The Mitchell-Ruff Duo

To jazz musicians who are well aware that there exists an underground history of the music they love, the names or Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff have great significance.  No fanfare accompanies the all-too-infrequent release of their recordings, no “pick-hit” blurb shows up in People magazine or Downbeat, no major label promoters line up to court them for some honour.  Pianist Mitchell and bassist/French horn player Ruff exist in a kind of timeless limbo, suspended between between the wonderkinder of jazz and the brand-names that make up 99% of the JVC Jazz Festival.

David Arner: In a Category of One

A commanding technique and orchestral palette

But the players know, and that includes everyone from Miles David to Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington to Count Basie, and at least a handful of Woodstockers.  First among the local players is David Arner, whose commanding technique and orchestral palette place him in a category of one when it comes to pianism.  A long time student of Dwike Mitchell’s, I thought I’d let Arner speak about his mentor.

Praise for Dwike Mitchell

“Well, Dwike is the quiet genius in jazz,” says Arner.  “For five years or so, I soaked it up from him- the profound rhythms and absolutely kaleidoscopic harmonies!  The harmonies will astound you, but the rhythm is really unique.  That’s why Dizzy went out of his way to do concerts and a few recordings with Mitchell-Ruff.  The rhythms are rhythms of elation, of unbounded joy, and you can hear it so well without any drums in the mix.”

Yes, the harmony will astound you.  It will astound you this Saturday, July 10th [1993], when Music in the Mountains presents the Dwike Mitchell-Willie Ruff Duo in a double bill at SUNY New Paltz, a children’s concert in the afternoon and a regular gig in the evening.

And it astounded me over 20 years ago when I caught Dwike Mitchell solo at the Carlyle Hotel in New York…

Joe Giardullo, Woodstock Times (NY), July 8 1993

Framing the Gestures

David Arner in Concert

Venue:  Performing Arts Center (Rhinebeck, NY)

December 26, 2003 – On the day after Christmas (how appropriate the date),  David Arner gave a solo performance at the Performing Arts Center in Rhinebeck, NY.

The spry, tall, thin, angular pianist walked on stage, bowed, sat on the bench in front of a baby grand piano and looked at the keyboard in thought. One hand playing two notes later began the setting of a framework for what Arner dubs a spontaneous composition.

The first piece established his focus: span, interval, and a unity of functioning of both hands.  Arner generated his music from the extent which the keyboard would allow.  He found the center and moved to the outskirts and back again.  He utilized small, delicate, single note movements, and grander, larger, wider chordal plants to fulfill the balance of variation.  His penchant for repeated phrases alternating with repeated single notes that climb out of phrases and clusters of notes is a signature component to Arner’s playing.  It is Arner’s mode of accenting to the point of making an accent a pure isolated element in the improvisation that catapults his compositions above any of those of its kind (of which I know).  The accents become a major factor in the construction of the music.  Their repetition serve as both the technical hinge from one set of movements to the next AND the content.

The variations which he created were based on a steadfast set of givens, recognizable in hindsight once a piece has concluded, but, if recognized during the piece, could indicate a pattern of growth.  Each spontaneous composition could be mapped out graphically.  The patterned aspect of his performance thrust it into an arena of description that had more to do with classical format than not, yet, more to do with improvisation than classical format.  The significance is that Arner is expanding the world that was established when Earle Brown said in effect that improvisation allows his classical compositions to evolve and become richer than if he premeditated his music with measures.

Arner performed one of the works from his solo recording.  COSMOS uses the piano as a percussive instrument.  He utilized mallet tools to play the strings of the piano in the sounding board.  It was thrilling to see the instrument from within make sound without the movement of keys and hammers; to see resonance controlled by an invisible pedal resulting from the up and down motion of the row of felts.  Arner alternated the use of the keys with the use of the mallets.  His touch was delicate and purposeful, intended for drawing an atmosphere and breaking it apart.  His touch caused the sound to pulsate like groups of binary stars and whir like intergalactic dust winds.

