freely improvised duets

David Arner – Stars Aligned

Not five minutes from the campus of Bard College is Barrytown, a shady hamlet of Red Hook tucked along the edge the Hudson.  Sitting there like a tiny toy is the area’s former post office and general store, a one-room 18th-century shoebox reopened this year as the Barrytown Archive arts space.  Inside, David Arner, on keyboard and balafon, and George Quasha, on Roland Octapad and snare drum, are playing before a packed house.  Their unspoken conversation is animated.  The squiggling blips and squeaks and the sampled organ and vibes emanating from Arner’s device comingle with Quasha’s frenzied tapping, which sounds at times like hard rain on a corrugated roof.

Between pieces, Arner looks over at his accompanist and calls out a number.  “32,” he says. Quasha nods dryly, and plays.  The piece ends. “43.”  The next piece begins and ends.  “35.” And so on.  What is this, a secret language?  Some arsenal of obscure aphorisms à la Brian Eno’s mysterious “Oblique Strategies” cards?

Arner laughs when the questions are put to him in his Kingston home the following day.  “No, no,” he explains.  “Those numbers were just the presets for George’s electronic drums, some sounds that we’ve found and liked as we’ve jammed over the years.  What George does with those sounds, and what I do around them, aren’t planned at all.  That music’s totally improvised, with no predetermined ideas.”  With a pianist whose innovations have lately astonished the jazz world, one might be forgiven for assuming the shop talk was yet more evidence of his deep creativity.

Locally for several years, however, it was perhaps more as a curator of creativity that Arner was known.  From 2003 to 2007 he ran the New Vanguard Series in Kingston, a vital weekly event that presented performances by the free jazz/improvised scene’s top players.  Yet while he did play occasionally inside and outside of the series, Arner, 60, had largely put his own music aside.  And since moving on from his self-sacrificing role he’s been knocking out acclaimed recordings and snagging high-profile gigs at music meccas like New York’s the Stone and elsewhere.  It’s vindicating to see the pianist, whose startling style blends the bristly dissonance of Cecil Taylor with the fragile lyricism of Keith Jarrett, enjoying the renaissance that has him at last getting the attention he deserves.

Born and raised in Bayside, Queens, Arner was an explorer from a young age.  “I loved riding my bicycle through the side streets, taking the bus and the train into Manhattan and going to museums and performances,” says the composer-musician, who counts among his formative experiences Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s ninth symphony at one of the conductor’s celebrated Young People’s Concerts; a 1964 Living Theatre staging of “The Brig”; a radio broadcast of Vladimir Horowitz’s 1965 Carnegie Hall return concert; a 1967 Joseph Papp production of “Hamlet” starring Martin Sheen; and a 1968 performance of “Astarte” by the Joffrey Ballet.  The diversity of such a list would come to the fore in his work, which besides a wide range of musicians, includes collaborations with artists in dance, literature, and visual art. But it was music that grabbed him first, and his home was filled with it. “There was always classical music in the house,” he remembers. “My parents didn’t play, but my uncle and aunt were serious classical musicians.  My grandfather died before I was born but I do know he played piano for silent films, which is interesting because that’s something I go into doing.”  Arner began piano lessons at age nine and went on to study under the renowned Edna Golandsky. “We had a baby grand in the house, but it wasn’t very good,” he says.  “In high school I got an inheritance and my parents took me to the Steinway showroom to pick out a grand, which I still have.”

It was while majoring in music, philosophy, and religion at Oberlin College that he connected with jazz.  “This kid I made friends with played me three or so records from start to finish,” the pianist recalls.  “Then he said, ‘Okay, now you’re ready” and put on a Coltrane album—My Favorite Things.  That just opened me up.”  For his junior year Arner apprenticed with influential sound artist and composer Charlie Morrow, and a campus visit from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which then included John Cage and David Tudor, was also revelatory.  Although he did play a 1973 one-off gig, on flute and percussion, in a box car in Grand Central Station with poet Jackson Mac Low for the 10th Annual Avant-Garde Festival, Arner remained “afraid to commit myself” to playing music.  Upon graduation he instead worked as a roadie for rock bands, mixing monitors for The Band, the Grateful Dead, the Bee Gees, Labelle, the Jackson Five, Little Richard, Aretha Franklin, and other acts.  He also began his ongoing association with the medium of dance, though as not as the simpatico accompanist he’s frequently worked as.  “I went to see Meredith Monk to ask if she needed a sound engineer,” he says.  “She looked at me and said, ‘No, I want you to dance.’  I wasn’t a dancer, but I said OK.”  Arner appeared in Monk’s operas “Vessel” (1971) and “Education of the Girlchild” (1973) and lived in a Soho loft for a year with dancers from choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s troupe and Coltrane bassist Jimmy Garrison and family.

