Microclimates
and Supernovae
Jennifer Paull explores the vision
behind a recent CD by David Sherr
and The Art Music Ensemble
Look Both Ways
David Sherr - leader, alto saxophone,
flute, oboe, clarinet
Brian Swartz - trumpet, flugelhorn
Scott Higgins - percussion
Joe LaBarbera - drums
Amy Wilkins – harp
Shelly Berg - piano
Cynthia Fogg - viola
Harvey Newmark – bass
Innova 541
AmazonUK
"I have always believed that opera is
a planet where the muses work together,
join hands and celebrate all the arts."(Franco
Zeffirelli (b. 1922) Italian stage and
film director - International Herald
Tribune (Paris, March 21, 1990))
David Sherr
is not only a planet in himself; he
is a galaxy.
On this recording he
plays alto saxophone, flute, oboe and
clarinet in the Luciano Berio pieces
and in his own compositions. He plays
what is written and leads the improvisation
of what is not. He is equally at home
on the planet of jazz and in the post-modernist
solo micro-climate of Berio’s superb
Sequenza series. This is the series
that in the space of my own lifetime
altered the barriers of what the voice
(Cathy Berberian Sequenza III)
and instruments could and would achieve.
Sherr’s compositions, with the incorporation
of musique concrète (of
which Berio and Maderna were the well-spring
in Milan in the 1950s and 1960s), pay
homage to the recently demised Great
Master.
In a world where there
is so much that is negative, how vibrant
is the rediscovery of man’s ability
to be creative, original and daring!
There is talent, Talent and TALENT.
David Sherr’s abilities sparkle like
stardust upon the latter. His synthesis
of solo instrumental chamber music and
jazz is so beautiful that it feels as
right as Matthew Peaceman’s electronic
manipulations of contemporary music
recorded on baroque instruments. The
aptness of this music may also remind
you of Gilles Apap’s Four Seasons
with poetic as well as virtuoso
brilliance upon violin, accordion, cimbalom
and string bass. The norm? Absolutely
not! Here again, we are propelled into
another world by creative imagination
at its very best!
David Sherr’s Milky
Way career has included concerts with
the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the
San Francisco Ballet Orchestras. I cannot
help but feel a total awareness of choreography
in everything he does. Sound simply
rocket leaps from his mind.
As a jazz musician,
Sherr has performed (amongst many others)
with Sonny Criss (Sonny's Dream, Prestige
Records), David Benoit, Bobby Bryant,
Buddy Collette, Billy Eckstein, Ella
Fitzgerald, Freddie Hubbard, Plas Johnson,
Oliver Nelson, Nelson Riddle and Sarah
Vaughn. As a chamber music soloist,
he has taken part in Monday Evening
Concerts and the Ojai Festival, and
has premiered works by Gilbert Amy,
Luciano Berio, Harrison Birtwistle,
Paul Chihara, Ernst Krenek, Alexina
Louie, Leonard Rosenman and Iannis Xenakis.
His recordings include
Stravinsky (alto clarinet soloist in
the PBS telecast of Symphonies for
Wind Instruments), The Beach Boys,
Ray Charles (oboe soloist in the Beatles’
Eleanor Rigby), Frank Sinatra,
Dinah Shore (more than 2,000 television
shows between 1970 and 1980), and Frank
Zappa: to omit a skyscape of other stars.
Having "too much
talent" was something of which
the general public remained stubbornly
wary in times past. One thinks of Paganini
who was excommunicated by a superstitious
Pope absolutely certain that he had
to be in league with the devil to play
as well as he did.
Charles Ives would
have been outrageous enough with his
parallel musings in different tonalities
and Unanswered Questions - but
to be a genius at inheritance insurance
schemes and become a millionaire – well,
why not just starve nobly in a garret?
Ives and Gershwin were frowned upon
(for different reasons), by a public
wishing for meat and two "normal",
musical veg from the conformist, often
impoverished, mono-directional artiste.
What of Hindemith?
He claimed to be able to play any music
he wrote upon the many instruments for
which he wrote it. A hot air balloon
burst of boasting? No way! But he could
have been a violinist and undoubtedly
a viola virtuoso of great distinction.
