New Music composer Evan Williams is no stranger to Memphis, having lived and taught here from 2018-22. And, as he noted in his remarks in the Crosstown Concourse East Atrium last night, his time as a assistant professor of music and director of instrumental activities at Rhodes College made an indelible impression on him. Indeed, Wednesday evening’s premiere of his new work, Crosstown Counterpoint, was a deep rumination on that iconic space and its place in the city’s history.
But that multi-movement suite was book-ended and contextualized by other pieces that helped situate Crosstown in time and space. Williams began with a trombone solo titled Amber Waves, in honor of the semi-rural Chicago suburb where he grew up. His use of delay effects only added to the natural reverberation of the towering atrium, with its echoing brass tones reminiscent of Sean Murphy’s Sketches of Crosstown from 10 years ago, featuring tuba and saxophone in the abandoned Sears Tower, pre-renovation.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!
Historical recordings of Savio’s words were woven into a duet for flute and cello, and, echoing through the cavernous space of Crosstown, the combination served to remind listeners of the political and aesthetic dimensions of such a public commons, and the citizens’ duty to make good on any promise that such a space implies.
And then came the centerpiece of the evening, taking place within the very space it celebrated. Subtitled “for two antiphonal string quartets and audio playback,” Crosstown Counterpoint and Memphis’ own Blueshift Ensemble made use of the concourse’s multiple levels, with one quartet on the ground floor and another on the mezzanine above. The sound of stereo strings responding to each others’ hypnotic patterns evoked the origins of Sears, Roebuck and Company’s founder, Richard Warren Sears, in the railroad business; and as recordings of voices were heard on the P.A., the effect was reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. But the voices’ stories were closer to home.
Those voices, originally recorded for the Crosstown Concourse Breaking Ground Oral Histories Project, were provided to Williams by Crosstown Arts, and recounted decades of history, from the original Sears department store to its demise and abandonment, and finally its rebirth. In one moving passage, a Memphian observes, “The building has a personality,” then adds, “and layers of history,” a phrase which repeated as the strings played on, the words echoing through the very walls being remembered.
Throughout the proceedings, it was as if the atrium itself was an instrument, its reverberations throwing the composer’s sounds back at us in real time. When Crosstown Counterpoint concluded, Williams then led an expanded ensemble through a classic of the modern classical canon, Terry Riley’s In C.
Evan Williams leads scattered musicians through Terry Riley’s In C (Credit: Alex Greene)
This piece was also well-suited to the space, full of cascading, contrasting patterns played by various musicians scattered strategically throughout the atrium, on multiple levels. The slightly out of sync parts would ebb and flow, harmonizing with each other in unpredictable ways. Though considered groundbreaking when it premiered in 1964, the piece is not often heard in Memphis, though Williams noted that he led a group through the piece during his time at Rhodes.
In this case, the ever-shifting piece held the crowd’s attention for nearly a half hour, as audience members wandered through the atrium, sampling the sounds from different niches of the concourse. It was met with a standing ovation and raucous cheering as the evening came to end, the reborn vertical village of Crosstown still resonating with its own history.
August 17, 2018, was a historic night in the Bluff City. A new space in the newly renovated Crosstown Concourse, The Green Room, was about to enjoy its inaugural concert — the culmination of years of planning. A sizable audience had gathered to hear the music of celebrated avant-garde pioneer John Cage, and a hush fell over the room as the lights dimmed. Then Jenny Davis, a flutist in the genre-defying Blueshift Ensemble, stepped up and began to play … a cactus.
Jenny Davis (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Around her was a scene from a gardening shop. Cacti of different sizes were arrayed on a table, and Davis was systematically plucking the thorns of each plant as if it were a drum. Each movement resonated over the sound system; the cacti were outfitted with microphone pickups. It was as if we’d all shrunk to the size of geckos, immersed in a world of desert greenery, every brush of the needles an arpeggio.
For lovers of unusual sounds and textures, Davis’ performance was captivating. But it also marked the beginning of an avant-garde renaissance that is putting Memphis on the map of all that is strange and fascinating in 21st century music. It was only fitting that Davis was making the sounds, as that night foreshadowed the extent to which she, as programmer of Crosstown Arts’ musical performances, would be making waves. As it turns out, she’s only one of a host of players and presenters who are introducing Memphis audiences to sounds well off the beaten path. Beyond that, she sees no need to define what the music is. It’s here to stay, whatever you call it. “The avant-garde realm is hard to describe,” Davis says. “It becomes kind of tricky. Maybe it’s not even necessary to always describe something as being in one genre or another.”
