Deep LIsterning Space

Going Where the Love Is

Deep Listening Space (Kingston, NY)

Attending this first concert of 2006 was an easy choice for me to make.  It was the very idea of the duo performance of David Arner on piano and Michael Bisio on string bass that took me the distance from where I write here to where I could hear them.  And the music transcended the miles I traveled.

Arner chooses his musical syntax from an encyclopedic knowledge of the capacity of the keyboard.  Bisio rewards the listener with a soft and dedicated approach to the bass strings. Every sound that the two make is simple.  It is in the interaction that those same sounds can promote a blended complexity.  It is in the interaction of an orientation to detail, which is paramount to Arner’s precise address to his instrument, with Bisio’s tender and broad strokes that can paint a complete musical picture.  A wedding of opposites.

The concert took place in an informal setting in the Hudson Valley.  As the music was about to begin, Arner was poised over the sounding board of a grand piano.  Bisio stood in the space shaped by the curve of the piano, his fingers ready to engage the strings at the neck of the bass.

The sound commenced.  It spread out invisibly in small, quiet motion.  Both players were plucking and tapping their own strings in a conversation with one another, cementing the space as the groundwork for the upcoming dynamic.  The two carefully picked where they intersected.  It was like foreplay before they thrust their coherence and persistence and dove into the place where the vibrations of the strings merged, ringing and full.

Arner moved his fingers to the keyboard as Bisio charted out a dreamy, beautiful melody.  A quickly captivating rhythmic content crossed through the terrifically stringent and abstracted sound constructions and eventually took over.  The power of the rhythm was not inconsistent with the endlessly repeated cascades of notes on the piano complemented by slow grooves on the bass, thumbed and plucked over the strings.

The drive and climb to the next configuration of time was all that mattered.  To be so ensconced in the activity at hand was all that mattered.  The poetry of the musician’s becoming one with the instrumental interplay was all that mattered.

Chordal shifts in the piano aligned with snaps of the strings on the bass.  The bass notes were squeezed and pushed and eventually met the bow.  The piano music transformed into a drone for a while.  Bisio bowed adamant, large, classical gestures which were pitted against exquisitely small detailed ones on the piano.  Arner’s fingers evoked grandeur with a tact completely different from that of Bisio.  They both produced resonating tones unparalleled for the rest of night.  The potency of the resonance overcame anything that could follow.  The sound seemed electronic; the two instruments had reached the same tonal arena: as the sound became larger, so was influenced its largeness.  The sound surrounded itself.  No drama: only indeterminate determinacy.  Arner flickered with his little finger in the treble seeming to signal the sight of the end of this road.  Bisio applied force on his bow, vibrating one string after the other.  Arner came back to center with careful placement of his fingers and his foot on the pedal.  The pitch on the bass ascended.  Bisio scraped a high finishing note.

After an arresting statement of virtuosity, calmness bathed the audience.  The musicians took a deep breath.

Arner introduced the next piece with a tuneful basis.  From there, with the rhythm an underlying constant, he worked to map out his process.  Bisio entered slowly with a relaxed pizzicato.  Midst the lacey pianistic structure made of chords, trills and atonal clusters, Bisio strummed, played staccato and snapped the bass strings.  Then Arner stamped out double-handed marching phrases permitting himself to charge into a group of changes that seesawed between chords and fluid swirls and landed into a set of phases.  Bisio spread himself to correspond sweepingly with the rapidity with which Arner traveled dryly and then coloristically over the piano.  With one finger wagging over the strings constantly, Bisio fell into a nearly Spanish guitar type fluttering’he was echoing Arner’s playfulness.  The musicians were consumed in the rhythm that had developed.  And once again, a groove overwhelmed the gathering of the senses.  The music was joyous.  Each player spoke to one another unremittingly.  The atmosphere the music expired was one of captivation and immersion.  Bisio grunted with the pulse.  Arner repeated one series of tumbling notes after the other.  The bass exuded tightness, yet that tightness was paradoxically supple and elastic.

After passing through a hiatus or two, in relation to Arner’s gradual slowing of pace in the treble, Bisio played with the edge of his bow, instead of its width, to pull away from depth of the sonority for a bit.  Then he applied the bow’s broadside again to submerge into rich, embracing tones.  Bisio rounded out the sharpness of Arner’s retracing of thematic phrasing.  A deconstruction of the tune ended the second piece.

