James MacMillan's New Opera "The Sacrifice"

Like most kids of my generation I was first exposed to opera in what was probably the worst possible context, on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sandwiched between jugglers, cabaret acts, comedians, puppets and the latest pop/rock star was something that Ed introduced with a laconic "And now, Italian opera star ____ _____." Out would come some overweight person singing something in an incomprehensible language, with plenty of emotion, but who knew why? If this was opera, I didn't like it at all. Of course if you already knew the opera from which the aria was ripped asunder, if one knew the singer and liked him or her, in short, if you already knew and liked opera, this was probably an enjoyable three minutes. If not, not.

It was only later, when I had discovered classical music for myself, in the form of piano and orchestral music, that I branched out and discovered that opera was a good thing, slowly (through excerpts like the "Toreador Song") and then one afternoon when the high school music department attended a Met matinee of Lucia di Lammermoor, surely.

I sometimes wonder how the youth of today will be exposed to opera, if at all. There is no equivalent to the Ed Sullivan Show, bad as that was for understanding the art form. In the situation of new operatic works, I don't know of any that are especially suited to convince non-operatic listeners that there is a world of enrichment and pleasure available for the taking.

Today's music is no exception. James MacMillan's The Sacrifice seems more keyed to those who already like the 30 or so operas that are continually performed throughout the world. This is MacMillan's bid to be the composer of number 31. It has a plot typical of operas of the late 19th century, a sort of Romeo & Juliet trajectory without much of the love element. The music is drenched in late romantic convention for the most part. The performance on a new Chandos two-CD set is a live one made originally for consumption by the BBC; it is quite respectable; it is not perfect either sonically or musically.

Nonetheless The Sacrifice has some real musical weight. There are recurring themes that can captivate, there is a wealth of orchestral detail (in fact the orchestral interludes are perhaps what I find most interesting) and there is some attention to the curve of dramatic development, some time given over to rousing crowd scenes with chorus, some moving duets and a general solid quality to it all. I will say that it does not especially overwhelm in its modernity (mostly, it isn't) nor does the libretto seem particularly poignant to me. The daughter of a general of one warring political faction agrees to marry the principal head of the opposing faction. Her former lover makes vengeance by various violent acts; the husband-political-opponent accidentally kills the general in a mistaken identity retaliation, and everyone has something to learn from it. As with the conclusion of West Side Story or Romeo and Juliet, "all are punish-ed," sort of. If we start realizing today that humanity seems to learn nothing from the senseless violence in the name of a cause, with or without the romantic interest element, that should not deter us from acknowledging that the theme seems still to be a powerful one. It is hard to top Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story, though, for all that.

I don't mean to be too flippant, because ultimately this work most certainly establishes James MacMillan as a composer of note, as a composer of substance. Anyone with an interest in contemporary operatic works should listen to this recording. One hundred years from now what will be the fate of The Sacrifice? I have no idea. In the interim it is certainly a work to appreciate. And if the youth of today will probably not flock to this opera, that does not mean they wont come to appreciate it in their later years. Who knows?

Chris Kelsey: Not Cool, Hot

The title to Chris Kelsey's new CD is apt. Not Cool {...As in, "The Opposite of Paul Desmond"} (Tzazz Krytyk) is a burning ode to music making in the cauldron of molten sound. Chris Kelsey (his soprano, alto and tenor, his music) has been around for quite some time. After a hiatus from playing he returned in full flower in recent years and this is his latest. From the moment the band hits the deck running on the first cut, my first listen made me realize that I had been missing out on some strong playing. Chris burns through reeds with extreme power. He is "old school" to the extent that his music assumes the blowing ensemble format of pre-free bands, and the routines have a certain tip of the cap to avant garde traditions, but beholden debts all end there.

