For all the rhythmic focus of 21st century music, where beats reign supreme, there’s one type of rhythm that remains elusive: swing. It’s nigh impossible to program machines to swing convincingly, and so it has withered in our musical landscape. But it’s not extinct, as pockets of jazz players in every city make clear. Now, one stalwart jazz pilgrim is single-handedly kicking off a revival of swinging rhythms in a very popular way.
Music lovers can hear it for themselves at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) on Saturday, January 20th, when the show Louis! Louis! Louis! takes the stage. But at the end of the night, fans won’t be screaming the name “Louis!” — it will more likely be “Jumaane!” That would be the trumpeter, singer, and composer Jumaane Smith, who has recently been leading audiences through the glories of swinging, stomping music by way of his three greatest influences, all of whom happen to be named Louis. Taking a deep dive into the music of Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, and Louis Jordan, Smith has found a way to celebrate much of what he loves in older music without surrendering to nostalgia. The way he sees it, those artists are as galvanizing and entertaining today as they were during their heyday. In fact, they’re still inspiring his own compositions, which he blends in with the classics made famous by three guys named Louis.
Armstrong is rightly considered a pillar of all jazz who remained committed to that genre’s pop potential even as it took more esoteric turns after World War II. That’s something he had in common with Prima and Jordan as well, as all of them combined instrumental virtuosity with singing and a flair for showmanship.
“Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima were both singing trumpet players, and Louis Jordan was a singing saxophonist. And I feel as though one informs the other with the melodic choices they make,” says Smith. Beyond that, they also shared a sense of humor and embodied the notion of the complete entertainer, something Smith would like to see more of in jazz.
He would know, having performed in Michael Bublé’s band for the past 17 years. As he told Variety in 2020, that experience showed him just how popular swinging music could be. “It’s always a weird situation when people say, ‘Oh, nobody likes jazz; nobody shows up to jazz concerts,’” he said at the time. “We’re playing to 20,000 to 50,000 people a night, and half the show or more is just straight up big-band jazz.”
At the time, Smith was plugging his then-new album, When You’re Smiling, which features his interpretations of nine standards popularized by the three Louises and one original, “Sweet Baby.” But the album was released in January 2020, after which all tour plans were scuttled. Three years and one pandemic later, Smith has finally brought the show on the road. Now, “we’ve been traveling all over the States for the last year, doing this project,” he says.
Smith is especially proud of the band he’s assembled. “When I’m performing, I always try to make sure that the groove is at a very high level, and I’ve played with some of these musicians for over 20 years now. It’s really exciting to have that sort of interplay and long-term musical relationship within the band. I’ll be using Will Gorman on piano, and a fellow Juilliard graduate of mine, Luke Sellick, on bass. Our guitarist, David Rosenthal, is a supremely versatile musician, and on drums is another Juilliard grad, Carmen Intorre Jr. Then we’ll have Josh Brown playing trombone, and a young, extremely talented saxophonist from England named Ruben Fox.”
With such a band, Smith says, the swinging comes easy. “That’s where the magic really happens, when these players are all performing true to themselves within the framework of the concert. When I started this project, I had no intention of doing a nostalgia experience. The concept is, how can I allow myself to come through the parameters of this lens? This lens being the music of Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, and Louis Jordan. And when the band’s really cooking and in the groove, people in the audience start tapping their feet and they don’t know why. The feeling of the music just makes you excited in that way and makes you want to move.”
Catch Jumaane Smith: Louis! Louis! Louis! at Germantown Performing Arts Center on Saturday, January 20th, 8 p.m. Purchase tickets ($20-$65) at gpacweb.com.
In 1971, three Dartmouth students — a cross-country skier majoring in English, a fencer majoring in philosophy, and a pole vaulter on the pre-med track — enrolled in a dance composition class. They had no dance experience, and their teacher had no faith in their technique. For an assignment, they created a comedic dance, themed around walking, on a squash court. Today, that dance, titled “Walklyndon,” is the oldest dance in the repertoire of Pilobolus, the dance company that formed out of this moment of exploratory movement.
Decades later, Pilobolus still performs this dance, and will perform it this weekend at Germantown Performing Arts Center, along with selections from performances throughout its 50 years. “We’re like a TARDIS [from Doctor Who] in a way,” says Matt Kent, the group’s artistic director. Indeed, the pieces, ranging in length, take audiences through different times, taking inspiration from antiquity, to the Elizabethan era, to the present day.
