| Weekend
Edition
April 19 / 20, 2008
The
Musical Patriot
Suitcase
Arias and Ithacan Jazz (But Tune That Piano!)
By
DAVID YEARSLEY
There
are two kinds of musical baggage, the one real, the other virtual.
The so-called suitcase aria combines these two aspects. 18th-century
opera stars lugged around actual leaves of paper with the notated
music for their show-stopping set pieces, their musical calling
cards.
Arriving for an engagement in a new city, the star would demand
to sing his signature aria in the opera to be performed, plugging
it in at the least inappropriate moment. The larger drama had to
make way for some ten minutes of pure ego.
The traveling star would distribute the music to the conductor and
orchestra, and when the singer’s moment came he simply parked
and barked—stepped to the footlights, struck the pose and
delivered the showcase aria just he had as in countless other operas
and opera houses across the European continent. The singer relied
on the notated score (hand luggage, if you like) along with the
virtual music in his or her own head and produced by his her own
voice.
Still, the thought of lost luggage must have been a terrifying one
to those carrying a suitcase aria.
Without dimension or mass, the music of memory and imagination is
the lightest baggage the traveler can take on the journey. It brings
with it no surcharges, must thwart no carry-on guidelines, threatens
no broken zippers or busted buckles, no diverse contents flung round
the conveyor belt for the general inspection and amusement of baggage
handlers and jetlagged passengers. This virtual music of the mind
need not be—often can’t be—turned off during take-off
and landing. For all the digital accuracy of the Ipod, its silicon
hold crammed with however many thousands of tunes, it can never
match the intensity and adaptability of the music of the human hard
drive.
A
friend of mine composed an entire 75 minute pop album of staggering
originality while accompanying his mother around the museums of
Europe. Genius can travel lightly.
It
is true, that sad music, though physically weightless, can weigh
down the melancholic traveler, as it occasionally did the greatest
musical adventurer of the 17th century. Over many journeys, Johann
Jakob Froberger was variously ensnared and bloodied by wars and
brigands, attacked by pirates, deserted by princes. Yet on his death,
he is said to have been a man of exceedingly good humor and loved
by all. On one of his many adventures, Froberger composed a moving
lament, a genre for which he harbored lasting and profound affection:
“Meditation on my own future death.” He wrote the piece
on the road, in Paris on May Day 1660 when the rest of the city
was celebrating the rebirth of nature with the oncoming Spring.
No i-Pod could ever do that.
17th-century
medicine urged travel as a cure for melancholy. Music was crucial
to this prescription, as Froberger noted on another trip with another
of his lament, this one written to “pass his melancholy.”
Give me such evocations of sorrow underway over the heroic Beethoven
Symphonies heard incessantly in the Pittsburgh Airport or the chirpy
Mozart of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York deployed to
drive out the homeless.
Indeed,
the whistling, humming vagabond is fueled by his own music, pushed
forward by his own song. This is the truly free traveler, of say,
Bach’s free-spirited cantata, Ich bin in mir vergnügt
(I’m content in myself). Save the occasional well-timed handout,
this hermit on the road needs no one and nothing except for the
occasional handout, some crumbs of bread, and a wedge of cheese.
But he must have his tunes, and these he supplies himself.
Still,
the urge to accessorize is impossible to suppress, and the larger
the musical accessory the greater hassle.
Think of the encumbrances of the double bass versus those of the
harmonica. Even the cellistS must buy an extra seat on the airplane
for their cellos.
Other
instruments are less unwieldy. The great violinist Nicola Matteis
made his way to London in the late 17th-century: a contemporary
related that “his circumstances were low, and it was say’d
that he travelled thro’ Germany on foot with his violin under
a full coat at his back.”
Lost
luggage can be much more than an inconvenience when it concerns
a beloved musical instrument. That most mercurial of violinists,
Francecso Maria Veracini, lost his pair of famed Stainer violins—Stainers
were more prized in Veracini’s 18thcentury than those of Stradivarius—when
his ship went down in the English Channel. I always think of the
catastrophic loss of these illustrious instruments, nicknamed St.
Peter and St. Paul, to add the proper perspective when my suitcase
doesn’t show up on the baggage carousel.
This
past Sunday evening New York City trumpeter Jim Rotondi, his horn
at his side and an apparently limitless store of music in his mind,
showed up at the Carriage House Café, an excellent, if occasional,
jazz venue at the south end of Lake Cayuga. In the recently refurbished
hayloft of the 19th-century carriage house from which the restaurant
takes its name, Rotondi delivered a masterful display of the virtual
and real.
Lying about halfway between Buffalo to the West and New York City
to the Southeast, Ithaca is often referred to as “centrally
isolated” by many a self-styled cosmopolitan after getting
air-dropped into this college town for the purposes of academic
advancement. One would not necessarily expect to find musicians
here capable of following Rotondi through his high voltage bebop
tempos.
But the provinces hold surprises. When the mighty Parisian organist
Louis Marchand traveled through what he thought were the backwaters
Germany in 1717 he never suspected that he would run into a J. S.