What you have is a crack post-bop free band of "first chair" quality. Kelsey plays incandescent reeds and writes out some drivingly sane charts for the band to cook over their hot stove. Chris Dimeglio, on trumpet, as Kelsey notes in the album liner, has absorbed the lessons to be learned from Don Cherry and Lester Bowie and taken things from there, and the rhythm section of Francois Grillot and Jay Rosen, bass and drums, stoke the flames with dedication, energy and flair.

Chris Kelsey shows that he is at the forefront of the fiery reedists today. The music is exhilarating, overflowing, brilliant. Check out this CD by all means (www.chriskelsey.com), then, like me, you are probably going to want to hear the recordings he made with Bob Rusch in the Cadence/CIMP series.

Connie Crothers and Michael Bisio in a Breathtaking Duet

Improvisational music depends so much on the time, place and inspiration of the players. Once in a while, we are all lucky that the tape is rolling when everything conjoins wonderfully.

Session at 475 Kent (Mutable) is just such a recording. The place is Connie Crothers' studio, with great acoustics and a congenial environment to make some music. The time is May of last year, so late spring is in the air, and, well, let's just say that this is one of the most moving performances of free improvisation I've heard in a long time.

Connie Crothers makes pianistic things happen. She has devoted her life to a style that cannot be easily classified; even less can she be dismissed as "follower of so-and-so." It's Crothers who has gone her own way from the time of her first album in the '70s through to today. She has deep roots in the music, but whether she chooses to evoke them directly or not becomes a part of a performance on any given occasion. She has a very fertile, musically inventive gift and a pianistic touch that puts her in with the world-class few who can really make the piano sing. She does here.

Michael Bisio in many ways parallels Connie in that he is a marvelously inventive bassist that seemingly has burst forth over the years as a musical trunk rather than a branch. His technique is formidable, both pizzicato and arco, and he taps into a virtually inexhaustible wellspring of musical ideas when he plays.

These are two artists that have a perfectly simpatico viewpoint of what is possible in a freewheeling improvisational setting. The music they make on this recording is pure magic. Do not miss it.

Ayler's "Spiritual Unity" and Influence

There are recordings that have become vastly influential with musicians and have also caught on with the general listening public. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue comes to mind. Then there are recordings that at least initially did not sell briskly but strongly influenced several generations of new jazz artists.

Certainly Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity (ESP) was one of the latter. When it came out in 1965 it supplied a vocabulary for the budding free saxophonist and just as importantly presented a model for the free rhythm section that remains very much alive today.

ESP has reissued the album as a CD, as a download and as an audiophile quality collector's edition LP.

It's not just Albert Ayler's tenor work that was rather revolutionary at the time. Gary Peacock's bass and Sunny Murray's drums were equally so. Peacock acted with maximal freedom and true virtuosity yet his playing was a continual commentary on the implication of the simple folk-like quality of the head melodies as well as Ayler's freely articulated excursions into expressive tenor sounds. Much has been made of comparing what Ayler played and the Pentecostal practice of "speaking in tongues." I'm not about to question the aptness of that analogy. More to the point free music derived much from the freneticism of his playing on these sides.

Perhaps most importantly Ayler established a much wider palette of sounds the tenor sax could regularly call upon: the throaty growls. dynamic lower register overblowing, piercing upper register falsettos and much else. After this album and several key others that followed, the expanded sound resources suggested by Ayler's work were adapted by many that followed in his wake, from late Coltrane onwards.

Then there is drummer Sunny Murray. He virtually invented the freely out-of-time style of drumming that has remained a critical stylistic aspect of the modern player. And one can hear how well enmeshed Sunny was in this way of going about it early on. Listen to how he interacts with Ayler and Peacock on Spiritual Unity and you will hear a master already fully formed.

The general public still may find this music a little shocking, perhaps abrasive. Compared to Kenny G. that is certainly so. (And of course that should tell you something about Kenny G. more so than Albert Ayler.) It took many years for a Beethoven or a Berlioz to gain general acceptance in the late classical-early romantic era. And there are still untutored ears that may find that music a little too "heavy." So with Albert. He has an intensity that the listener needs to assimilate to appreciate his music.