It is said that he worked on the solo
part of Der Schwanendreher (1935)
on a train journey on the way to
its premiere and performed it without
having practised at all. I know this
to be true of Daniel Barenboim who plotted
a Mozart piano concerto cadenza on the
train with the ECO en route to
Oxford, and performed it from memory
without having touched a pre-concert
keyboard. However, as there are fewer
than 100 heckelphones on Planet Earth
today, when Hindemith was supposed to
achieve his flying hours and subsequent
wings for that particular LEM, he did
not disclose.
There is, tragically,
hardly any information available about
a truly remarkable musician, Frederick
Vogelgesang, who achieved his particular
Moonwalk in the Pre-Google Age (1960s).
On page 70 of Michael Compton’s French
Horn Discography (Greenwood Press
1986), a plumbing loop is even extracted
to modulate him to "Vogelsang".
Studying at The Curtis
Institute before WWII, he was a very
gifted student of violin, horn, piano
and conducting. In 1964, he used multiple
tracks to record himself playing the
Brahms Trio for Violin, Horn and
Piano, Opus 40. Originally released
on Lance Productions FV3B, this
remarkable, forward-looking man and
his excellent interpretation are falling
into oblivion. I find this a disgrace.
How many people could do such a thing
so ahead of the technology we take for
granted today? I remember hearing his
interpretation on the radio here in
Switzerland in the 1980s and being totally
amazed at this outstanding performer.
He spent his musical career as an assistant
conductor of many Broadway shows and
as a member of the New York City Opera,
although he did make other recordings
accompanying his violin playing on the
piano.
Derek Bell made an
LP in 1981 (many years later), Derek
Bell Plays with Himself in
which his oboe hardware, plucked and
percussive keyboard utensils lie scattered
around him on the front cover. He looks
out, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-mouth,
as though a double entendre had
never crossed his tongue-in-cheek mind.
Also a serious composer, engaged by
the Ulster orchestra as both harpist
AND oboist (doubtless with a strip of
worn-out lino between the two chairs),
with this sadly-missed member of The
Chieftains, we had left the meat
and two veg well behind and were off
into orbit. It never ceases to amaze
me how many musicians stay deeply embedded
in convention like ancient launching
platforms in reinforced concrete.
David Sherr is a chameleon.
There are as many David Sherrs as there
are notes in the scale, although we
will need to swivel chromatically to
have adequate radar screen space to
capture them all. He is a flautist of
great virtuosity – Berio’s Sequenza
I (1958) is not for those without
an astronautical helmet. He is an oboist
of the same ilk: a clarinettist too,
and a saxophonist to moon boot. All
of this can be upon the written stave,
improvised space or the Jazz Shuttle:
composed by others or by himself.
He is not only a telescope
– he is a microscope, and this recording
defies every stuffy preconception still
remaining about man’s very ability to
master more than one tool and more than
one medium and be quite simply, a musician
of the XXI Century. This is new music
at its best: Musique sans Frontières.
He follows on from these heroes of the
hors-piste, off-limits, sky-blazing
trail.
In his own words: "The
idea for this CD came in stages starting
about ten years ago. It began with a
couple of articles in a specialist chamber
music magazine that were dismissive
of jazz, in one case making the distinction
between jazz and "serious"
music and in the other, offering advice
as to how to "advance" from
jazz to it. Needless to say, the articles
were not written by musicians … it occurred
to me that if I were to record all three
(Sequenzas) and then match them
with jazz "companion" pieces,
it might make a good case for the equivalency
of the two kinds of music."
I am grateful to Marsha
Berman for allowing me to quote from
her compilation of excellent programme
notes incorporating Berio’s words and
her own. With Stephen Davison, she is
at present engaged in preparing a bio-bibliography
of Luciano Berio for Greenwood Press.
The CD begins with
Sequenza I (1958). "[It]
has as its starting point a sequence
of harmonic fields that generate, in
the most strongly characterized ways,
other musical functions … a polyphonic
type of listening. The codes governing
the Baroque era allowed one to write
a fugue in two parts for solo flute.
