[Dixielandjazz] Jazz & Poetry & Classical

[Steve barbone]

Perhaps not OKOM, but Charlie Suhor and some others on the DJML will enjoy
this article. Jazz? Poetry? Classical? Opera? Who knows, but music is music.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Jazz and Opera Come Together Over Poetry and Pop

NY TIMES By BEN RATLIFF May 17, 2005

The jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and the soprano Renée Fleming have been
bending toward each other's worlds: Mr. Mehldau with a classically inspired
solo-piano record some years back ("Elegiac Cycle") and plenty of written
pronouncements about Brahms, Beethoven and Schumann; Ms. Fleming with an
interest in jazz that she recently developed into "Haunted Heart," an album
of mostly popular music and standards with Bill Frisell and Fred Hersch.

That album, though, has no relation to the art songs she did with Mr.
Mehldau on Sunday night at Zankel Hall. This was classical music, and new
work, a commission for Mr. Mehldau from Carnegie Hall - specifically from
Robert J. Harth, Carnegie's former artistic and executive director, who died
not long after commissioning the work. It made sense in most ways, even if
it didn't engage on deeper levels.

Mr. Mehldau wrote settings for poems: seven from Rilke's early work "The
Book of Hours: Love Poems to God" and three from Louise Bogan's collection
"The Blue Estuaries." In them he took a very different tack from his typical
solo-piano style - writing sparely, using expanded harmonies, much more
dissonance than usual, and spending a great deal of energy on the rhythmic
phrasing of the words.

There were a few pop-music connotations: among the Rilke pieces, "I Love the
Dark Hours of My Being" had a rhythmic piano figure related to Mr. Mehldau's
solo version of Nick Drake's "Things Behind the Sun," in which he mimicks
Drake's guitar picking. "No One Lives His Life," another Rilke piece, had a
kind of gospel feeling. ("His Caring Is a Nightmare to Us" interpolated a
bitter reharmonizing of "God Bless America," for some unclear reason.) Even
"Your First Word Was Light," slow and astringent, had an implied groove, and
Ms. Fleming used some soul melisma.

At times the works brought up a good question about genre. This music used
Messiaenesque chords and contained no improvising, so it is perceived as
classical, full stop. But sometimes it seemed that a pop singer who could
get more juice and swing of the phrasing - Beyoncé, let's say, or if she
were too busy, Fantasia - might have been a better delivery system for it.
But Ms. Fleming was good at a certain kind of cold drama, building the
violent closing lines of the last Rilke piece to a satisfying thunder: "And
if you consume my brain with fire/I'll feel you burn in every drop of my
blood."

Around the new works, Mr. Mehldau played, alone, some pieces from his strong
solo-piano repertory, including Drake's "Things Behind the Sun," Jobim's
"Zingaro," Lennon and McCartney's "Martha My Dear," Gershwin's "How Long Has
This Been Going On?", Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" and Kurt Cobain's
"Lithium." (He has a nicely rounded vision of popular music.) There was
unity to Mr. Mehldau's approach: generally he kept a busy rhythm churning,
and he had an arrangement strategy for each song, highlighting whatever were
the strongest elements of each one - a major-to-minor shift, a stirring
bridge, a verse melody. They achieved an orderly density, and the small
amount of improvisation came deeply embedded inside the composed material.