The Cactus in the Room: A State of Mind
As Davis notes, playing Cage’s “Child of Tree” that night was a prescient grand opening. “That was the first concert we ever did in The Green Room,” she notes, “which I love. We christened the room with some John Cage!” In keeping with that, the space has become a key venue for musicians who want nothing more than to be listened to, and it’s likely rooted in the context of that first show. As part of the 2018 Continuum Festival, also organized by Davis, attendees could learn of the different states of mind that most avant-garde music demands, with talks on “Suggestions on How to Listen to Contemporary Classical Music” or a “Mindful Listening Workshop” based on composer Pauline Oliveros’ sound and meditation activities.
The seriousness suggested by such presentations is often belied by the sheer playfulness of the music. Beyond cacti, for example, the John Cage tribute also included his “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” in which players adjusted the frequencies and volumes of 12 transistor radios. Whether whimsical or disturbing, the one thing that most avant-garde, experimental, or “out” music has in common is the need for deep listening. While B-Side Memphis or the Lamplighter Lounge have also cultivated scenes for strange music, The Green Room and its big sibling, Crosstown Theater, have set the standard of spaces that encourage silence.
Art Edmaiston, a veteran saxophonist of more conventional R&B, soul, and rock ensembles, has played enough noisy bars in his storied career to really appreciate silence. “You know, people wander into bars just to have a drink, and then they’ll say, ‘What is this? Why is a guy dragging a music stand across the floor? What’s going on with the flame thrower?’” he says with a chuckle. Such a crowd may not be tuned in to the subtleties of experimental music, and that can impact the playing itself. “The other thing is how quiet some of the music can be,” he notes. “We’re all listening. If you’re not in a listening environment, which means the crowd has to be quiet, then it’s hard for us to communicate, almost telepathically, and everybody’s going to miss what’s going on.”
What’s Going On
Edmaiston is a key figure in the local music landscape, and his involvement in the free improvisational group SpiralPhonics is indicative of just how much is happening on the cutting edge here. As he describes it, just having a venue for avant-garde music has made all the difference. “It’s hard for our little group to find places,” he says. “Revenue and venue, it’s all kinda in there together. You’ve got to find people. Listeners needed!” That has usually required staying on the more accessible side of the street. “Playing commercial music, you have a structure and vocabulary applicable to that situation. If you come in playing like Albert Ayler on [a track like] ‘Take Me to the River,’ you’re not going to be called back. So throughout most of my career, I was trying to assimilate, trying to be a studio musician. I’ve had a life of doing that, but never lost my desire to be on the more artistic side of things.”
When drummer Terence Clark proposed collaborating in a more improvisational context, and they joined forces with guitarist Logan Hanna to form SpiralPhonics, the mere existence of a venue helped them to manifest their vision. “We only played sporadically,” he recalls. “So we booked The Green Room in order to make us get our stuff together.” Ultimately, the gig not only brought their group into focus; it led to their debut album. “The Green Room being a listening room, that’s the spot to do it,” says Edmaiston. “That’s where we recorded our Argot Session. It was a live performance that we recorded there, and we couldn’t have done it anywhere else. It would take a lot more tries to get good takes and a quiet environment somewhere else. Your head space has to be right.”
Others note the resurgence of “out” music as well. Chad Fowler, a saxophonist, woodwind player, composer, and producer from Arkansas, studied at the University of Memphis in the 1990s, and the experimental music scene here at that time had a profound impact on him. Having then left town, he was surprised upon his return over a decade later. “I felt, when I first moved back to Memphis six or seven years ago, like there was a real dearth of creative music happening. It was kind of disappointing. I felt it had been stronger in the ’90s. However, since then it feels like it’s changed. A lot of it is due to Jenny Davis and Blueshift. Crosstown and B-Side have made a huge difference.”
The scene’s personal impact on Fowler is in turn reflecting back on the local environment. Having ultimately settled back in Arkansas, he’s nevertheless a regular in the avant-garde music world of Memphis, even as he also increases his profile in the New York experimental scene. His Mahakala Music label, focused on experimental jazz, has built on associations he forged in the ’90s Memphis scene, with players like Marc Franklin, Chris Parker, and Kelley Hurt, and Anders Griffen often appearing on Mahakala releases today. But he’s also used his and others’ connections to New York, Chicago, and New Orleans to create ensembles of world-class players from elsewhere, often bringing them to Memphis.