Spiritual Unity is one of those records that belongs in the collection of anyone serious about the roots of the jazz of today. It's that important and it's that good.

Toby Driver and His New Music

Composer-instrumentalist Toby Driver is the creative force behind the group Maudlin of the Well/Kayo Dot. From what I understand, the group manages to combine new metal styles with classical form and orchestration. I have not had the pleasure of hearing them, but I have had the pleasure of hearing Driver's second album for Tzadik, To The L...L...Library Loft.

There are four pieces on the record, each a world of its own. Driver's hyper-electric ensemble guitar gives three of the four pieces some added metallic weight. Greg Massi is the guitarist on the fourth work. Every piece makes a convincing case for the viability of Toby's vision. Metal and new music can indeed be transformed into a powerful amalgam.

The instruments and participants for each work form a particular chamber/rock configuration. A series of moods and sound environments result. Some are soundscapes where atmospheric sounds conjoin with metal-derived musical washes; others are more hard-edged.

I don't know of anyone else creating music like this. And it's not just that Toby Driver dares to create such hybrids; he does so with absolute musicality. These are works to live within and grow into. They are so unique that a first hearing left me mystified. By the fifth hearing I began to appreciate concretely what was happening on this disk. I still need to listen another, say, five or six times to really get to grips with it. That is how unprecedented and unusual Driver's music seems to me. What could be more interesting?

A Living Composers Anthology, Volume 15

I have not sampled any of the earlier volumes, but I have been listening to Erm Media's Masterworks of the New Era, Volume 15. It's a three CD set at a budget price, which is a good thing. There are generous time allocations per disk, so that you get a great deal of music to hear. There are 22 composers represented, people you may not have heard of, and again, that's generally a good thing for the music. Do you know Arnest? Flinn? Kapson? Probably not.

Robert Ian Winstin conducts, alternately, the Kiev Philharmonic and the Prague Radio Symphony in performances that seem quite good and the sound staging of the recordings is quite excellent.

So what of the music? Here I have reservations. There is such a wide net cast for works by living composers that the range of styles and relative weight of each piece can vary considerably. There are modernist sorts of pieces, there are postmodernist works, there are works one can only classify as conservative, and all that is fine if done well. Then there are those that seem a bit on the light side. Worst of all there are a one or two that sound to me like they could have been used as soundtracks for Doris Day's 1950's comedies or something similar. In short there are a few works here that to me spoil the effect of the others. Masterworks? Some definitely not.

On the other hand what is interesting here is in the majority. For the good price I suspect it's worth your while to invest in the volume if you have a need to discover some new voices in the music. A little judicious weeding out would have made this set even better. But for all that there are still quite a number of works that are well worth hearing.

Free Unfold Trio: Quiet Subtlety

Jobic Le Masson, piano, Didier Lassarre, drums, and Benjamin Duboc, bass, collectively form the Free Unfold Trio. Their second album, Ballades (Ayler) is a half-hour of quite subtle, quite free and quite intriguing music. Like some of Paul Bley's excellent trio work of the mid-to-late '60s, they are out to realize a reflective mood, to react as a three-voiced musical being to their muse.

And they do so with much charm and much to hear within the short time span allotted. Understandably, pianist Le Masson has the most prominent voice in the proceedings, but Lasserre and Duboc bring all their interpretive powers into play.

Ballades may even out-do Bley for a laconic, inner-directedness. And of course the classic Bill Evans trios come to mind, but only as a reference. This trio is even more restrained than Bill's in their most impressionistic phase. That is saying something. Most importantly they do what they do not for effect. The music is a genuine expression of where they are at the moment. So it seems to me.

If you like the darker shades of the piano trio in a ballad mode, this will certainly bring you much pleasure. It did for me.