Bach and subsequently have to flee their keyboard contest under
cover of darkness after hearing Bach do his thing earlier in the
evening. Legion are the stories of great musicians tucked away in
distant places, and in Ithaca this means the trio of John Stetch,
a world-class pianist who happens to live in town, as does his equal,
the bassist Nicholas Walker; the trio’s excellent drummer
Tom Killian comes from nearby Corning, New York.
Rotondi
had spent the previous two weekend nights playing Rochester, that
once-shining city on the shores of Lake Ontario, now a dimmed beacon
of New York’s distant Industrial Age. These days a tour of
Upstate New York is a tour of rural poverty and urban decay, with
bright ribbons of suburban sprawl holding the whole thing tenuously
together.
Nestled
between the city of Ithaca on the valley floor and the citadel of
Cornell University on the bluffs above, the Carriage House Café
has the wooden and stone warmth of a winery tasting room though
about half the pretentiousness and more than a century of aging
to supply the necessary luster of authenticity. Like the café
as a whole, the hayloft indulges in the requisite modern touches
of “good taste”—the carefully selected details
of tile, the retro lighting fixtures, the occasional leather armchair
of the gentleman’s club. The studied chaos of the weekend
antique collector fills out the decor: a penny farthing bicycle
hangs on the wall above the bandstand, old typewriters and accordion
cameras peek out from ad hoc niches between beams and vaulting.
The architecture and interior design are the opposite of that found
in the celebrated jazz basement that is the Village Vanguard.
The bandstand is itself enclosed by a wooden balustrade that could
easily be mistaken for an altar rail. And why not? The audience
is here to celebrate the priesthood of musicians over a communion
cup of well-chosen, if foolishly named Zinfandel.
The
primitive thud of a fraternity barbecue wafting across one of Ithaca’s
famous gorges begins to fade. The flow of SUVs with New Jersey plates
thundering over the brick paving on the street below recedes. The
evening sun bathes the wooden interior of the Carriage House in
the red afterglow of the weekend.
Rotondi
and the John Stetch Trio confer sotto voce, Rotondi telling his
new musical acquaintances what they’d be playing first: the
tune, the key, the basic parameters of the tempo. We were about
to hear the first notes the visitor will play with this well-organized
trio. That is exciting for the musicians and for the audience, and
constitutes the true and limitless wealth of jazz: the virtual suitcase
aria.
Of course we all bring music with us, though only a small fraction
of the huge library of jazz standards shared in the minds of Rotondi,
Stetch, and Walker. We’re all ready to sing Happy Birthday,
even if diffidently, but not at lightning speed under the non-stop
pressure of ever-changing polyrhythms coming from all directions
and against constantly shifting harmonic variations to the basic
chord patterns grabbed intuitively by all participants at the light
speed of the imagination.
Rotondi
called “Alone Together” for the opener and the quartet
set off at a brisk tempo, a plunge into the unknown over the familiar
terrain of a tune played and recorded uncountable times. The title
itself is the perfect motto for the enterprise of jazz, and for
the first meeting of these musicians. As writers on music have noted
since at least the 17th century, ensemble playing involves a mysterious
dialectic of cooperation and competition. There is a sense of the
whole, but also one of establishing individual credibility, not
to say excellence. Jazz is perhaps the perfect form for the workings
of this dialectic: showing-off is a huge part of the fun and art
of it. Yes, each player can and should be buoyed by their partners,
but there is no hiding behind the group. Exposure is crucial to
the equation of jazz.
Rotondi
doesn’t have a problem with overexposure: he loves the limelight
and it is a real pleasure to hear him bask in it, especially without
the clutter and distortion of amplification in the intimate, welcoming
acoustics of the hayloft.
Hailing
from Butte, Montana, a place known more for the Berkeley copper
mine pit than its bebop trumpeters, Rotondi has an astounding agility
of technique and invention, often pushing his improvisations beyond
the safe harbor of harmonic and melodic convention. I am not one
to denigrate the familiar, as I think novelty for its own sake is
a curse of art, and Rotondi plays much that is wonderfully straight
ahead. But I gladly follow Rotondi as best I can along the sometimes
bumpy terrain of the outer reaches. He guides us with an unfailing
swing through every moment of the journey, offering up his own complex
commentary on the progress of musical time and harmony and charted
by the richly varied metrical and harmonic impulses of the John
Stetch trio.
If
you doubt that music is learned as a language, consider Rotondi’s
mastery of the complexities of bop syntax, developed in 1940s New
York, by black virtuosos and aesthetes, or be moved by his playing
of the blues—and I don’t mean just the closing blues-line
with which the quartet ended the first set. Rotondi’s authenticity
is that of a native speaker, who may have learned the language first
in distant Montana but has nonetheless mastered its cadence and
meaning. His accent was doubtless perfected during his early touring
years with Ray Charles. At the Carriage House Rotondi’s blues
were as black as bituminous coal.
1998
winner of Le Grand Prix du Jazz du Maurier in Montreal, Stetch has
produced a stream of fine recordings over the last decade-and-a-half,
the last half dozen available from Justin Time Records. Miraculously,
he began playing the piano in earnest only at the age of eighteen.