Dopolarians at The Green Room (Photo: Jack T. Adcock)
As Fowler notes, “It’s kind of weird because the same people might be on, like, a New York Times best of jazz year-end list but then also playing in a room the size of a closet for a tiny crowd in Brooklyn. We might get better audiences in Memphis for the same music.” He points to a gig by one of Mahakala’s “all-star” groups, Dopolarians. “With the Dopolarians show, I think William Parker was blown away by how great the energy was when we were there in The Green Room — by how many people came out, how engaged the audience was. It was a good experience.”
Collaborating with William Parker, a highly respected free jazz bassist and co-organizer of the Vision Festival, “New York City’s premier live free jazz event,” according to TheNew York Times, has been a boon to Fowler and Mahakala, arising quite organically from Fowler’s earliest free jazz experiences. Parker played on the debut album of Memphian Frank Lowe in 1973, as Lowe’s star was rising. Ultimately, Lowe would join Alice Coltrane’s band and enjoy a solo career of some renown, yet would still return to Memphis and jam with the likes of Fowler, Franklin, Chris Parker, and other University of Memphis students. Now, Fowler carries that inspiration back to New York on a regular basis, often playing with William Parker in various ensembles and recording projects. Mahakala’s star is now rising as well. “The first record we put out was on Rolling Stone’s end-of-year jazz roundup list,” says Fowler, “and since then, pretty frequently, we’ve been mentioned in Jazziz, JazzTimes, DownBeat, and all the go-to jazz publications. It seems the label is becoming one of the most respected of the genre, even though it’s very new.”
Lately, the links between Memphis and leaders of free jazz from the Northeast have only strengthened, as when drummer Ra Kalam, aka Bob Moses, who’s been on the cutting edge of the free improvisation world since the ’60s, relocated to Memphis permanently. Edmaiston recently played with the drummer on a New Year’s Eve show and was surprised at his embrace of more traditional R&B. Edmaiston recalls, “Ra Kalam told us, ‘Hey man, that was ‘Cleo’s Back!’ I recorded that in 1967 with Larry Coryell and Jim Pepper. We used to play it all the time!’ So that was kind of wild. He can play inside, but he’s developed into something else. When he plays himself, he says, it’s like he’s got to be in Europe to be expressive. Over here, less people want to hear that. Over there, he’s celebrated for it.” Yet now, with improvisational music on the rise here, that’s changing. On January 18th, Ra Kalam will be holding a master class and concert at Nelson Drum Shop in Nashville.
New Music, from Punks to P-basses to Piccolos
If there’s an uptick in free jazz and improvisational groups like SpiralPhonics and Fowler’s various projects, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, since Jenny Davis and Jonathan Kirkscey founded Blueshift Ensemble, a loose collection of Memphis Symphony Orchestra players with a penchant for experimental music, an Iceberg has orbited them — for that’s the name of a composers’ collective that collaborates with Blueshift every August to bring their works to life. “I like to have some new stuff along with some more familiar sounds, and that’s a nice way to introduce new things to audiences,” says Davis. “Blueshift’s work with Iceberg New Music, the composer collective out of New York, encapsulates that idea, too, because it’s a group of 10 composers, some of them more on the experimental, avant-garde side of things and some whose works are more lyrical and tonal, so you have the whole spectrum of what’s going on in new classical music today.”
Other avenues have long been available for the edgier side of the classical world, though they tend to be tucked into programs that showcase more traditional works. Conrad Tao’s “Spoonful,” commissioned in 2020 by the Iris Orchestra in honor of Memphis’ bicentennial, was a New Music tour de force, pivoting from cacophony to explosions of orchestral texture to delicate piano lines in a heartbeat and even a sample of Charley Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues.” It lost none of its power by being sandwiched between works by Haydn and Brahms. And many such experimental works continue to percolate out of the classical world.
A more hybrid approach was concocted by David Collins’ Frog Squad, when they premiered his arrangements of the music of Erik Satie at The Green Room in 2021. Turning the composer’s original sparse arrangements into showcases for a more jazz-oriented octet represented a perfect balance between accessibility and “out” music, as the players took solos with the abandon of a free jazz group, even as they remained grounded in the composer’s classic works. This year, they’re set to release a similar treatment of Horace Silver’s music and an album of all originals.
Misterioso Africano (Photo: Courtesy Khari Wynn)
Frog Squad’s bassist, Khari Wynn, is a virtuoso in his own right. While best known as one of Public Enemy’s go-to guitarists, his real passion is a kind of Afrofuturism first pioneered by his hero, Sun Ra, yet channeled through a thousand other influences he’s absorbed over the years as he plays under the name Misterioso Africano, or a few years back, The Energy Disciples.
