sounds of the added instruments (in tonight's case, Nels Cline and Ben Monder's electric guitars). It was notable to me that the decay of the sound from the pieces was faster than I expected after hearing Bertoia's recordings; probably a function of the room sound.

The performance was total wish fulfillment. After two years of pandemic, it was kind of overwhelming to sit in the middle of maybe a hundred people -- all masked without complaint, thank Ceiling Cat -- involved in energy exchange with the players. Cline and Monder had only had today to interact with the sculptures (although Cline had been aware of Bertoia's work since the '70s) before incorporating them into their performance. (One is reminded of Don Cherry's European group incorporating gamelan instruments into their 1968 appearance at the Berlin Jazz Days with little or no preparation.)

I loved the way the players seemed to cue off each other, rhythmically and dynamically, while extemporizing. I have long believed that if you take people who understand how musical composition works and give them tools or materials with which they are unfamiliar, they'll make music. These men surely did. Monder's orchestral way of playing -- lots of dark chords with moving voices, fast runs played with an overlay of effects that muted his pick attack and transformed the sound into Something Entahrly Other -- provided a nice contrast to Cline's array of extended techniques and mastery of effects. For me, though, the best part of the performance was Cline's manipulation of the Bertoias. He came to make a big noise, and the physicality of his interaction with the pieces -- stalking the space and attacking them with vigor -- was stunning.

I'll be back at the Nasher later in the week for acoustic instruments (Jen Shyu and Brandon Seabrook) and pianos (Kris Davis and Craig Taborn, who'll then visit Fort Worth's Modern Art Museum with a different program of material). After famine, feast. Now to see if I can get my ailing laptop repaired.