Michael Bisio

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.

An Artist of Subtlety and Depth

Porgy/Bess Act 1: The David Arner Trio and Their Rechanneling of Porgy and Bess

David Arner has a pianistic fulminosity (it’s a kind of abundance) that comes across with the substantial release Porgy/Bess Act 1 (CIMP).   He is joined by the first-rank bass virtuoso Michael Bisio and the lightly subtle yet freely engaging drummer Jay Rosen.

In what will be a two-volume release, Mr. Arner takes inspiration from the Gershwin classic Porgy and Bess as well as the Miles Davis-Gil Evans rearrangement from the exceptional 1958 Columbia recording by that name.   David Arner does not get involved with a literal rehashing of the score, nor does he take Gershwin themes as head-solo-head arrangements.   Rather he and the trio react to the music as a springboard for four free improvisations.   You will hear thematic interjections, sometimes in the whole cloth, sometimes as quilted fragments and chordal reminiscences, but all in the context of spontaneous recomposition.

Arner-Bisio-Rosen interact in quite subtle ways and the melodic-kinetic energies of Arner and Bisio are palpable.   This is not as much an energy-surging exercise as a varied expressive dialogue.   In David Arner we hear the techniques of modern improv piano as well as the harmonic-melodic tradition of the Gershwin and Davis-Evans eras but contextualized to his own ends.   And he opens up a space that Michael Bisio and Jay Rosen enter into with open ears and inventive musical discourse.

This is music that takes attentive listening to assimilate.   It is not entertaining; it is enlightening.

I would put this among the best piano trio recordings I’ve heard in this waning year.   Arner is an artist of subtlety and depth.

The trio is a multi-faceted musical force that gains newfound inspiration from classic sources without repeating the obvious.   If only some of the repertoire-oriented aggregations were this creative!

Gapplegate Music Review, December 7,2009

A Sterling Example of Arner Pianism at its Best

The David Arner Trio: Out/In the Open, 2007
Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Remarkable piano trio interplay throughout

Pianist David Arner is a musical voice that does not fit easily into the various schools of improvisation that are widely influential among the free school of players.  He’s managed to forge a path that does not cross directly the Cecil Taylors, the Paul Bleys, the Keith Jarretts, or the Bill Evans influenced players.  Not that he has ignored these stylistic landmarks.  Clearly not.  But he chooses to go his own way.

You can hear that quite readily in the 2007 recording Out/In the Open (Not Two 812-2).  It’s a trio date with the formidable alliance of Arner with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen, all key institutional-foundational figures in the creative improvisational music of the present era.  The album’s hour-long program features four collective improvisations, an Arner composition (“Intensities”) and a standard (“My Romance”).

There is remarkable piano trio interplay throughout.  Rosen listens creatively to what Maestros Bisio and Arner are doing and gives out with the coloristic energy washes that he does so well; Bisio is alive with noteful counter improvisations to Arner’s forward-pressing expressions; and David unleashes the full spectrum of the music he hears, which engages the jazz tradition, the expressive intensities of the avant, the expanded harmonic, melodic and textural potentialities of the piano and the musical ideas he has in abundance.

It’s a documentary testament to what these three imaginative players can achieve in the space of a single session.  And it’s a sterling example of Arner pianism at its best.

Highly recommended.

Gapplegate Music Review

An Innovative Pianist

David Arner has built a reputation as an innovative pianist and a proponent of spontaneous composition.

He filters both skills into his music and adds a healthy dose of surprise through changes in tempo, dynamics and harmony, weaving one into the other with facile dexterity.

His ability to shape progression has led to associations with other creative forces like Tomas Ulrich, Dom Minasi and Susie Ibarra.  He also has collaborated with his compatriots on this record, Michael Bisio (bass) and Jay Rosen (drums), both in concert and on the CD Porgy & Bess Act 1(CIMP, 2009).  Bisio has had an intersting carrer, first playing classical music with the Seattle Symphony and the Northwest Chamber Orchestra before he found jazz in the 1980s.  From then on, it was a journey filled with adventure into the unknown. Unafraid of risk, Bisio has been called to share the musical lore of Charles Gayle, John Tchicai , Joe McPhee and Diedre Murray , among others.
Inspired by Tony Williams to play the drums, Rosen became seriously involved with jazz after hearing Charlie Parker. A colorful drummer, he filters his innate sense of rhythm and time into the veins of a tune, giving it a pulsating presence.

Arner, Bisio and Rosen have an inherent immediacy. Reading each other perfectly, they develop ideas with cohesion and a committed passion.

Four of the six selections—”Double Nature,” “Swirl,” “Mr. MB” and “A Take On It All”—are spontaneous improvisations, liberating each from the strictures of composition and opening the door to some arresting developments.

Bisio’s scraggly bass is the take-off for “Double Nature.” Arner and Rosen prowl, converse, interlock and bring in an introspective mood. The character of the track changes as Arner develops a melody of flowing sweetness that is countered by Bisio’s arching bow. It is soon a riptide set up by the percussive hammer of the piano, the shimmer of the cymbals and the rolling of the bass. Ideas are fermented and brought to fruition at a furious pace.  It is all brilliantly conceived and resolved.

Arner’s “Intensities Opus 56” drives the adjective. The thrust is forceful, but it is not without an underlying emotion. Arner roils and rumbles, his two-handed approach balanced between attack and modulation. The tapestry is splashed by the shifting timbre of Bisio’s arco and the percussive touches from Rosen before the final riot of color, as Arner lets the tempo surge and seethe.

“My Romance” is given a warm reading. The melody flows into the open arms of improvisation, rippling in the becoming presence of Arner’s resplendent piano.  It’s a beautiful finale to an album that holds several magical moments.

Jerry D’Souza, December 09, All About Jazz

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