Nowadays, when writing for monodic instruments,
the relationship between explicit and
implicit, real and virtual polyphony
has to be invented anew, and stands
as the crux of musical creativity."
A Sherr composition
follows; Debussy Deb-You-Do (1999).
"[This] is a set of variations,
written and improvised, for two quartets.
There are two themes. One is made up
of a series of melodic fragments related
to Sequenza I and Sequenza
IXa (for clarinet). The other is
from a solo by Dizzie Gillespie. The
written variations are played by a quartet
of vibraphone, harp, viola and flute.
The improvised variations are for flute,
piano, bass and drums."
The Art Music
Ensemble like Gilles Apap’s Colors
of Invention, is not only composed
of brilliant musicians, but they appear
to share the same brain and think as
one.
The fourth track, Sax
Lines and Audio Tape and the
eighth, In The Pocketa Pocketa are
part of The Secret Life of Walter
MIDI (1999). Together with a 3rd
movement not recorded here, they "are
based on tone rows from sources where
they are not commonly found. Sax
Lines and Audio Tape is derived
from the first 13 notes of Charlie Parker’s
solo on the Jerome Kern – Oscar Hammerstein
II composition The Song Is You
(Verve, NG V-8005) in which he uses
eleven different notes, omitting only
B-flat and using A-natural and G-natural
twice. It is made up of a 16 bar chorus
in which no two consecutive measures
except seven and eight … are in the
same key. Thus there are no cadences
and solos need not conform to four or
eight bar phrases."
This sound world of
David Sherr’s is very successful and
shows us his remarkable talent as a
composer. At this point, we definitely
need to borrow a few accidentals to
have enough overflow space to touch
briefly upon his own compositions. His
mixtures of chamber music and jazz are
his leitmotiv. A recent work for choir,
seven instruments and conductor based
on Bach’s Cantata 56, was featured
earlier this year at the Eleventh ACF-LA
Composer’s Salon.
The next track on the
present CD, Sequenza VII (1969)
for oboe, "is a sort of permanent
conflict … between the extreme velocity
of the instrumental articulations and
the slowness of the musical processes
that sustain the work’s progress such
as: a certain fixedness of registers,
the prolonged absence of certain notes,
and the increasingly insistent presence
of certain intervals (the perfect fifth,
for example, which is not without memories
of the English horn in Tristan).
I continue my search for a virtual polyphony."
Another composition
of Sherr’s follows: Palimpsest (1999).
To quote his own thoughts here:
"A palimpsest
is a surface upon which something has
been written, erased and written over,
but with some of the original showing
through. It seemed to fit our piece,
with Sequenza VII poking through
the written and improvised music. Harvey
Newmark is a truly amazing musician.
The second half of the piece was entirely
improvised and was recorded in one take."
As Marsha Berman points
out, " Palimpsest is an
accompaniment to Sequenza VII
as Berio has himself incorporated the
music of other composers (Mahler and
Beethoven among others in Sinfonia
and Schubert in Rendering)
into his own. Parts were written for
viola, harp and vibes at the beginning
and piano at the end. The flute and
bass parts are improvised."
Sequenza IXa
(1980) for clarinet continues this remarkable
sound adventure. "[It] develops
a constant exchange and a constant transformation
between two different pitch fields,
one of seven notes that are almost always
fixed in the same register, and the
other of five notes that are instead
characterized by great mobility."
The final track, The
Pocketa Pocketa (1999), by Sherr,
"is based, however loosely, on
the first fifteen notes of the development
section of the last movement of Mozart’s
40th Symphony in G
minor, K550, in which he uses 11 different
notes, omitting only G, The form is
a twelve bar blues in B-flat minor."
David Scherr has moved
on from this CD to more adventures exploring
further microclimates. I for one am
eagerly awaiting the next release.
Everything you've
learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes
less and less obvious as you begin to
study the universe. For example, there
are no solids in the universe. There's
not even a suggestion of a solid. There
are no absolute continuums. There are
no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
(R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer,
and architect (1895-1983))
© Jennifer
Paull, Vouvry, Switzerland 30.11.03
