This is pretty exciting: video from today's rehearsal of the Northwest Sinfonietta performing with pianist Mark Salman.
Sounds like the show will be in Seattle this Friday, Tacoma on Saturday, and then Puyallup on Sunday. Details here.
Jay-Z played to a sold out house at the Pepsi Center last night in Denver. It was my first Jay-Z concert. I was expecting it to be good and he didn't disappoint.
It was an impressive show. The music and performance were solid.
The lighting and the graphics projected on the stage backdrop added to the show and made it fun to watch.
Jay-Z is a great entertainer and showman. He lives up to the accolades as "the new Sinatra."
My brother Tim and I went to Disney Concert Hall last night to see Gustavo Dudamel perform in his debut weekend there as Artistic Director of the LA Philharmonic. The music was great; the sound was unbelievable. They played Mahler's First Symphony, and the marriage of composition with musicianship (the two elements of musical performance that you can copyright) was every bit as fraught with power and genius as the performance Burge and I saw of Bob Dylan and his band in Seattle earlier this week.
I may try later to embad in this post an iPhone video of the accolades Dudamel received at the end of the show, accolades to which he responded by walking into the orchestra and calling out the sections and principal players who performed the piece brilliantly. I'll reserve comment on Dudamel himself, except to say that I now more nearly understand what a conductor does. A metaphor that comes to mind is of the visiting representative of a civilization from another galaxy; although his technology is far, far advanced, everything in the complex craft transporting him can be thrown into motion from a simple joystick, or the natural gestures of his organic form (the opposite of the instrument panel in a jet, or the cascading nav bars of newer versions of Microsoft Word).
But my chief purpose here is to book-end my "Hiking Disney Concert Hall" post, about an earlier traversal of the exterior of this extraordinary building. Last night, my brother Tim and I got to explore the inside!
The above is of a lecture (and small performance?) area which before we were only able to look down upon from an exterior window (see the last picture from my prior post). The rectangular panels that look darker in the picture above appear so because they are drilled full of holes; this has something to do with the acoustic performance of the space (the main performance hall has the same thing going on).
We took a tour for new subscribers before the show, and the guild told us that the HVAC system was encased in Douglas Fir. To the right is a picture of part of the system from the level of the main floor.
Below is a picture where you can see the steel inside the wood.It is an incredible building.
The only thing in Seattle that is comparable, as elegant on the outside and as hospitable, ennobling and civilized on the inside, is the downtown Seattle Public Library.
Here is a pic I tweeted last night, of Dudamel and the orchestra bowing to the back of the house at the end of the night.
I went to the Henry tonight to see a film about the Herbert Bayer Earthworks in Kent. Before the screening, a cellist named Paul Rucker played a piece that he said would evoke the Earthworks. It was moving.
A couple minutes into the music, I decided that there is no sound as sublime as a single cello played as well as Paul Rucker was playing it. Moreover, I was taken with the idea that I may never have heard a better piece for cello than the piece this cellist was playing at this moment.
I resisted the temptation to take out my iPhone to attempt to record what I was hearing. If I was walking or having a good glass of wine or seeing a movie, sure, I could take the device out and tweet and snap a pic or record a video or whatever - that's how I roll and that's the edge I use to lean into the moment. But this was a cello and here was an artist and I had to allow that there yet might be some place in the world for an antiquated singular attentiveness to be a valid means of experience.
He then hit a stretch so profound my better instinct prevailed and I pulled out the iPhone and hit record on the voice memo app. I only caught the last minute 47 seconds. It was largely pizzicato, and I was disappointed because I don't care for pizzicato. I shrugged the disappointment off. When the end credits for the movie rolled, I googled his name and figured out where I might find his music.
I should have recorded from 10 seconds into the piece. Because it wasn't a piece. It was an improvisation. And the AV person at the Henry who meant to record it had technical issues, and missed it.
I learned this from Paul Rucker himself. I met him at the reception following the movie, and asked him the name of his piece. "'Earthworks,' I guess," he said. He had made it up as he went. His friend or girlfriend next to him explained, "he does this all the time." Paul Rucker added, "That one's gone, I guess; it was one of a kind."
The recording would not have been it. Some recordings are it, mind you: a cassette tape recording of Bartok's Second Piano Concerto was it and, after my then-wife erased it to spite me, I went through seemingly every recording of it ever published, but never found it again.
But I was there, tonight, for the one-time-only performance of Earthworks, an improvisation for single cello by Paul Rucker. I was mostly there. I'm getting better at being in one place. There is no settled method for that, however. Not for me.
The Arctic Monkeys have a new sound.
A Billboard article last month explains that the change is a deliberate effort to win over the US market. The band became a sensation in the UK through an album of melodic pop songs - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - that is as earnest and as good as any early Beatles album. Apparently, though, it's necessary to adapt to meet the tastes of the US market. In their latest album, Humbug, says Billboard, "some of the typically British indie-isms -- the frantic guitars and Turner's kitchen-sink lyrics -- have been jettisoned in favour of a more universally appealing, darker rock sound."
The band also now sports longer hair. Burge and I saw them last night at the Showbox in Seattle (pictured above). When we last saw them there, in May 2007 (pictured below), their hair was shorter and they wore turtlenecks.
I don't know if I totally buy the PR that the shift to "dark rock" came between the second and third albums. Favourite Worst Nightmare, the second album, songs from which were featured in the 2007 Showbox show, seems to me closer in style to the third album than it is to the first.
In their first show in Seattle, at the Crocodile Cafe in March 2006, I recall their hair was even shorter and their dress even less self-conscious (but alas, I don't have photos from that show). Burge, who has always sported "dark rock sound"-length hair himself, was disappointed that they've given up on looking like lads from Britain. This is not to suggest that either of us are nostalgic about the pop-version of the band: all life argues against relief, and all things should relentlessly evolve. Last night we both especially liked that, as Burge put it, "they incorporate their new sound into their old songs."
I do, however, think their initial music was more authentic than what they are writing now. For sure, they now sound more "mature" and are now more accomplished as musicians. They are experimenting, which is better than parodying their teenage selves. They are yet so young, so immensely talented, I have to believe that they will go through whatever they have to go through to deal with their fame, and re-find an authenticity that may yield music surpassing what they brought coming out of the gate.
William Carleton is a member of McNaul Ebel Nawrot & Helgren PLLC. He blogs every day at Wac6.com. In fact, his art posts lately seem to have migrated over there. More→
