solo piano

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.

“The Birds of Central Park” at the STONE

The Logic of Birds

The degree to which David Arner liberates himself from  pre-determined constraints and sends it soaring might only be imaginable if you heard his concert of improvised piano music at The Stone in Manhattan last night, or if this effort was guided by someone who had this privilege.  For those who missed this momentous event, I offer a step-by-step guide.

1.  Imagine writing your signature with a pencil on a sheet of lined paper and the many constraints imposed upon you before you lift your pen:

The paper dictates the shape and the dimensions of the field of operations.  The lines dictate the orientation, the spacing within this field, and the proportions of image to space.  You determine the shape of the letters (no constraints), the size and width of the letters (constrained), and the darkness or lightness of your touch (within the paper’s tolerance).

2. Imagine writing your signature on a sheet of paper without lines.

Now only the shape and the dimensions of the field of operations are determined before you lift your pen.  In addition to the liberties identified above, you orient your paper in any direction, choose whether to honor the right angled rigidity of the paper, and select your orientation.

3. Imagine writing your signature in the sand on a beach.

Borders and other constraints dissolve.  You are free to determine the size, shape, orientation, style, and pressure of your signature.                               

4. Imagine this beach in outer space – liberated from the gravity-bound constraints of Earth experience.

The sand-writing analogy only describes Arner’s starting point, not his destination.

5. Imagine Arner drawing with not one, but ten implements simultaneously. Each finger served the fullness of his musicality in the instant of its stirring.

6. Imagine this drawing embracing the myriad conditions provided by the setting. Instead of beach, sea, sun, wind, and shadow, Arner probed the innards of his grand piano as well as the keys, unleashing wondrous percussive and melodic opportunities.

Flights and songs of birds served as this concert’s inspiration.  Arner’s expressive freedom seemed the perfect embodiment of avian disregard for human-contrived borders and rational systems.  Yet, for me, the concert exceeded the untethering of music from compositional norms.  It demonstrated that human emancipation from constraint does not necessarily indicate explosive and destructive fury.  Arner yielded to an alternative ordering system.  He discovered the logic of birds.  Last night, he shared the glorious expression of this revelation with his audience.

Linda Weintraub, September 2009

Cadence Review of “Live from the Center”

His process will transfix and awe.

Arner is an intense, introspective pianist who methodically constructs sound portraits of shattering dimensions

[on Live from the Center].  He submerges himself into four lengthy pieces, the first of which begins with the aid of piano string musings, space and silence and then rumbles to hurricane strength as he uses an accelerated delivery and the pedals to sustain the moment.  He is a demonstrative player, alternating between a delicate touch and highly percussive attack to establish mood shifts that swerve at right angles without notice.  Arner’s penchant for changing the tempo and vibrato of his improvisations stamps his playing.  He pauses to contemplate a pastoral thought and then thunders ahead in bullish fashion to transform the ambiance back and forth between quiet to overpowering.

The performance was captured live and is an instantly-composed example of an artist baring his soul through his excitable execution.  He gives the impression of being an extremely deep thinker who projects his vibrant emotions in surges of energy offset by a retreat into an inner world of pensive solitude.  Inspiration comes in waves of light where he creates a sober scenario or a heavy, sunless sky filled with threatening rain clouds.  As the free improvisations segue through his complex mind maze, his sound images are emphatically implanted in mesmerizing fashion.  The closing “Opus 52” features staccato stabs that rise to high energy levels with single notes clustered together in jabbing segments of vitality.  Arner is a discerning musician who retreats inwardly to project his obsessions externally.  His process will transfix and awe.