In spite of the late start, he has built an impressive technique,
which includes octaves, abundant and creative use of the left-hand,
and fleet lines in the right. He can play bebop in the tradition
extending back to Bud Powell, though I often hear more the elegance
of a Wynton Kelly in the contours of his right hand melodies and
his rhythmically incisive left hand. While embracing that history,
Stetch isn’t stuck in it. A creative and energetic accompanist,
Stetch delivers solos that are sermons of the unexpected, often
moving between disparate rhetorical registers, from careening, widely-spaced
octaves and fifths darting in parallel motion, to spontaneous counterpoint
between right and left hands, to jubilant block chords, and to the
aforementioned skeins of melody.
The
range of styles is ecumenical, as in his tenor-range gospel intonings
on the group’s Latin reading of “Love For Sale.”
Stetch’s is a pianism of many languages, often spoken simultaneously.
He also has a great sense of musical humor, as in the tightly-knit
trio’s featured version of the “Theme from Star Trek”—a
virtuosic up-tempo arrangement that turned this bit of a pop-culture
pablum into and an enlivening sorbet, a palette cleanser to the
richer fare of jazz classics served up over the rest of the evening.
Unfortunately,
Stetch was saddled with a disgracefully out-of-tune Steinway. Like
one of those Carriage House horses of yore, he stoically dragged
the grand piano through the evening like a thoroughbred pulling
a hackney coach with a broken axle. Taking an odd solace in the
fact that even the Village Vanguard’s piano heard on so many
live recordings could be almost as off-kilter, the provincial in
me took a perverse pride in displacing my own displeasure at the
unkempt instrument onto Ithaca’s best piano tuner, who happened
to be sitting at the table next to mine. But even this unlikely
form of sublimated Schadenfreude could not completely assuage my
sense of loss that Stetch’s lovely introduction to the ballad
“Darn that Dream” had to suffer such indignities.
Bassist
Nicholas Walker is not only a great jazz musician but possibly one
of the most diverse musicians on the planet. Such a claim should
neither be attributed to my provincial pride in local talent nor
to the fact that he’s my neighbor. We both live just downhill
from the Carriage House, in a neighborhood tucked between the sprawling
and picturesque city graveyard and the dramatic Cascadilla Gorge.
For several years Walker toured with famed tenor saxophonist Illinois
Jacquet (more about him next week), and he’s recorded with
many other important jazz musicians. Walker’s Beatles bass
concerto, performed a couple of years ago to a sellout crowd in
Ithaca’s historic downtown theatre, is masterpiece of charm
and allusion.
He
plays in the one of the world’s leading period instrument
orchestras, Boston’s Handel and Haydn. Professor of bass at
Ithaca college, he is as at home playing the Bach cello suites on
one of his basses as he is with the tangos of Piazzolla. Did I mention
that he’s also an excellent viola da gamba player, and that
I’ve even had the pleasure of joining him for some swinging
17th-century Venetian music, lagoon bebop from La Serenissima? Such
domestic and public music-making with a neighbor belong to the truest
of provincial joys.
At
that Carriage House jazz Sunday, Walker announced his musical credentials
with a beautifully constructed bowed solo on “Alone Together.”
He proceeded then to spread his abundant gifts across the rest of
the evening. In his rollicking and rhythmically complex treatment
of Miles Davis’s “Solar,” Walker moved from jagged
bop lines to bluesy utterances high up on the finger board before
returning us to the beginning of the song’s form and ushering
in the re-entry of the quartet. He did so with an eloquent and ghostly
quotation from the tune itself cast against the grain of the beat—a
dazzling feat of poised musical oratory founded on an unwavering
sense rhythm.
The
visiting virtuoso Rotondi clearly had met in the hill and lake country
of central New York more than merely able companions for his tour
through jazz standards from the group’s lightning scamper
through “Just One of Those Things” to the relaxed “Nostalgia”
of ill-fated bop legend Fats Navarro (with whom Rotondi would have
more than held his own) to the funky, unnamed blues à la
Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder” that might have closed
things out had the quartet not obliged the enthusiastic audience
with an encore. The proceedings then duly concluded on a more mellow
note, one perhaps tinged by the melancholy of the traveler, with
“Bye, Bye Blackbird. ” It would have been the perfect
moment for the Harmon mute favored by Miles Davis on this tune,
but apparently that accessory hadn’t made it into Rotondi’s
bag.
Afterwards
I set out into the evening, at a suitably provincial hour of 10:45,
a fine fresh loaf of Carriage House ciabatta handed me by the proprietor
on my way out of the door. I headed down the rim of the gorge to
my house, glad that I could enjoy this memorable jazz journey without
even leaving home.
As
for the hard-working Rotondi, the rest of April finds him traveling
through Spain, his trumpet in tow. I don’t know if it fits
in the overhead compartment. As for the music within him: baggage
restrictions don’t apply.
David
Yearsley teaches at Cornell University, and is author of
Bach
and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge University Press).
He's also a long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
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