The style is experimental, holding no rule of dance too high. After all, as Kent says, “[The original students] didn’t know what to do; they also didn’t know what not to do. And so they created a vibe of collaborative improvisation that yields non-traditional dance vocabulary.”
For one of the pieces in this tour, Pilobolus has collaborated with Indigenous storyteller Darlene Kascak from the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation. “The Schaghticoke Tribal Nation,” Kent explains, “are the people who have belonged to and cared for and lived and worked on the land that Pilobolus lives and works on now in Washington, Connecticut.”
The piece explores an Indigenous myth about the Wendigo, a cannibalistic monster created from greed. “It’s become a symbol of colonial greed and more recently corporate greed,” Kent says.
And while there are heavy moments like this in the show, there is also laughter. “The world doesn’t need artists at this moment to tell everyone how shitty everything is — we already know that,” Kent says. “I hope that people leave our show feeling restored, that they’ve been able to laugh, that they’ve been able to feel that they’ve let something wash over them. That it gives them something to think about, but also that they can just kind of enjoy for the beauty that it is.”
Plus, for those looking to embrace the Pilobolus experience even further, the company is offering a free class, open to anyone, dancers and non-dancers alike, ages 14 and up. “It’s so much fun,” Kent says. “And it is not a class where anyone is asked to do movement that they’re gonna fail at. It’s a no-fail zone. … Like I said, we came out of non-dancers, so we know a thing or two about having people be comfortably out of their comfort zone and find ways to express themselves.”
To register for the class or purchase tickets to the performance, visit the links below.
Pilobolus Master Class, University of Memphis, Saturday, February 11, 11 a.m.-1 p.m., free.
Pilobolus, Germantown Performing Arts Center, Saturday, February 11, 8-10 p.m., $25-$75.
It was a momentous evening when Memphis-born jazz giant Charles Lloyd took to the stage Friday, November 4th at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), but not just for the music. Before playing a note, Lloyd reminisced at length about his youth here, including his time at Manassas High School, where “Frank Strozier put the hurt on me,” as Lloyd said, by virtue of his better chops. But he also took a moment to reflect on a recently fallen friend, one who figured heavily in the local jazz scene for decades: Malvin Massey Jr. Lloyd, who said he spoke with Massey often in his comings and goings through Memphis. And GPAC executive director Paul Chandler even paid tribute to Massey’s manner of speaking, quoting words spoken at his funeral, “Jazz’s human voice was Malvin. Malvin Massey sounded like jazz.”
For countless Memphians over the decades, that was literally true, as his voice wove in with the music of WUMR, the University of Memphis’ jazz-oriented station. Massey, who died this October 29th, became the station’s general manager in 2009, but he’d already been involved with the station nearly 20 years by then, serving as volunteer DJ, music director, and program director over that time. And when Massey left the station in 2020, he carried on promoting what he often called “that classic African-American art form called jazz,” joining co-host Howard Robertson for the popular Kudzukian podcast, Riffin’ on Jazz.
“He told me some years ago that a fan described his voice as ‘a whiskey baritone,’” says Robertson, whose words on Massey’s voice at the funeral were quoted by Chandler. But Robertson personally remembers when Massey’s voice was likely only a pre-teen squeak. “Malvin and I go way back to junior high school. We went to seventh grade together at Corry Junior High, right here in Memphis. We both thought at the time that we were God’s gift to the saxophone, and we were fiercely competitive. Everybody back then was in a band; we were in bands from the time we were 12 years old.”
Massey kept playing music all his life, but he really built a career in radio. Robertson, also boasting years of experience in radio, observes that “he helped build WUMR into one of the best jazz stations in the country. It was absolutely one of the finest university-owned and operated radio stations anywhere.” Indeed, it was one of only eight such stations in the country and carries on today after its rebirth as WYXR, supported by a partnership between the university, Crosstown Concourse, and The Daily Memphian.
There, Massey became a trusted mentor to many. Social media comments upon the announcement of his death reflected as much. “If it wasn’t for Malvin and the chance he gave me at WUMR as a high school graduate, I may have never gone to the University of Memphis,” wrote one former associate. “He was a great guy and mentor to me,” wrote another.
More recently, Massey’s podcast work is distinctive; the fact that both he and Robertson played music all their lives gave Riffin’ on Jazz a unique spin right out of the gate, not least because the hosts interjected bits of jazz lore they’d picked up over the decades.