Frank Rubolino, reprinted with permission, ©Cadence Magazine March 2006

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

Arner at the Whitney – Part 3

Alice Guy Blache – Part 3

Sunday January 24, 2010

2:00pm

10 Classic Short Films of Alice Guy Blache – Cinema Pioneer

Live Music by DAVID ARNER

Dance of the Seville Gypsies (1905) 2:16

Dog Playing Ball (1905) 1:24

The Charity of the Magician (1905) 3:25

The High Cost of Living (1912) 13:00

First Class Nun (1902) 4:00

A Man’s a Man (1912) 9:02

The Sewer (1912) 23:18

The Child of the Barricade (1907) 4:39

The Gamekeeper’s Son (1906) 5:07

Goodnight – The Flower Fairy (1905) 00:46

 The Whitney Museum of Art

Madison Avenue and 75th St.

New York City

(212) 570-3600

 Why you should come to this performance:

1. These are films about gypsy dancing, dogs, a magician, the working class, labor battles, antisemitism, the sewers, the Paris Commune, humanity in the midst of strife, and/or existentialism.   This broad palette of visual and dramatic expression is perfect for Arner’s equally diverse and eclectic musical palette.

2. Just as Alice Guy Blache was exploring the possibilities of the camera, so has David Arner been exploring the possibilities of live film music as an active part of the story at hand.

3. These films are hilarious, thoughtful, poignant, riveting, irreverent, and/or compassionate.   All in the course of one hour!

4. This is the very last day of the Alice Guy Blache exhibition at the Whitney– a show not to be missed.

 

For more info about the exhibition go to

http://www.whitney.org/file_columns/0001/0459/aliceguyblache_press_release.pdf

Arner at the Whitney – Part 2

5 Classic Short Films of Alice Guy Blache – Cinema Pioneer

Sunday December 27, 2009

2:00pm

Live Music by DAVID ARNER

The Floor Polisher (1907) 3:32

The Volunteer’s Fiancee (1907) 7:00

The Recalcitrant Donkey (1906) 5:00

The Beasts of the Jungle (1913) 31:36

The Life of Christ (1906) 33:23

 

The Whitney Museum
Madison Avenue and 75th St.
New York City
(212) 570-3600

Why you should come to this performance:

1.  If you missed Arner at the Whitney last month, here is your second chance.  There will be only one more in this series, on Sunday January 24.
2.  Alice Guy’s The Life of Christ features 25 elaborate sets and 300 extras, packed into a 33-minute epic (a long film for 1906).
3. The whole show will be about an hour.
4.  It’s at the Whitney.  Always worth a visit.

Arner at the Whitney – Part 1

Alice Guy Blache – Part 1

Sunday November 15, 2009

2:00pm
8 Classic Short Films of Alice Guy Blanche – Cinema Pioneer
Live Music by DAVID ARNER

The Stepmother (1906) 6:38

The Sticky Woman (1906) 2:22

The Results of Feminism (1906) 7:00

A Four-year-old Heroine (1907) 8:18

The Making of an American Citizen (1912) 15:53

For Love of the Flag (1912) 13:40

The Thief (1913) 16:37

New Love and the Old (1912) 4:50

The Whitney Museum of Art

Madison Avenue and 75th St.
New York City
(212) 570-3600
For more info about the exhibition go to

Why you should come to this performance:

1.  Arner is a pioneer in the re-vitalization of silent film music.  Alice Guy Blanche is a pioneer in making films, period.  Some of these films are from 1906.
2.   Arner’s favorite short being screened, The Sticky Woman (a kind of Dadaist-slapstick piece), is only 2 minutes and 20 seconds.  The longest one is only 17 minutes.
3.  For the 1st time in more than 20 years, Arner will be performing on an electronic keyboard!!  (Actually it’s the second time.  A month ago Arner covered a restaurant gig for the great pianist Nina Sheldon, which was on a  keyboard, and it suddenly became strangely interesting to him.)
4.  If you live in the city, it’s easier than going Upstate Films.
5.  It’s at the Whitney.  Always worth a visit.  Check out the other exhibitions before or after the films.
“His [Arner’s] process will transfix and awe”  (Cadence Magazine)
“Emphatic yet empathetic”  (Signal To Noise)

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