So Much Is Said

How refreshing this music is for the academic world as well for the world of the improvisers.  The music brings the two stylistic temperaments soberly together in a way that it can only be heard as itself.  So much is said with so few pitches.  So much is said with the distance between one pitch and another.  So much is said with silence as is with sound.  So much is said with a minimal number of gestures, pushed and pushed and pushed until their effect is maximal.  Totally.  Instrumentally.  Without question.

Concert Review by: Lyn Horton

View Lyn Horton’s review on jazzreview.com

 

Extraordinarily Rich

CD Title: Live from the Center

Exercising both the inside and outside of the piano means that you are dealing with the entire instrument.  It means that you are dealing with all of the piano’s dynamics.  And discovering what is possible within the realm of possibilities which you know, as a musician, you cannot possibly exhaust.

David Arner’s piano vocabulary in his new solo recording is extraordinarily rich.  He has augmented his musical vocabulary with this one instrument volumetrically.

His sense of the piano is extremely acute.  He knows the piano’s relationship to how the sound will rise out of it.  The key to the relationship is the attack he will choose: planting his fingers on the keys, using his fingers to pluck the strings on the sounding board, holding a mallet to bounce on the strings.  Then, comes the music.  How the notes are put together, how the phases become sensible, and how pushing the envelope on repetitions of phrases imbues great power in a sonorous atmosphere to build its omnipresence and incessant tempo.  This atmosphere is juxtaposed to quietude, and equally present are runs and trills, silence and deeply felt and internally driven accents and sustenutos and dampening resonance.  The music is in a perfect balance.

Arner’s playing has characteristics that qualify as signature. There are times when he executes his music as if it were played on a piano roll.  It is really quite amazing.  He can manufacture brilliant continuity with the left hand which simultaneously is countered by a right-handed series of separated single, double, triple notes.  Then the two hands switch roles and the continuity evolves in another way. Just as intense as the multiplicitous ranges of note and phrase series could be a repeated, very evenly timed single note cadenza.  Arner’s choice of how to combine the tonal with the percussive gives substance to the origin of both, which is the same.

Arner approaches his improvisations with exquisite conception.  The rapidity and clarity with which his pieces precisely unfold are remarkable.  It is with certainty that I feel that his idea of time corresponds with its passage.  It is as if he doesn’t want to let one increment of time pass unnoticed, undocumented, unused.  In this way, he is bearing witness to time in its penultimate form.  For the process of improvisation is, in itself, a means to document time.  It is a means for the mind, emotion and universal view to blend into an unfettered, irrevocable, inimitable sound force.  The ramifications of that marriage are completely absorbing and a lesson in how vast is the capacity of this pianist to create exciting, energized and unforgettable music.

Arner steps beyond the academic.  It is that step which takes him into musical zones that not only require rapt attention but also render rapt attention an automatic response to the music.

Reviewed by: Lyn Horton 2005

Improvised & Otherwise Festival 2005

Choreographer Susan Osberg’s Workwith Company

As the ultra gentrification of Manhattan continues, “downtown” artists have responded with an amoeboid exodus into the hinterlands of Queens and Brooklyn, where lower overhead expenses enable venues to support avant experimentation.  The Improvised and Otherwise festival, an outgrowth of this burgeoning “across-town” scene, is fast becoming an important forum for the continuing “researches” of these sonic scientists and their visual-kinetic collaborators.

The festival’s forth annual edition opened Thursday night [May 5th, 2005] with HorseEyeless, a dipsomaniacally dancing duo accompanied by percussion and electronics.  Mary Halvorson (guitar) and Jessica Pavone (viola) followed with a musical dialogue that alternated pointillistic exchanges with sustained, soothing sonorities wandering in and out of tonality. In the next piece, Estelle Woodward’s statuesque sensuality provided a kinesthetic counterpoint to John Hughes’ intimate “dance” with his bass, concluding in a poignant moment when the improvisors made I-contact…