“That’s how we learned! And that’s why we were thrilled to be able to do the show like that,” Robertson says. “We learned about it at the feet of old guys — our daddies, our uncles, many older people. And we’re sitting on the floor in front of a stereo or hi-fi, reading the album covers, and they’re talking about the music and the artists. And in a lot of cases, they knew them because a lot of them were from Memphis or came through Memphis, so they might be telling stories about them and what-not. And we’d be listening to the music, becoming educated and informed about who was playing what on what album cuts. There was all that great information you could get at that time from the liner notes.”
Reflecting on his last, great collaboration with Massey, Robertson says, “We learned to play together; we learned music together. And to have the opportunity to get back together and do this show, in our seasoned stage of life, was an incredible privilege to me. We had a great time.”
His gratitude echoes the words Massey spoke so often on the air, signing off from a program: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”
Charles Lloyd (Photo courtesy Forest Farm Music + Art)
It’s not every day one gets to swap emails with a living, breathing creative dynamo like Memphis native Charles Lloyd. But it’s not every day that finds him poised for what looks to be a euphoric homecoming, where Lloyd will rejoin an erstwhile collaborator who was living in Memphis recently, the phenomenal guitarist Anthony Wilson. Local music fans are already abuzz with news of their appearance at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) on November 4th.
Wilson, a Crosstown Arts Resident Composer in 2021, made a resounding impression on the Memphis jazz scene while visiting here, sitting in with many artists even as he appeared in shows of his own. And, as he explains in a recent Facebook post, an extended stay here resonated deeply with his family history:
Since 2018 I’ve been working on a project of music & photography inspired by my family history in the Mississippi Delta, as well as other histories and vibrations centered in that most essential American space. I’ve been missing being there since my last visit in May. I’ll be so happy to return to the Delta at the end of this month for a few days, just before a tour w/ Charles Lloyd, who was born and raised in Memphis—the northern entry point to the Delta—and also shares deep history in Mississippi. It feels symbolic that we’ll play our first show of our tour in Memphis, and that we can begin by communing with the energies and voices of the lands and the waters and the endless skies and the ancestors who speak to and through us.
To learn more about their collaboration, and Lloyd’s own roots here, I reached out to the saxophone and flute master via email, where we conducted an interview-by-correspondence. What follows is a glimpse into the creative process of one of jazz’s greatest living innovators.
Memphis Flyer:Blue Note has recently released your Trio of Trios album set. What are your feelings about the trio as an intentional approach to music? Many fellow jazz players feel that there’s something charmed about a trio in particular. And that form has a charmed history in jazz, from Jimmy Giufre’s albums, to Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, and beyond. What are some great examples of trios that have inspired you?
Charles Lloyd: Maestro Rollins’ Way Out West is great, as is Giufre. When I was a young man in NYC I used to play opposite Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard. I have always loved his trios, but especially the one with my friend Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. The trio format gives a lot of space to the music.
How did the Ocean album specifically come about? Anthony Wilson was a resident artist here at Crosstown Arts not long ago, and the Memphis music world was quite inspired by him.
TheOcean Trio, which is the second trio in the Trio of Trios trilogy, was recorded in the one hundred and fifty-year-old Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, California. I have performed there more than any other venue in the world — so it was very relaxed, kind of like my extended living room. The concert was live-streamed in September 2020, during the pandemic, so there is no audience. I asked Gerald Clayton to join me on piano — he has been touring and recording with me since 2013. And I invited Anthony Wilson on guitar, they both live in L.A. and were easily able to make the drive up. They both happen to be sons of famous musician fathers — Gerald is the son of bass legend John Clayton, while Anthony is the son of celebrated band leader, trumpeter, composer and arranger with strong Memphis roots, Gerald Wilson. When I moved from Memphis to Los Angeles to go to the University of Southern California (USC), I played lead alto in Gerald Wilson’s Big Band. So having Anthony playing with me now is like coming full circle. He is also a great composer and arranger.
Who will be playing in your trio at GPAC on November 4th?
At GPAC, Anthony and I will be joined by an amazing bass player, Harish Raghavan. Harish has a big rich sound and he has an ability to propel the music forward.
When I was recording The Water Is Wide, one of the engineers told me how much Anthony Wilson loved my playing. “You should hear him sometime,” he said. I didn’t know Anthony at that time; we had never met. But the fact that he was Gerald’s son meant a lot to me. Eventually we met, and then later, I heard him play (he also has a great singing voice!). He has been touring with Diana Krall for the last 15 years or so and has an extremely busy schedule. Covid slowed things down and gave us the perfect opportunity to get together. We are continuing to forge a path together in the music. Anthony has been exploring his Memphis roots in recent years, so it feels appropriate that we will launch the start of this tour here in Memphis at GPAC.