But there’s plenty of experimentation coming from less-schooled musicians as well. Goner Records has long waxed enthusiastic for musical risk-takers, and in recent years they’ve brought many edge-walking groups to the city, from the surrealist big band sounds of Fred Lane to the free improvisational textures of Wrest to Tatsuya Nakatani’s Gong Orchestra. The latter wowed music fans gathered at Off the Walls Arts last year, part of that gallery space’s increased staging of “out” musical events under its roof.
The label has also played host to some of the city’s more rock-adjacent groups who test the boundaries of conventional musical ideas through combinations of electronic music and guitar noise, from Aquarian Blood to Nots to Optic Sink, who all offer servings of noise and synth madness to variations on the big beat of rock. Yet other, less-punk groups are dipping their toes into strange waters at the same time. Salo Pallini’s new independently released album advises it be filed under “Progressive Latin Space Country,” and while that obscures the heavy dollop of rock in their sound, it does capture their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. They’ll be playing a record release show on January 20th at — you guessed it — The Green Room.
Some of these artists are also featured in the annual Memphis Concrète festival of electronic and experimental music, also centered in and around Crosstown, set to resume this June after some Covid-related setbacks.
IMAKEMADBEATS at Continuum Fest with Delara Hashemi (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Meanwhile, more hip-hop-adjacent sounds are percolating through the city. Unapologetic, who have long celebrated strangeness and vulnerability in their edgy hip-hop productions, now have a dedicated studio space, and producer IMAKEMADBEATS is enthused about the possibilities for combining traditional beat production with live players free to create new textures in a more spacious setting. “We’re all electronic/hip-hop-based producers who play instruments,” says IMAKEMADBEATS. “Finally having the kind of space that allows us to easily incorporate live instrumentation into our music is a game changer here. Because our minds are decades-trained to think of warping sounds in ways never done traditionally, but now we can combine that with traditional instruments in a space sonically set up to present it in an amazing way. Our producer engineers aren’t just band recording people or rap recording people. They are that and everything in between. We just needed space. Now it’s time to take off.”
MonoNeon and Daru Jones (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
Of course, the kitchen-sink approach has also been perfected by MonoNeon, whose transpositions of Cardi B tirades into carefully pitched bass solos and whose jams in his YouTube offerings may be the most experimental music of all. While he often records at home, he’s also branched out with other producers, including his work with Unapologetic. Like most of these artists, he’s appeared at The Green Room and/or Crosstown Theater multiple times. So it is that we must give credit where credit is due, as Crosstown Arts sits squarely at the center of the avant-garde revival. As Amy Schaftlein, co-host of the Sonosphere podcast and radio show, notes, “Jenny Davis has been doing such an amazing job of getting great artists to come to Crosstown Theater and The Green Room. She’s continued in that vein of ‘Let’s try to get folks to Memphis who may not hit us on their tour.’” Often recruiting acts on their way to or from Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, Davis has brought a steady stream of experimental and jazz artists to town, the likes of which have not been seen in decades. This March and April alone, Crosstown will feature Deepstaria Enigmatica, Makaya McCraven, SpiralPhonics, The Bad Plus + Marc Ribot and the Jazz-Bins, Tarta Relena, Ami Dang, and Xiu Xiu.
All of which is making the city a richer, more connected community. As Davis says, “I like the challenge of hearing something new. And [it] can be jarring at first. But then if you go back a second time, you start to see the patterns and it’s like learning a new language. I think that keeps things interesting.”
Blueshift Ensemble (Photo courtesy of Blueshift Ensemble).
Blueshift Ensemble has been at the cutting edge of New Music in Memphis for years now, often collaborating with jazz, hip hop, and alternative artists, but one of its most fruitful partnerships could have easily fizzled out when Covid brought everything to a halt. From 2017-2019, the ensemble of local classical players favoring music a bit left of center had an impressive run with New York’s ICEBERG New Music Collective, presenting works by the collective’s 10 composers at the Crosstown Concourse for three summers in a row. Then 2020 arrived, and lock-downs put the future of the collaboration in doubt.
But next week, ICEBERG will be back in Memphis for the first time in three years, as Blueshift Ensemble performs a collaboration between the composers — Drake Andersen, Victor Baez, Stephanie Ann Boyd, Alex Burtzos, Yu-Chun Chien, Derek Cooper, Jack Frerer, Max Grafe, Jessica Mays, and Harry Stafylakis — and poet Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz in a suite of new works, The Peace Chronicles, Parts 1 & 2. Recently, the Memphis Flyer reached out to ICEBERG’s composer and board member Alex Burtzos to learn more about what he calls “the best thing we’ve ever done.”
Memphis Flyer:It seems ICEBERG New Music is based in New York, yet I see that some of the composers work elsewhere. Would you still call it a New York collective?
