From the monthly archives:

March 2011

The Watts Project’s Back Pages

March 31, 2011

The formidable drummer and composer Jeff “Tain” Watts hails from Pittsburgh, but he cut his teeth with one of jazz’s royal New Orleans dynasties, the Marsalis family. If you look at the Branford Marsalis Quartet’s Braggtown sleeve, there’s Watts sitting in the locker room with a  strategically placed Terrible Towel in front of him. Check Watts’

Formenti’s Hands & “Kurtág’s Ghosts”

March 30, 2011

Chris Vitiello on Part I of Kurtág’s Ghosts:
Marino Formenti possesses the largest vocabulary of touch of any pianist I’ve seen, as if his hands were individual, sentient creatures. The program he played at Reynolds Theater on March 27, Kurtag’s Ghosts, required all of his formidable haptic repertoire. You can’t touch ghosts, but Formenti gave it

The Bad Plus Premieres “On Sacred Ground: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”

March 29, 2011

During last Thursday’s public talk, the Bad Plus made it clear that they were interested in “playing every note” of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, rather than turning its opening themes into head arrangements to introduce improvisation in a more standard jazz fashion. But they were also careful to say that they intended to make

The Bad Plus Prepares to “Spring”

March 28, 2011

Two nights ago, the Bad Plus unleashed the world premiere of their jazz renovation of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring upon a packed house at Reynolds Theater. We’ll have a review of this remarkable event for you tomorrow, but first, we offer a bit of context by way of a public conversation between the

Please Don’t Destroy the Auditorium

March 25, 2011

When I read about the plans to renovate Page Auditorium, I understood why Duke Performances scheduled Kronos Quartet’s all-Steve Reich program and the Bad Plus’ jazz arrangement of The Rite of Spring in the same week: They must be trying to save on demolition costs. After all, the debut of Stravinsky’s Rite in 1913 famously

Stockhausen Syndrome

March 24, 2011

Yesterday, Jayson Greene mentioned the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer who elaborated the systems of serial and aleatoric music, via matrices of electronic tone, toward their logical conclusions. On the scale of listener friendliness, he sometimes makes Milton Babbitt sound like MGMT, and can rankle even the most adventurous art lover with his

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