Ubiquitous Gestures & Found Object

The Susan Osberg Workwith Dancers Company performed Ubiquitous Gestures & Found Object featuring five dancer-narrators and the emphatic yet empathetic piano of David Arner…

Blue Collar, including downtown mainstays Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion), Steve Swell (trombone) and Nate Wooley (trumpet) concluded Friday’s festivities with a strong set. Swell played disassembled horn parts, Wooley experimented with multiphonic textures through simultaneous singing and blowing, while Nakatani expressed himself with Japanese “singing bowls” and dramatic body-English…

[Saturday] evening ended with a powerful set by Ken Filiano & Collected Stories, a dynamic group cross-fertilizing European free music sensibilities with In a Silent Way-era Miles Davis; compelling solos, a houserockin’ solo from trombonist Steve Swell, frenetic “fiddling” from cellist Tomas Ulrich, and Jackson Krall’s cookin’ drum gumbo brought the festival’s final night to a satisfying closure.

As it continues to build momentum and expand its aesthetic scope, I&O remains a reflection and extension of its communal roots: a melting pot-pourri of improvisational artistry.

Thomas Greenland,  Signal to Noise,  Fall 2005

WAMC-FM on David Arner

“David Arner has done what many have thought undoable.

He has welded the formalism of a commanding technique to the wildness of Jazz and the seductiveness of creativity.  The result is

a musical ménage a-trois, that holds and transports listeners through the incredible maze of his seemingly unflagging imagination.”

Paul Elisha,  Host of Performance Place,  WAMC-FM,  Northeast Public Radio,  January 2003

October Festival of Words and Music

One of the Valley’s most consistently inventive and stimulating musical improvisors.

Whether glissading over the keyboard or wailing on the balafon, David Arner is one of the Valley’s most consistently inventive and stimulating musical improvisors.  This Saturday, October 16th [1993], he’ll be joined by Futu Futu’s Joakim Lartey and instrument designer Steve Silverman for an all-percussion concert at the Artist’s Co-op, 60 Broadway, Tivoli, at 8:30 p.m. Drums, bells, cymbals, kalimbas, and one-of-a-kind percussive devices will make for a most irresistible gig– the penultimate performance in the Co-op’s October Festival of Words and Music, which Arner and friends organized.

Mikhail Horowitz,  Woodstock Times (NY),  October 14, 1993

Downtown Music Gallery Review of Out/In the Open

One of this year’s best piano trio offerings.

Featuring David Arner on his 1968 Steinway L piano,

Michael Bisio on contrabass and Jay Rosen on drums.  I hadn’t heard of pianist David Arner before four discs of his recently arrived at DMG, one on CIMP, two self-produced and this one. While the CIMP CD is based on the music of “Porgy & Bess”, this disc is mostly spontaneously improvised with one piece by Mr. Arner and one standard. “Double Nature” is a sublime, dreamy piece that starts slowly and builds to a grand conclusion. I am not sure how often this trio has played together but there is a most magical connection between each member“Swirl” is an aptly titled piece which flows superbly like the wind whipping slowly through the branches of a tree on a fine fall day.  Michael Bisio remains amongst the best of the crop of current bassists that I’ve been lucky enough to hear locally on numerous occasions.  Michael’s  solo on “Swirl” and overall playing throughout this disc is consistently stunning and often angelic.  I would imagine that the third piece is dedicated to him as it is called “Mr. MB”, his playing on this piece sublime and inspired.  Another integral part of this trio is the ubiquitous Jay Rosen who mallet work on this piece is quite special.  Mr. Arner’s one original work is called “Intensities” and it is indeed quietly intense.  Arner’s playing on this piece is harp-like and especially haunting as if it has drifted in from a familiar dream.  Commencing with Rogers & Hart’s “My Romance”, the trio brings this disc to close with a lovely, soothing and exquisite ballad. A most fitting conclusion to a most enchanting disc. Each of the six pieces on this wonderful disc seems complete and like a work unto itself.  I look forward to hearing the CIMP CD as this CD is one of this year’s best piano trio offerings.

– Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery, September 2009