Alex Burtzos: That’s a good question. When we first started in 2016, we were all based in New York City. But since then, as our careers have gone in different directions, I would say we’re now a global organization, because we have members that live in four different states and three different countries. But we’re incorporated in New York, and we always have two concerts every spring in New York City. So we’re still based in New York as an organization. But our members are based all over the place. Only three ICEBERG members are based in the city now. The rest of us are in and out. And we do meet in New York. For example, almost all of us were together for our two concerts with the Decoda Ensemble in April and May of this year. The pandemic continues to complicate things, but we do convene as much as possible. I’m looking forward to much more of that as the pandemic relaxes.
Alex Burtzos (Photo: Stephanie Ann Boyd)
Do you work together as you create compositions, playing each other works in progress and that sort of thing?
Yeah. I would say that for the most part, the craft of composition is not collaborative. So we’re still on our own a lot of the time, staring at dots. But to have a collaborative atmosphere that you can participate in is really valuable. So I’m constantly sending scores to the other members of ICEBERG and asking for feedback, and they do the same with me. Both artistically and professionally, it’s a really valuable thing to have that collaboration. And it’s kind of rare for a composer to have that sort of network.
The Peace Chronicles represents a whole new type of collaboration for us, because it was the first time we’d collaborated with someone from outside the music world — an artist from another discipline. Yolanda is an incredible poet, so we all read her most recent book, The Peace Chronicles, and selected poems from that book to act as the catalyst or inspiration for our pieces. And each one of us chose a different text, sometimes several texts. Then, having composed the pieces, we worked together to put them into a program that really led the listener on a journey from beginning to end.
Of course, Yolanda physically being a part of the show and reading her poems as part of the performance was an enormous part of that. To my mind, this is the best thing we’ve ever done. We are really, really proud of this program because it brings together so many artists. We have the artists from Decoda who are the ones who performed at the premier; and now Blueshift Ensemble’s stepping in. And then we have the composers, and Yolanda working with us. So it’s a really special show.
I gather all the pieces were written with her recitation of her poetry in mind, from the outset?
Yes, we always knew that she would be reading as part of the show, and it was up to the composers whether they would incorporate that spoken word into the piece, or whether that spoken word would precede the piece, and composers took different approaches. We also had members take very different tacks to how the words inspired them. Sometimes Yolanda’s words provided a sort of program for the piece; sometimes the words provided an image; sometimes the words were decoded, and individual patterns of letters became the basis of the composition’s form. And everything in between. So it was a nice demonstration of the diverse perspectives that the ten composers bring, and the ability of the collective to take those diverse perspectives and combine them into something that feels very unified and organic.
Does it flow like a single piece, with transitions from one piece to another?
There are no transitions; they are discrete pieces in the program. But of course we were in constant communication about the flow of the music in the concert, and the way each piece would prepare the listener for the next. There were a lot of conversations discussing that question.
Did Yolanda have input into how her words were woven into the music?
Yes. She was a fantastic collaborator. She immediately grasped what we had been talking about from a musical perspective, even though she’s not a musician. She was fantastic to work with as we plotted the trajectory of the show. Yolanda’s previous book was called Love from the Vortex, and her latest one is called The Peace Chronicles. And when I was reading these collections, I saw them as sort of a yin and yang, where they were meant to be complementary. Love from the Vortex is very concerned with feelings of hurt and regret, and The Peace Chronicles is very focused on healing. That’s a generalization. Not every poem fits into that mold, but taken together, that’s how I interpreted them.
Because we were primarily concentrating on the second of those two books, that translated into two programs that are very optimistic overall. It’s not always happy music, but it’s a program that trends towards a healing feeling. And getting the opportunity to produce this show in the spring of 2022, when we’re still coming out of two years of complete isolation, was very meaningful for us. We had people in the audience who were in tears, and who came up to talk to us afterwards about how much it meant to be out, listening to music, and getting to experience that show. So it meant a lot to us, and I’m sure it meant a lot to Yolanda, and it seemed to mean a lot to the listeners as well.
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. So it’s not a topical book, exactly.
It is not a specifically topical book. It pre-dated the war in the Ukraine.
Yet what a perfect way to give voice to what we’re all preoccupied with these days.
Because we premiered it in New York, and because the war in Ukraine was somewhat young at that point, people that I spoke to tended to associate the program more with their own lived experience during the pandemic. But the more I’ve thought about the poems, the more it seems like their message is applicable [to the war]. So that would be a perfectly valid reading of the program, even though it wasn’t specifically created thinking about that.
