Fort Worth, 6.29.2024

To cap a live music-rich week, we headed to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to catch Sounds Modern's Surreal Rhythms: music to celebrate Surrealism and Us. (The exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists Since 1940 will run through July 28. We'll have to come back on a Friday, when gallery admission is free, to check it out.) Of the eleven musicians performing, it was notable that seven were players we've seen at experimental and improv performances in Denton and Dallas. Inspired by the fusion of European and Afro-Caribbean elements in the exhibition, Sounds Modern director-flautist Elizabeth McNutt chose three pieces that take adventuresome approaches to tonality and rhythm. 

Puerto Rican born Angelica Negron is a recent composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, and her Quimbombo -- named for a stewed okra dish that enslaved Africans brought to Puerto Rico -- is built around a rhythmic pattern from bomba, an African-based dance style. Played by a quartet of Patrick Overturf on percussion, Mia Detwiler on violin, Kourtney Newton on cello, and McNutt on flute, it employs the melodic instruments in a percussive manner, and has the performers use their voices to mimic the vocal gestures of bomba dancers. At times, the effect they achieved reminded me of a percussion-heavy piece from Henry Threadgill's Too Much Sugar for a Dime. Particularly striking was a unison passage by McNutt and Overturf (on vibraphone), which Newton accompanied by beating time on the face of her cello -- something we've also seen her do in improvising contexts.

Next up was A Tres Voces, composed by 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner, Cuban born Tania Leon, and played by a string trio of Detwiler, Newton, and violist Mike Capone. It was thrilling to hear the blended textures of the three bowed strings -- sometimes churning, sometimes singing -- and some virtuosic passages from Detwiler, and to see Newton using her thumb to play some wide-interval double stops 

Julius Eastman's Stay On It is a piece with an interesting history. The composer, a gay Black New Yorker and a familiar of Terry Riley and Frederick Rzewski, once told an audience that its genesis came from a desire to "[bring] the beat into the concert hall," and indeed, Stay On It is propelled by a Cuban son clave rhythm. Eastman's original score -- which, according to a 2015 article by Matthew Mendez, was "piecemeal and highly approximate" -- was lost and had to be reconstructed from a 1973 recording and conversations with musicians who originally performed it. Part of the composer's intent was to draw from the spontaneity of improvising traditions. The work is minimalist, but not mechanical. 

Sounds Modern's version is based on analysis of the original recording and a video of a live performance, as well as Cornelius Dufallo and Chris MacIntyre's reconstructed score, and Mendez's article -- an admirable feat of musical archaeology. At the Modern today, it was played by the full ensemble of eleven musicians, with Andrew May's violin and Matthew Frerck and Kory Reeder's double basses joining Detwiler, Capone, and Newton's strings, Mel Mobley joining Overturf on percussion, Stephen Lucas's piano, Sarah Ruth Alexander's voice, and McNutt's flute.

Stay On It began with Lucas playing a simple ostinato, which Overturf picked up on vibraphone and the other instruments gradually joined in, adding variations which almost imperceptibly began to drift metrically before a series of breaks, morphing and changing until May briefly conducted to pull the ensemble back together. The process was repeated several times, with a different musician conducting each time (Alexander's "STOP...in the name of love" was an amusing variation). Then the ensemble settled into a two-chord vamp, over which Alexander sang the text from a poem Eastman wrote to accompany the piece. Lucas played an unaccompanied coda, joined at the end by Overturf on tambourine. Like Jacques Tati's Playtime, Stay On It is a wide-screen event, filled with multiple ongoing events that can feel overwhelming at times, with the omnipresent clave beat to keep things moving.

This free concert series has been one of the best-kept secrets in Fort Worth, but attendance at today's performance indicated that maybe the word is getting out. You can watch video of the concert here.