[Dixielandjazz] Fwd: the future of jazz?

[Harry Callaghan]

This comes courtesy of my friend "Crazy Henry" Newberger (piano, trombone,
tuba) "way out in Coram, LI"*......who is actually "way out" **no matter
where he happens to be.*


 Music Review Not Your Ordinary Marching Band
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Asphalt Orchestra on Broadway in a Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert on
Wednesday night that began at Alice Tully Hall and included a solo from the
reflecting pool.
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER Published: August 5, 2010

A casual observer at Lincoln
Center<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/lincoln_center_for_the_performing_arts/index.html?inline=nyt-org>on
Wednesday evening might have wondered what on earth was going on when
a
large, eclectic crowd made a frenzied dash across 65th Street, following a
ragtag band of musicians who had careened across the road like deranged pied
pipers.
  <http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html>

The moblike scene occurred during a performance by the rambunctious Asphalt
Orchestra, <http://asphaltorchestra.com/> an avant-garde 12-piece marching
band presented here by Lincoln Center Out of
Doors.<http://new.lincolncenter.org/live/index.php/lc-ood-2010>

This quirky ensemble, the brainchild of Bang on a Can, marches to an
iconoclastic beat, eschewing typical brass-band fare for funky arrangements
and inventive new works.

The event began in a comparatively sedate fashion, with the audience seated
on the steps in front of Alice Tully Hall, as the ensemble entered from 65th
Street and paraded up and down the triangular staircase on the corner of the
plaza. The musicians stopped in front of the hall for their first work,
“Carlton,” by Stew<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/stew/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
Heidi Rodewald. Listeners stayed seated despite the toe-tapping
rhythms
and ear-catching tunes. At a few points the band shouted out the letters of
the song title.

There was an element of performance art throughout the approximately
30-minute show. The musicians played with virtuosic flair while twisting,
turning and executing moves choreographed by Susan Marshall and Mark
DeChiazza, no easy feat when dealing with complex metric shifts and carrying
bulky percussion and brass instruments as large as a sousaphone.

The performance art aspect seemed particularly vivid during the
premiere of Yoko
Ono<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/yoko_ono/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s
“Opus 81,” when the trumpeter Stephanie Richards, dressed in shorts and
boots, stood alone in Lincoln Center Plaza’s reflecting pool playing a
mournful solo. Her colleagues gathered at the edges of the pool, their
insistent motifs underpinning Ms. Richards’s elegiac solo.

The action shifted to the grove of trees nearby for the premiere of “Two
Ships,” by David Byrne and Annie Clark (who is known as St. Vincent), and
Ms. Richards’s arrangement of the sultry “Wild About My Daddy,” by the
Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band.

Some members of the large, appreciative crowd that followed the Asphalt
players as they moved through the plaza swayed to the irresistible beats in
the lively arrangement of Thomas Mapfumo’s “Ngoma
Yekwedu,”<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKAo3nw6cI>by Alex Hamlin,
the band’s soprano saxophonist.

The musicians snaked over to the fountain for their final piece, an
arrangement by Peter Hess (the group’s tenor saxophonist) of Frank
Zappa<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/z/frank_zappa/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s
“Zomby Woof.” Patrons waiting for a Mostly
Mozart<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/mostly_mozart_festival/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>concert
to begin at Avery Fisher Hall leaned over the balcony to enjoy a
vigorous rendition of the arrangement, with slapstick musical touches,
rapidly shifting time signatures and wailing trumpet solos that echoed
through the plaza.

The Asphalt Orchestra will give additional free performances on Friday,
Saturday and Sunday nights at various locations at Lincoln Center;
lincolncenter.org.





-- 
Some men see things as they are and say why....I dream things that never
were and say why not            -
                        -George Bernard Shaw