The mark of a good ICEBERG concert is that it has a little bit of everything. These shows are no exception to that. There are moments that will feel very abstract, and moments that will feel very direct, and everything in between. There are some pieces that use extended techniques and more noise-based compositions, and pieces that utilize triads and chords you would recognize in any pop song. And we always encourage audience members to come and talk with the composers. If you liked the piece, or if you didn’t, come and say so. We’re always happy to engage with listeners in that way. That’s what we want as composers.
What kinds of instrumentation will be involved?
The two concerts both feature a quintet. The first will feature four string players with piano, and the second concert will feature four wind players with a piano. So the instrumentation is traditional, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to hear anything unexpected. For example, my piece utilizes two e-bows, and electromagnet that’s used mainly with guitar, but I’ve placed those on the piano strings to create a drone effect. So there are touches here and there that will be something you don’t expect.
I want to add a personal note of thanks to Crosstown Arts, to Blueshift Ensemble and specifically to Jenny Davis. This will be our fourth visit to Memphis. We feel like we know Blueshift very well, both personally and artistically. We’re frequently working with the same performers every time we come back, and they always do an amazing job. Memphis is our home away from home.
You know, it would have been easy for this collaboration to fall by the wayside during Covid, and it never did. So that’s a testament to everyone on both sides being committed to doing this. So, a huge thank you to those organizations and to Jenny in particular. We’re really looking forward to seeing everyone in Memphis. We’ve missed you!
The Peace Chronicles, Part 1 will be performed on Thursday, August 18, 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., at the Crosstown Concourse East Atrium. The Peace Chronicles, Part 2 will be performed on Friday, August 19, 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., at the Crosstown Theater. Visit crosstownarts.org for more information.
Readers may wonder why an iceberg is present in the music blog, and rightly so. Is this some kind of stealth climate change activism? While its true that climate change has become an unavoidable iceberg in the room of our lives, ICEBERG is quite a different matter: It will be very much present in the East Atrium of Crosstown Concourse today and tomorrow, but it won’t be either melting or dangerous.
Rather, the ICEBERG new music collective hails from New York, a group of 10 young composers who promote the idea that “classical” compositions should draw from a broad array of influences in their work — including popular music, avant-garde techniques, and everything in between. The ICEBERG composers hail from different schools and cultivate radically different sounds, but with their longstanding collaboration with Memphis’ Blueshift Ensemble, they often compose for the same group and present their works during a joint concert. The result is a glimpse into the ever-widening possibilities of art music in the 21st century.
Not to be confused with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), also based in New York, ICEBERG was founded by composer Alex Burtzos in 2016. Almost from the beginning, they’ve cultivated a relationship with Blueshift Ensemble, often being featured in the Continuum Festival that typically takes place this time of year. While there’s no festival per se, Blueshift, which happens to include flautist Jenny Davis, Crosstown Arts’ music department manager, will be performing a selection of compositions from the ICEBERG group.
This weekend, they’ll be joined by another ensemble, the Coalescent Quartet, an all-saxophone group playing everything from traditional to contemporary works. Regular members Nathan Bogert, Michael Shults, Nick Zoulek, and Drew Whiting will be joined by Heidi Radtke, instructor of saxophone at Butler University. All told, Coalescent’s members have taught at Ball State University, Silver Lake College, the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, UW Oshkosh, UW Whitewater, the University of Memphis, and Oakland University, and collectively the quartet has presented master classes across the country.
It’s an all too rare chance to delve deeply into the world of contemporary art music, all live and all free. Why not welcome this ICEBERG into the safe harbor of Memphis, and help keep this cutting-edge collaboration a going concern?
Blueshift Ensemble & Coalescent Quartet perform ICEBERG New Music in the East Atrium of the Crosstown Concourse, Friday, August 20 and Saturday, August 21, at 7:30 p.m. on both nights. Free.
In January 2020, Alex Greene, joined by his jazz band The Rolling Head Orchestra and members of the Blueshift Ensemble, did something extraordinary: They performed original live scores to the silent films A Trip to the Moon and Aelita: Queen of Mars. Back in the first decades of the 20th century, people did it all the time, mostly organists in movie palaces, but occasionally with full ensembles. In the days before sound recording, some more elaborate film productions even came with their own sheet music for the score.
These days, it’s pretty rare, except for groups like the Alloy Orchestra, who have made a career out of performing live scores for films like Metropolis and Phantom of the Opera at film festivals. Just before the pandemic started, Crosstown Arts had commissioned a series of live scores in their new Crosstown Theater, where Greene was artist in residence at the time. “It was kind of the culmination of my residency at Crosstown Arts, and it was great, because they made everything very easy.”