You’re known for your innovation, and collaborations outside of the jazz world. As someone who evolves so relentlessly, how does it feel to be bringing your newest music to Memphis? You’ve explored so many styles since you left your hometown. Are there still echoes of your earliest playing in what you play today?
I’m in service. Music was always my inspiration and consolation — I hope I can bring that to someone and lift them up. Nancy Wilson called me a bluesman on a spiritual journey. The blues are in my DNA but I’m also an explorer looking for that perfect sound. The sound that will allow me to put my horn down and go back into the woods. But the Lord has this carrot he dangles in front of me… “Not yet Charles, not yet. Just a little bit further.”
The Charles Lloyd Trio will play GPAC on Friday, November 4, 8 p.m. Click here for tickets.
The zydeco tradition is to evolve,” Terrance Simien tells me. It’s a refreshing idea in a genre that’s so identified with roots music that purists of all kinds gravitate toward it, and that unique reading of the tradition will take center stage when Terrance Simien and the Zydeco Experience appear at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) this Saturday.
“You’ve got a lot of people that hear zydeco music from a certain period, and think, ‘Oh, if it doesn’t sound like that, it’s not zydeco.’ But when I listen to zydeco music as a whole, I’ve always heard an expansion. Every zydeco artist has their own interpretation of the music, in their own voice.”
It’s a lesson that Simien learned right out of the gate, when he was still a teenager, unexpectedly catapulted from his hometown of Mallet, Louisiana, into the world of rock royalty. “My career started out like this,” he explains. “I did two 45s that I produced myself, released in 1982 and 1983. I was still a kid. Around that time, Paul Simon was thinking, ‘I’ve got to have a zydeco song on my next record.’ It was before he was even calling it Graceland. So he had Dickie Landry find three bands to do a session with him, and my band was one of them. In the end, he decided that we weren’t gonna make the album, but he wanted to do something special for us. So I recorded this Clifton Chenier song, ‘You Used to Call Me,’ and Paul went back and put these five-part harmonies on it, making it sound like Simon & Garfunkel! To hear Paul take a zydeco song and bring it into that world, I couldn’t sleep for days with all the ideas I got from what he did. That was in 1985, and I’ve been on the road ever since.”
Simien kept evolving, and so did his brand of zydeco. Many of his mentors were not zydeco artists at all. “I was mentored by some of the best. In addition to John Delafose and Clifton Chenier, Dr. John, Art Neville, Allen Toussaint, Dickie Landry, and Taj Mahal all mentored me,” he says. “Every last one of them did their best to help me any way they could. My mission now is to pay it forward and do the same with younger artists. I’m nowhere near the level those guys were and will never be, but I see it as a mission. My wife and I have a nonprofit called Music Matters, and we try to mentor people in the business.”
He also pays special attention to bringing his history and music to much younger folks, and he’ll be hosting a kid-friendly matinee show on Friday, October 21st, at 10 a.m., where children are encouraged to dance and sing along. He’ll also bring a strong family vibe to his Saturday show, where his daughter, local singer/songwriter Marcella Simien, will make a cameo. Seeing her thrive here is one reason Simien is especially fond of Memphis.
“I can’t thank Memphis enough for embracing my daughter like they did,” he says. “Marcella has seen what a roller coaster the music business is, but she’s embraced it. That’s what she wanted to do. She went to the Memphis College of Art, and what an awesome school. That’s where she learned to have confidence in being creative, knowing what it takes, that it’s a process.”
But Marcella won’t be his only guest: Drummer George Receli will also make an appearance. “At 17, George left Hammond, Louisiana, to tour with Edgar and Johnny Winter,” says Simien. “Since then, he’s played with Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, James Brown, Keith Richards, and many others. I’m even going to do a little interview — he has these amazing stories. And we’re going to play together. He played on and produced our last record that won a Grammy, Dockside Sessions.”
Ultimately, reflecting on his daughter’s cameo, Simien is encouraged by zydeco’s continued appeal to young people. “Because the music evolves,” he says, “it connects with the youth of today. We’re not just doing this to keep it alive; we’re doing it because it is alive.”