He moved upstate in 1975 and finally and completely turned himself over to music, beginning a two-year regimen of practicing 10 hours daily and performing in collective improv unit Dream Time and various cover and wedding bands.  In 1981 he became the music advisor of Bard College’s dance department, a position he would hold until 2009, and began to take flight as a creator of music for dance performances, serving as music director in Poughkeepsie for Jacques d’Amboise’s National Dance Institute and seeing his compositions for choreographers Aileen Passloff, Albert Reid, and Jeanette Leentvaar presented in Venezuela and France and at New York’s Merce Cunningham Studio.  Arner served as a Bard composer-in-residence in 1998 and continues to teach at Bard as well as at Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In was also the ’80s Arner that began scoring and performing music for silent film.  “I was hanging out with Steve Lieber from Upstate Films in Rhinebeck and he was talking about showing some silent movies,” the musician says.  “And we both thought, ‘Why don’t we do live music?’”  The keyboardist’s first foray as a film accompanist was at Upstate in 1986 for the Buster Keaton comedy The General (1926), and he’s since played for genre classics like F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (both 1924), and Victor Sjöström’s The  Wind (1928); a 2009 retrospective of films by French pioneer Alice Guy Blaché at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and events at the American Museum of the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Art.

Along with dance and film, a fascination with mythology has informed much of Arner’s work.  This includes two long-form opuses with the poet Charles Stein, 1992’s “Prometheus Project,” which was performed at the Knitting Factory and “explored collective composition though spontaneous consensus and was primarily focused on Greek mythology but covered a wide variety of related interests, including sound poetry, philosophy and tarot,” and “An Invocation of Hermes Twice Revealed,” a nine-part, semi-improvisational suite for piano, harpsichord, and spoken word based on the ancient Homeric Hymn to Hermes, which is part of Arner’s “Planetary Invocations” series and was presented at EMPAC in Troy this past May.

The pianist’s first releases, the overtly named Solo Piano and the in-concert Live from the Center (2002 and 2005, respectively, Dogstar Records), led to his being cited by jazz bible Cadence as “an intense, introspective pianist who methodically constructs sound portraits of shattering dimensions…a discerning musician who retreats inwardly to project his obsessions externally.”  For most of the last decade, though, he was devoted to overseeing the New Vanguard Series, which across 216 shows presented over 150 musicians from around the world.  “[Cottekill saxophonist] Joe Giardullo had started the series under a different name but stopped doing it, so I stepped in,” explains Arner.  “At first I called it New Directions in Jazz, and it was at the [now defunct] Uptown Cafe in the Stockade area.  When the Uptown closed, it moved to the old Deep Listening Space in the Rondout and when that place closed we moved back to the Stockade, to Alternative Books.” For lovers of out jazz the New Vanguard was a godsend, hosting performances by saxophonists Joseph Jarman and Joe McPhee, trombonist Julian Priester, pianists Burton Greene and Dave Burrell (a former teacher of Arner’s), and bassist Dominic Duval, among other icons.  But after four glorious years its booker was spent.  “I needed a break,” he says.  “It was great to do but very time consuming, particularly as volunteer work.”  (Downloads of the series’ mind-expanding sets are now available through Deeplistening.org.)

From the New Vanguard’s ashes, however, emerged the David Arner Trio.  The unit, which includes series veterans bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen, debuted in tandem in 2009 with Out/In the Open, on Polish label Not Two Records, and Porgy/Bess Act 1, the first of two volumes of inspired impressions of music from George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” on the crucial CIMP imprint.  “What really strikes me about David is how he brings his hard-core classical background to the music,” says Bisio, a sometime Troy resident who also performs with pianist Matthew Shipp.  “He’s very gracious as a player and just allows [collaborators] to be who they are.  Also, David’s an expert on birdsong and astrology.  He’s a mystical cat.”

In addition to his performing at Manhattan’s renowned Vision Festival in 2010 with saxophonist Lorenzo Sanguedolce, Arner’s resume has expanded to include work with creative paragons like cellist Tomas Ulrich, guitarist Dom Minasi, and drummer Susie Ibarra.  Another association, with pianist Connie Crothers, has proven incredibly fruitful.  In May 2009 the pair recorded nearly four hours of music at Bard’s Fisher Center, which is newly out on French label RogueArt as the four-CD box set Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos.  As one might expect, it’s a lot to take in.  A pristinely captured epic—or Homeric, perhaps, given Arner’s mythological interests—experience, the album boasts 11 extended, completely improvised pieces, most of which have been titled for their distinct segments (“Suite II: The Metropolis,” for example, comprises the bustling “City Rhapsody,” the tranquil “Night Through Dawn,” and the rising “In the Midst”).  A document of two artists who share an uncanny telepathy, Spontaneous Suites is a modern landmark, the sound of two amazing-unto-themselves universes existing as their glittering constellations overlap.

More heavenly sounds are in store as Arner readies the celestially themed work “Planetary Invocations” and learns to use the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), an electronic signal processing system developed by Pauline Oliveros.  The recipient of a Jazz Fellowship award from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Meet the Composer grants, the pianist says that at this point he’s “looking to get beyond the keyboard.” Considering the transcendent nature of his music, one might say he’s already there.

Peter Aaron, Chronogram, July2012.  Reprinted with permission.

A masterpiece of freely improvised duets

I certainly intend to play something from Connie Crothers’ new release SPONTANEOUS SUITES FOR TWO PIANOS which is

a masterpiece of freely improvised duets with David Arner

— a 4-cd set that I’ve only so far listened to the first disk (about seventeen times! ) — of my thoughts on this, it occurred to me that Connie & Mr. Arner need no music — sheet music absolutely not needed —

the lyricism and cosmic drive just tumbles out of them like a torrent.

KUNM 89.9 FM

Albuquerque, New Mexico
Host MARK WEBER
Thursday, March 22, 2012

Review of Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos,  RogueArt

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