“Very easy” is relative when you’re talking about writing original music for a 12-piece ensemble, including a theremin, that’s designed to sync up perfectly with a moving image. “It’s very different from recording a soundtrack,” says Greene. “You have the whole process of editing to make sure it all syncs up, but in this case, you’re just ‘Once more unto the breach!’ You’re launched into it and by the seat of your pants, hoping you can keep up with the movie, because there’s no pausing … I really wanted it to sync up with the emotional cues of the movie in a very precise way, as if you were watching a film with a pre-recorded soundtrack. That ambition made for a lot more work for all of us.”
Greene and the orchestra’s performance drew raves from the Crosstown audience, and the musician-turned-composer really wanted to jump into the breach again when COVID shut down the theater. He saw a new opportunity at Germantown Performing Arts Center’s new outdoor venue, The Grove, which features a massive video screen behind the stage. “I pitched to them back in January, and we went back and forth a lot about the best time to do it. At the time it seemed like summer was the best bet in terms of COVID, partly because the virus supposedly recedes in the heat somewhat, but also just we assumed once a vaccine became available everyone would be vaccinated by now. In any case, it is an outdoor venue, so even as early as January, we felt pretty safe in moving forward with a big concert like this.”
Greene says when it came time to choose a film, he wanted to “find something dark.” But GPAC director Paul Chandler disagreed. “People are emerging from a very dark year and a half, so let’s do something lighthearted,” Greene says. “I’ve always loved Buster Keaton, so I immediately saw what Buster Keaton films were being distributed by GPAC’s distributor, and the only one was The Cameraman, which I had never seen,” says Greene. “I looked it over and I loved it. I was like ‘Wow, why don’t more people know about this one?’ People know about The General, or Our Hospitality, or Steamboat Bill Jr., but this one is lesser-known, and in a way, that’s better for this kind of project. You’re seeing the film and the music in a very fresh way.”
The Cameraman is considered to be the last film of Keaton’s golden age, where he made incredible strides in big screen comedy and action in the mid-1920s. Keaton, who was used to total creative control, had just gotten a lucrative contract with MGM when he directed and starred in the comedy about a newsreel cameraman trying to impress a female co-worker — and failing spectacularly. It would be the last film Keaton fully controlled. Afterwards, MGM executives clamped down on the auteur’s perceived excesses; later, Keaton would say signing with MGM was the biggest mistake he ever made.
Green wrote the new score for the same band who played in January 2020: Carl Caspersen on bass, Mark Franklin on trumpet, Tom Lonardo on drums, Jim Spake on reed instruments, John Whittemore on pedal steel, and Jenny Davis and Delara Hashemi of the Blueshift Ensemble on flute, Jonathan Kirkscey on cello, Jessica Munson on violin, and Susanna Whitney on bassoon. “Once again, I have this wonderful theremin player from Florence, Alabama, Kate Tayler Hunt, who used to be the concertmaster at the Shoals Symphony. An injury prevented her from continuing as a violinist, so she pivoted and put all her conservatory training into the theremin. She has a very precise ear, and unlike a lot of people who play theremin for texture or sound effects, she can play melodies very accurately, and that just takes it to a whole other level.”
But before the players can bring the magic to The Grove, Greene has to write it down. “I’m scoring as we speak!” he says. “It’s really incredible, it’s a new thing to me. I started doing it in earnest with last year’s live score. Sure, I would write chord changes and lead sheets for my jazz group, but to actually score every note that everyone plays in a 12-piece group, and then to hear them execute it almost perfectly in the first rehearsal … it’s breathtaking!”
The audience will get to see Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra with the Blueshift Ensemble and Kate Tayler Hunt’s live score of Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman at The Grove at GPAC on Saturday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m. Greene says he hopes there are many other opportunities in the future to breathe new life into silent classics.
On January 23rd, Alex Greene debuted a live score for two silent classics at the Crosstown Theater. Greene, who is the Memphis Flyer‘s Music Editor, was a resident artist at Crosstown Arts when he composed new music for Georges Méliès’ 1902 Jules Verne-inspired special effects extravaganza “A Trip to the Moon”and the 1924 silent Soviet sci fi film Aelita: Queen of Mars. The performance, which you can read about here, was captured on video by Crosstown Arts’ Justin Thompson. Since Crosstown’s successful live score concert series has been put on hold, like everything else in the music and film world, they’ve decided to share Greene’s performance. It is amazing. Greene’s normal collaborators, the Rolling Head Orchestra, are joined by the strings, flute, and bassoon of the Blueshift Ensemble and Theremin virtuoso Kate Tayler Hunt. The dynamic ups and downs of the 11-piece mini orchestra bring new life to the visually creative silent films. For those who were there, it’s a chance to re-live a great, unique Memphis performance. For those who missed it, here’s your chance to rectify your oversight and get some quality quarantine entertainment.