Flailing musicians take heart at this tale: Chuck Leavell, a keyboardist of no small accomplishment, hit a rough patch at the turn of the 1980s. As he neared the age of 30, the best option in his life seemed to be … farming? Granted, he loved the tree farm near Macon, Georgia, that he’d settled on. But, as his wife Rose Lane notes in The Tree Man, a documentary on Leavell’s life, “Chuck comes in; he’s kind of downtrodden a little bit because his life isn’t going the way he wanted it to. He said, ‘I’m just gonna not do my piano. I’m just gonna have a farm; We’re gonna live out here on the farm, everything’s gonna be great.’ And I’m going, ‘No, it’s not going to be like that.’” Rose Lane knew something Leavell didn’t: She’d received a phone call earlier, arranging to have Leavell audition for the Rolling Stones.
Now Leavell has been with the band 40 years, and his penchant for organization has paid off. “I began taking copious amounts of notes,” he says in the film of his early days with the Stones. “Eventually they gave me the moniker of musical director. I kinda scoff at that because Mick and Keith are the musical directors.”
And yet, as the Stones’ Ronnie Wood himself admits on camera, “He’s indispensable — an indispensable part of our setup.”
Nevertheless, the Rolling Stones are but one chapter in the storied life’s journey that Leavell has pursued. Most listeners know his work, if not his name, via recordings by the Allman Brothers Band at their peak, namely the piano-laden instrumental, “Jessica.” But there has been so much more. That’s the point of a special event at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) on Thursday, September 29th: to explore every angle of a very multifaceted life.
Reached by phone at his tree farm, Leavell describes the unique experience in store that night. “I have a recent documentary out called The Tree Man, and we’re going to show about a 30-minute version of it, to get people warmed up to who I am, what I do, and see some of the comments that some of my fellow artists have been kind enough to make about me,” Leavell says. “After that, I’ll come onstage with a moderator, Matt Ross-Spang, and Matt will cue me with some questions. We’ll discuss some specific parts of the career and the fact that I’ve worked with the Stones for 40 years and had the pleasure of working with Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and other artists. So, we’ll tell some stories along the way, and that segment will probably be an hour. The audience is welcome to ask any questions. Then we’ll wrap it up with a song. I think it’s going to make for a really fun night.”
Lest readers think he will be speaking more than playing, note that Leavell will have a piano nearby for the proceedings. “For instance,” he says, “when we talk about Eric Clapton, I’ll do a song from when I worked with him. When we talk about the Stones, I’ll do a song or two I did with them. I’ll even play some Allman Brothers and Sea Level. I’ll play at least one song for every period of my life represented, and tell some stories along the way.”
While Leavell first cut his teeth in the Muscle Shoals area as a teenager, he says Memphis has always had a special place in his heart. “I just love being in Memphis,” he says. “The history speaks for itself. The music is all over the place. During the inaugural Mempho Festival five years ago, we did a presentation called Stone’s Throw, which is some of the side men from the Rolling Stones — Bernard Fowler, Lisa Fischer, myself, and Tim Ries on sax. We did an all-Stones set at the first Mempho. I’ve had a lot of great experiences in Memphis.”
Speaking of the Mempho Music Festival (running from September 30th through October 2nd), Leavell lets it be known that he won’t be leaving Memphis right away after his GPAC appearance. “I’ll be hanging out the next couple of days because Mempho is going on,” he says. “And I’ll be making some surprise appearances on Friday and Saturday with some bands. I’ll be looking forward to that as well.”
Awadagin Pratt (Photo: Courtesy of Iris Orchestra)
The Iris Orchestra’s closing concert of the 2021-2022 season, on April 23rd and 24th, was nearly its swan song. For a moment, it appeared that the much-loved collection of virtuosos from around the world, who gather in Memphis for a few select concerts every year, was unsustainable. The notion was deeply troubling for founder and conductor Michael Stern, but he wanted to do the moment justice. “We expressly chose Beethoven’s 5th Symphony because we thought for a moment that we’d be suspending operations, and that this would have been our last concert ever,” says Stern. “I wanted to bring full closure. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony closed our very first concert ever, in 2000. So I thought, if this is going to be our last concert, let it also feature the piece that closed our first concert. But with joy I can say that Iris is not going away!”
As it turns out, Iris will stick around, albeit in new form. After the upcoming concerts, Iris Orchestra will be known as the Iris Collective. “The musicians themselves grouped together, committed to the idea that they simply would not let Iris go away. It was absolutely musician driven. And Iris will continue on. It’s going to have a different feel. I will be less involved, and it will be an amalgam of ensembles, chamber music, orchestra concerts, and new ways of imagining community engagement,” Stern says.
The fortuitous change will be foreshadowed by Iris’ chamber music concert on April 24th. “It’s entirely Iris musicians playing Beethoven’s Septet in E-flat Major, and it’s a fantastic group. It gives a little taste of what the Iris Collective is going to be about.”
