Drawing

Richard Serra oil stick drawing at MoMA
Richard Serra oil stick drawing at MoMA

We didn’t want to cut out of yoga early so we missed the first piece of Ossia’s “ShadeShifting” program this evening at Kilbourn Hall. It was called “Zugvogal” and it incorporated bird calls. The pieces we heard, all composed in the past twelve years, were spacey and beautiful, just what the doctor ordered after splitting wood for most of the day.

The final piece was stunning. The program notes described Toshio Hosokawa’s “Drawing” as “composed of highly intimate details. The smallest gestures and lines carry great weight. Subtle changes of color contain whole worlds of meaning. Airy canons at the beginning give way to splashes in the winds, until at the end the piece becomes meditative again, disappearing into a wisp of a cloud.”

It lived up to the billing.

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Spontaneous Duplicity

Scat singer and drummer at Eastman School of Music Spontaneous Duos
Scat singer and drummer at Eastman School of Music Spontaneous Duos

Our Jazz Fest buddy, Hal, saw one of these Spontaneous Duo concerts in New York and he got the idea going up here last year. The performance order was assigned by a moderator five minutes before the start of the event. One musician started by playing alone. Five minutes later he was joined by another musician. After five more minutes the first musician left and another player joined the second. There was always a duo playing, the music never stopped for an hour and a half. It was like an open jam for music students (and some faculty members) but not on blues tunes, they were improvising freely.

It was bass and drums when we walked in, then drums and piano, cello and piano, piano and a clarinet player who doubled on plastic water bottle, soprano sax and clarinet, banjo and stand up bass, drums and banjo, voice and drums, flute and voice, trumpet and flute, ending with tenor sax by Vince Ercolomento. All with transitions were so seamless there wasn’t space to applaud.

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Love For Sale

Three Musicians at Wednesday night Open Jam at Clarissa's in Rochester, NY
Three Musicians at Wednesday night Open Jam at Clarissa’s in Rochester, NY

I was thinking of that Picasso painting, “Three Musicians“.

The Clarisa Room is no more but the old Shep’s Paradise is open as “Clarissa’s” and it is still a great sounding room for jazz. We were there last night for the open jam hosted by 1968 RL Thomas graduate, Mike Allen, aka “A King Of Soul”. These three horn players, probably Eastman School of Music students, were waiting to play “Love For Sale”. This is one comfortable bar and it was midnight before we knew it.

We were talking about Gap Mangione last night because the bass player from his big band was sitting in. Conversation turned to the Buffalo plane crash and the Chuck Mangione players that died there. We hadn’t heard from Gap in a while but he called today to request some changes to his web site. We did another quote today for a web site. We have a few out there. We could be busy again if all goes well

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