The last piece of the set began with a Bisio solo.  His bow moved to me and away from me.  The series of tones he played interlocked into a velvet fabric of energy so smooth that the distance between the bowing and the coincidental fingering was undetectable.  His large strokes mapped a seemingly endless journey to a distinct melodic line in which a low to high pitch movement introduced a synchronicity with the piano as it returned to the soundscape.  Bisio goes nowhere except where he is at any one point.  How he stretches the boundaries of his instrument is through his state of aural mind.  How that transfer matches with Arner’s pianistic intelligence is one reason the musicians could so easily converge.  Even in the silence, even in the blossoming of “Angel Eyes”, I had the jitters.  I counted the pulse the whole time.

Someone once wrote that music has to have meaning and, further, that music meaning itself is nonsensical.  I disagree.  Music may have meaning and music that means itself is music that is being explored for how its form can become its content.  Music that means itself is music that has been crafted and honed to the quintessence that each individual musician can identify. The quintessence arises out of a strange simultaneity of involvement and detachment.  At this concert was manifested that quintessence, times two.

Lyn Horton, January 12, 2006

Deep Listening Convergence

3 Days of Performances at the Lifebridge Sanctuary June 8-10 2007

Lifebridge Sanctuary, Rosendale NY
Sunday June 10 2007
3:00pm
Deep Listening Convergence at
Lifebridge Sanctuary
333 Mountain Rd.
Rosendale NY
(845) 338-6418

New works and collaborations with David Arner, Monique Buzzarte, Renko Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Susie Ibarra, Scott Gresham-Lancaster, Vonn New, Kristen Nordival, Roberto Rodriquez, Katharina von Rutte, Gayle Young.

Including David Arner’s
“Abstract Songs of Birds for Harpsichord, Accordion & Percussion”
With David Arner (harpsichord), Pauline Oliveros (accordion) & Susie Ibarra (percussion)

This is David Arner’s premier performance on the Harpsichord

Arner is also performing in compositions by Roberto Rodriquez and Scott Gresham-Lancaster

Arner continues musical journey with new CD

A Supremely Gifted Pianist

Review of  “Live from the Center”

The Hudson Valley music community is certainly lucky to have David Arner.  Besides being a supremely gifted pianist the Port Ewen resident and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute jazz history professor has also been the curator of Kingston’s vital weekly New Vanguard series of creative improvised music for the past few years.  In its current home at the city’s Gallery at Deep Listening Space, the series’ performances boast some of the leading local, national and international artists of the free jazz/avant-garde world.  Outside of Manhattan, few cities have anything close to the surprising showcase of innovative music Arner presents like clockwork every Thursday night.  It’s an evening of high musical adventure.

Of course, many listeners don’t want adventure.  They want something they find easy to hum along to when they’re working out or staining the deck.  Fair enough.  We all love our comfort food, be it classical or classic rock.  But sometimes it just feels great to through away the roadmap, to use a side of the brain we normally leave dormant and surrender without judgment to whatever random sounds come our way – be they soothing or abrasive.  Anyone who appreciates Jackson Pollock’s paintings should have no trouble with this approach.

A Journey to the Outer Reaches of Discovery

Like Arner’s 2002 debut, “Solo Piano” (Dogstar), “Live from the Center” stars the pianist in unaccompanied mode.  Culled from his December 26th 2003 performance at the Center for the Performing Arts in Rhinebeck, the 70-minute disc features four of his lengthy “spontaneous compositions,” beginning with the nearly half-hour “Cosmos II.”  The classically trained Arner is often favorably compared to free jazz piano giants Cecil Taylor and Matthew Shipp; his use of thundering chords and runs of frantic, scrambled high notes make it easy to understand why.  Yet his style is equally marked by an ability to create deep chasms of almost unbearable tension, wide-open gaps that challenge the listener to the point of insanity by keeping him or her hanging on the eternities between every plinked key, every scraped piano string.  It feels good.

But as uncompromising as Arner’s technique is, the roots of tradition are still there for those who look hard enough: while “NY Nocturne’s” glittering free-flowing whirlpool appears completely un-tethered, one can actually pick out snatches of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” as well as the Harlem stride players like Art Tatum and James P. Johnson whom Arner sites in his liner notes.  (The tune inspired a poem by award-winning writer and former Freeman editor Mikhail Horowitz,  reprinted in the CD’s booklet.)

As Arner’s performances always are, “Live from the Center” is a journey to the outer reaches of discovery for both the artist and the listener.

Your ticket, please.

Peter Aaron, Kingston Daily Freeman (NY), October 21 2005