Reinvention is par for the course for an organization that’s been dedicated to reimagining music from the beginning, founded to be “an ensemble for the 21st century — flexible, non-hierarchical, and passionate about the highest standards of performance.” And, as Stern sees it, this season’s last program embodies all of Iris’ ideals at once. “We have a wonderful piece from the 20th century, not one but two new pieces by essential American composers, and then an iconic work from the canon. That, in a nutshell, is what Iris is about.”
Stern is especially enthusiastic about the new works. “When we started Iris 22 years ago,” says Stern, “the express intention was, in part, to nurture and promote the music of our time, especially American composers. So this is quite a lovely thing, to have a co-commissioning relationship with two pieces in the program.
“Jonathan Leshnoff has been a great partner and friend to us since we commissioned him to write his first symphony, which was a companion piece to Beethoven’s 9th. This new piece was written to commemorate our 20th anniversary in 2020, which is why he called the piece Score. It’s not only a reference to sheet music, it also means 20 years. Since the premiere got delayed by two years because of Covid, this is a long overdue and very welcome performance.
“And Jessie Montgomery is one of the most compelling voices of the last two or three years, for good reason,” Stern continues. “I’ve done quite a few of Jessie’s works now. This piece especially, Rounds for Piano and String Orchestra, is playful and dancing and really lovely. Awadagin Pratt is making his solo piano debut with us on Jessie’s piece, which she wrote specifically for him. He is a force. A wonderful pianist, a wonderful musician.”
That forward-thinking spirit is also apparent in the classics Iris will present on April 23rd, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, Op. 25, the “Classical.” Stern describes the latter piece as “turning a Haydn symphony on its ear. Through the prism of the early 20th century, Prokofiev writes this really tongue-in-cheek and wonderfully energetic music, doing something new. Beethoven, in his time, was also doing something new. He often said he was writing music for the future. Prokofiev was writing at the dawn of the 20th century, and Beethoven was writing at the dawn of the 19th century. And both were trying to find a new way of speaking in the world.”
Iris Orchestra, featuring Awadagin Pratt, piano, presents Where Past & Future Gather, Saturday, April 23rd, 7:30 p.m. at GPAC; and Iris at the Brooks: Beethoven, Sunday, April 24th, 3 p.m. at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Iris Orchestra will come to an end after the 2021-2022 season.
A press release issued Monday said that in the past 18 months, the orchestra had “confronted significant financial and operational challenges.” It also said the organization was facing “the inevitable and formidable task of transitioning in the near future to new artistic and executive leadership, while also grappling with the additional burdens and restrictions of Covid-19 in an altered philanthropic environment.”
The final concerts will be the weekend of April 23-24, 2022. That program will include Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — the work Iris played during its inaugural concert 22 years ago.
The 2021-2022 season will continue as planned, including all GPAC and Brooks Museum concerts, and all scheduled community engagements.
Iris Orchestra began in September 2000 as an experiment, founded by Michael Stern and Albert Pertalion in partnership with the City of Germantown. The organization transitioned from a municipally funded orchestra to an independent organization funded primarily by private contributions and institutional grants.
It was noted for its unusual structure that brought in orchestra members from around the country and abroad for a handful of performances every year, mainly at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. The roster of guest artists has included some of the world’s top performers.
Under Stern’s leadership, the orchestra made several recordings, performed new as well as old reliable works, and commissioned works by American composers. It also was involved in community arts education, including establishment of the Iris Artists Fellowship Program.
Yo-Yo Ma was the first soloist in the group’s inaugural concert and he appeared with Iris again 10 years later. Other luminaries who performed with Irish include Yefim Bronfman, Garrick Ohlsson, Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, and Pinchas Zukerman.
Commissioned composers include Anna Clyne, Chris Brubeck, Jonathan Leshnoff, Ned Rorem, Huang Ruo, and Edgar Meyer.
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.
Iris Orchestra, that unique hybrid organization headquartered at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC), yet made up of stellar classical players from across the country and the world, continues apace as one of the most relevant and innovative classical organizations of our time. With the pandemic curtailing any live performances, Iris, helmed by conductor Michael Stern, carries on its multi-dimensional work in other media.
Courtesy Iris Orchestra
Michael Stern
As we saw last fall, the facilities at GPAC, coupled with the recording know-how of engineer Jamey Lamar, who captures all of their performances, the orchestra has adapted to a COVID-afflicted world by presenting freshly-recorded performances online in lieu of their regular concert season. Tomorrow and Sunday, their February performances will go live online, featuring performances recorded last weekend, even as Memphis suffered its first wave of February ice and snow.
