Continuum Music Festival – Memphis Flyer

Jamie Harmon

Project Logic, with DJ Logic, Vernon Reid, MonoNeon, and Daru Jones

The Continuum Music Festival has come and gone once again, leaving many reeling from over two solid days of innovative sounds. Here, we present a slideshow of some highlights, by photographers Jamie Harmon and Jillian Baron.

Your faithful correspondent was able to witness one highlight of the weekend, Opera Memphis’ staging of the modern opera As One, by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettists Kimberly Reed and Mark Campbell. Since its premier in 2014, this has become the most produced new opera in North America, and upon seeing the performance at Continuum, it was easy to see why.
Jillian Baron for Opera Memphis

Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Kelly, baritone, in As One

Featuring Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Kelly, baritone, singing with the Blueshift Ensemble String Quartet (Marisa Polesky, Jessie Munson, Beth Luscombe, Alisa Horn), the piece tells a heart-wrenching saga of a transgender person grappling with her identity. The two singers orbit around each other throughout, each furthering the tale of a young boy’s struggle with, and gradual acceptance of, his often secret female identity. The effect of the two singers inhabiting different aspects of one life is indescribably captivating; coupled with the string quartet, it is gripping.

The music ranges from the hypnotic or pastoral pulses of childhood, to ever more strident and dissonant harmonies as the dual protagonist, Hannah after and Hannah before, confronts misunderstanding and threats from the world at large.

For impressions of the remainder of the festival, I asked Paul Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways, to describe his impressions of the festival’s second day.
Jamie Harmon

New Memphis Colorways

Paul Taylor: There was a restorative yoga thing led by Sean Murphy and Anne Froning. That was a nice addition to both days. Sean does a really interesting looping with a bunch of wind instruments and delay pedals. Pretty cool.

The Theremin-Lap Steel duo was super beautiful and tranquil. It was really refreshing and surprising. They took it in a direction that was totally not directly linked to the expected sounds of those instruments.

Then I played my set, which was a re-imagining of my New Memphis Colorways Vignettes. That’s a project I’m doing on social media this year, releasing little 60-second video clips that are intended to exist only on social media. They’re not advertisements for anything else. They’ve just reached their destination and I’m done with it when they wind up on social media, as art intended to live there.

But I decided, for this show, to reanimate them into longer versions by mapping out sections of each of the videos to a MIDI controller, so I could trigger start points in the video and audio in each of them, and spontaneously improvise longer compositions. And that sort of created new chord changes and beats by utilizing different start points as they were not originally intended to be. And I think I survived relatively unscathed.

Directly after me it was the Blueshift Ensemble playing music by ICEBERG. And the pieces they played were just astonishing. I was absolutely blown away at the breadth and scope of those tunes. They’re really challenging, they’re really enlightening.

And after that was Project Logic. That was a really interesting show, in that I think a lot of people expected Vernon Reid to just be a shredder, which he is, but man, he was playing the holy hell out of funky neo-soul repetitive groove guitar, and those guys were in a trance for, like, two hours straight. They had the audience completely entranced. And the venue and lights were fantastic.

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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.