This weekend, Crosstown Arts will echo with the work of several Tennessee demolition experts in search of new space. Concertgoers, be advised: wear protective headgear; there will be genre-busting. You may be impacted by the shards of shattered boundaries and preconceptions. But tearing down generic walls is the whole point of the Continuum Music Festival.
“It’s kind of different from what you think of as classical chamber music,” muses festival organizer Jenny Davis. Several ensembles will be performing, at times collaborating with local songwriters or hip hop artists, and all with a regional provenance. “They’re actually all based in Tennessee,” says Davis, director of Memphis’ own Blueshift Ensemble, who will close the festival. “Which is kind of surprising, because you think of all this stuff happening in New York, and L.A., and Chicago. But actually it’s doing really great here as well.” Many heard Blueshift’s recent collaborations with the New York-based ICEBERG composers collective, with several shows in and around the Crosstown Concourse in June. This week’s festival brings the collaboration closer to home.
Nief-Norf
“Nief-Norf are more of an experimental ensemble, based in Knoxville,” she notes. “The director, Andrew Bliss, is the percussion director of the University of Tennessee. They do a big festival every summer for two weeks, where they host a bunch of student composers and performers, with a ton of premieres and performances. This weekend at Continuum, they’ll just have cello and electric guitar. So a small little subset of the ensemble. They’re doing a Steve Reich piece, Electric Counterpoint, for electric guitar and recorded tape.”
Readers familiar with Reich’s Different Trains may recognize the title as the Pat Metheny-performed piece that finishes that album. “And there are two other pieces on the program for cello and electric guitar. Those are both world premieres, actually. One is by [California Institute of the Arts’] Nicholas Deyoe. And the other, “Sequenza for cello,” is by Luciano Berio. His sequenzas – I think there are 14 or 15 of them – explore the extreme ranges of what the instruments can do. So whenever I see those on a program, I definitely get excited.”
chatterbird
Nief-Norf’s opening set will be followed by a “secret show” by one of the more exciting new music ventures in the city. Hint: their shows last year, recorded for an LP released this January, had the whole city raving. The following night keeps things local with the Luna Nova ensemble, major supporters of new composers via their long-running Belvedere Chamber Music Festival. “They do lots of commissioning of new pieces, and they have their festival every June where they have a student composition competition, and they premiere several pieces there,” says Davis. They’ll be followed by a new kind of Nashville sound, chatterbird. “So chatterbird have been around since 2014. They are directed by a flutist, Celine Thackston, who I go way back with from Middle Tennessee State University. Their mission is to explore alternative instrumentation and stylistic diversity. I think they’re really all about inventive experiences, using flute, soprano, bassoon, piano, and percussion. AMRO is donating a really beautiful Steinway piano for the event.”
Rob Jungklas
The festival culminates with two shows on Saturday that take the genre-busting to new heights, including collaborations with local recording artists. Rob Jungklas, whose Blackbirds album arrived earlier this year, will be reinterpreting his new songs in duets with Blueshift cellist Jonathan Kirkscey. Then Blueshift will take center stage. “We’re premiering a piece by our artist in residence, Jonathan Russ, and that’s for 13 musicians – string quartet, plus winds, plus rock band, essentially,” says Davis.
The grand finale will be Blueshift’s performance with local hip hop auteur and visual artist Lawrence Matthews, a.k.a. Don Lifted. “I graduated with a painting degree [from the University of Memphis]. But I also did photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, ceramics,” says Matthews, whose musical shows often include a visual element. “I don’t do shows unless I can do a self-curated event in an alternative space. And I try to completely transform the space. So you might come into a space and see three projections, all in sync with the music. I’m just trying to curate a whole experience.” Expect the same multimedia aesthetic to permeate Saturday’s show, where Blueshift will add new musical elements to Don Lifted tracks. “I’m excited to hear what it sounds like and excited to play with it – to the point where I kinda want Jenny and Jonathan to put strings on the album that I’m working on. I’m definitely excited about how this could work.”
Blueshift Ensemble
For her part, Davis is also excited by the possibilities. “I always thought new music was like, very experimental, no melody, maybe kind of hard to listen to sometimes. But that’s just not the case, and I think there’s really something for everybody in the world of new music now.”
The Continuum Music Festival will take place at the story booth and Crosstown Art Gallery spaces, starting at 7:00 pm, Thursday, August 3rd – Saturday, August 5th.