Beyond that, this month has also witnessed the release of an album boasting the world premiere of a concerto by composer Bruce Adolphe, recorded at GPAC when it was performed by Iris in 2015. Earlier this week, I spoke with Stern about both the album and the online concerts. By the end of our conversation, I was more convinced than ever of our good fortune in hosting this committed group of players.
Memphis Flyer:How did Iris Orchestra come to be involved in this premiere of Bruce Adlophe’s work,I Will Not Remain Silent?
Michael Stern: This is all a happy confluence of events. Sharon Roffman, the featured soloist, is an incredible force. Her mother’s very involved in education and the violin. Sharon had known Bruce Adolphe since she was a kid. He had this idea to write this piece about Joachim Prinz, who was of course so closely aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr., and as it turns out, Prinz married Sharon’s parents. Allen Cohen
Sharon Roffman
But above and beyond that, they were both interested in this project which was, first and foremost, a piece of wonderful new music. Secondly, a way to raise awareness about Rabbi Joachim Prinz and Martin Luther King, and to have that connection in terms of civil rights and social justice. But the other thing is, Sharon is passionately committed to education and engagement, especially with young people. Not only were we able to organize the premiere, by rehearsing and recording and performing it, but she, largely, along with Iris Orchestra, organized this community-wide education and engagement project embedded in the curriculum that she distributed to schools and churches and synagogues. We did something at the Jewish Community Center, as I recall, as well as the Civil Rights Museum and Houston High School. We had a writing project associated with it. We had an art project associated with it. And for kids across all lines to learn about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, and to learn about 1930’s in Germany and Joachim Prinz and Nazism, was a wonderful experience. So, all the way around it was a really rewarding moment.
The piece itself is so wonderful. I’ve done it with her since our premiere, and it holds up great. It’s just a really terrific composition, which really speaks to the fundamental subject matter and its importance.
I’ve see the curriculum. It’s really impressive. And it seems the piece itself addresses the subject matter thematically, with orchestral hits battling, so to speak, with this solitary, soaring voice of Sharon’s violin. It’s a striking contrast, and captures the power of a solitary voice speaking truth to power.
I agree. I will say that he’s got a program to it. The first movement is Joachim Prinz in Europe, and the second movement is Joachim Prinz in America. But it doesn’t sound manipulative at all. It doesn’t sound arch. It sounds very authentic and sincere and organic, and the entire piece, just from a musical point of view, works really well.
The second movement really does evoke a new time, a new atmosphere.
It also just underlines the idea that challenge, struggle and eventually overcoming and coming to a place of peace and triumph really transcends color, it transcends religion, it transcends geography. It just is what it is in terms of the human experience and the human condition. I appreciated Bruce’s intent from the beginning. The way he wrote the piece. Sharon was unbelievably devoted to the project, and in it 150 percent. It was inspiring to work on.
So the educational outreach happened around the time of the premiere and the recording in 2015?
Yes, but don’t say the word outreach. It sounds like that’s a one way thing. I prefer the word engagement. My mindset in doing something like this is not to deliver information, it’s to engage young people in this conversation. And I think Sharon especially, and all of us, tried to do that and I think we did do that. And one thing Bruce did, which was fantastic, was, he created a chamber version of the piece. So when we did go around, notably to the high school, we were able to talk about the story and to play some of the concerto without requiring the full orchestra to come. Instead, we could use a chamber ensemble and it made it much more mobile. And then of course, the fact that it was picked up by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music is meaningful, because the music stands as an American concerto, but beyond that, it also has these extra-musical, historical echoes which fit that series absolutely perfectly. I’m proud that our contribution to that series came out so well.
What we did for those concerts was just a string orchestra. Not the largest, not the smallest, somewhere in the middle. But nothing we played was an adaptation of anything. We played the pieces the way they were meant to be played.
I would say that COVID interrupted everybody’s plans for a lot of reasons. We can’t be too close to one another on stage, so that puts a cap on the number of players you can have onstage or in the hall at one time. Everybody has to be masked. There are all sorts of precautions and protocols. Beyond that, you can’t have wind players on the stage. The conventional wisdom is that wind players expel more droplets and more of a risk in terms of transmission, than strings or harp or piano would be. So we made the decision that we would just play whatever music we could play. And right now that’s music for strings only. But we present these programs without any sense of compromise. Would we like to get 40-60 more players onstage? Sure. Just not right now. We have to take safety first.
We had the cancellation of our soloist in the February slot. He couldn’t travel because of COVID concerns. He’s healthy, but just due to an abundance of caution he cancelled. Similarly our guest soloist and conductor, Jeffrey Kahane, who was going to play and conduct the March concert, also cancelled. And then we were faced with what do we do? We had already changed those programs, to piece for string orchestra only, now we had to change them again to accommodate those cancellations. And we just made the decision on the fly that we would overload the week and put more performance capture in the can, so we would have performances for February and March without imposing a second trip for all the musicians or for me or the engineers, because we didn’t know, and frankly still don’t know, even though vaccines are rolling out slowly, we still don’t know what the numbers are going to look like in early February and March. So we thought, let’s get as much music recorded as possible, and we’ll broadcast that for our February and March offerings, and keep our fingers crossed for May.
What we did was we took some really great music for strings alone. For February, we have this wonderful piece, a young, extraordinarily talented American composer, Jessie Montgomery, whose music is not only terrific, but also informed by her sense of activism and social justice, and is one of the brightest lights in American music right now. She wrote a piece called ‘Banner,’ which celebrates the 150th Anniversary of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner. But in her piece, built into this celebration, is also the awareness that the Star Spangled Banner should, but doesn’t actually, speak for everybody in this country. And to make those voices, who might be marginalized by the Banner or who have not been as included, historically, she wrote a piece which really reflected on the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star Spangled Banner in a really beautiful way. And we go through that piece… For the February presentation, I was able to sit down with Jessie and we had a conversation about the piece. And that’s a really incredible addition to the program.
On New Album and in Virtual Concerts, Iris Orchestra is Undaunted (2)
We also did this incredibly beautiful, heartrendingly beautiful piece by Puccini, called the Chrysanthemums, which he wrote as a memorial to a great friend of his who passed away. And then we finish with one of the great pieces in the string repertoire, the Dvořák String Serenade. And then in March, we have two other masterpieces, in terms of string repertoire. Mozart’s F major Divertimento for Strings, K138, and the great Tchaikovsky String Serenade. So in these two programs, we’ve got Dvořák and Tchaikovsky and Puccini and Montgomery, and the interview with Jessie. I think it’s a really great overview of some terrific music, and it lets us keep our contact with our public without needing to stop the music because of COVID. So that made us all very happy.
It’s a wonderfully diverse collection. Contrasting the cutting edge, Jessie Montgomery, with Mozart…
Well, we try! We try. Many of us hadn’t seen each other for almost a year. The October recording was a very small group of musicians. It was a chamber ensemble. So it was wonderful to be together.
Were there any special arrangements with the host families?
We spared the host families. We could not, and we would not, put that imposition on them. This is not the time to invite other people to your house, even cherished friends. So we put everybody up in a hotel.
Jessie didn’t perform with Iris, but Jessie Montgomery is a force of nature. She’s a wonderful violinist. She was composing a lot of music while she was still an active member of a regular string quartet, and she’s doing her doctorate at Princeton University. She is a very busy, very talented, very accomplished woman.
We’ve had this tradition of having chamber concerts at Brooks Museum. Of course we could not do that, but we didn’t want to deprive our audience of anything, so three of our musicians stayed an extra day. Jamey stayed the extra day, and they got that filmed and it was a great success.
I think there are some silver linings to COVID. Not many. It’s been a terrible time. And hopefully now, with a new feeling in the country, we can maybe start to address some of the divisiveness and some of the rancor. But I do think you need to try to see some good in everything. COVID has taken its toll, and yet in the process of going through it, the fact that we were isolated, but also technically involved with the regular routine of everything, meant that people could actually consider what was happening.
And then you had the issues that were in front of all of us, and rightly so, with long overdue conversations, and I think people considering the real meaning, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or the environmental issues before us, or the terrible political divisiveness, we were able to process that with a little less knee jerk reaction and a little more thoughtfulness. And I do think, and I’m very encouraged by the fact that the reaction to those things did not simply become a flash point for a few weeks and then fade. I think the awareness that we are going to do better, and the awareness that the world is a little closer to real justice, is here to stay. And I think that is a really healthy thing. I can’t help but think that maybe that in and of itself is worth celebrating, and that’s a good thing.
Watch Bruce Adophe discuss “I Will Not Remain Silent” below.
On New Album and in Virtual Concerts, Iris Orchestra is Undaunted
Courtesy Iris Orchestra 
Allen Cohen 