Pittsburgh Net Radio

This set of music will be geared towards longer pieces of music. Possibly because I don't feel like typing. I fear arthritis from typing all day at work and then mouse-clicking while recording music at night and making small dots on wood, which you can see at the ModernFormations Spring Salon this April 2007.

1. Lonnie Smith | Play It Back | Live At Club Mozambique

This story might have been recounted before. My first trip to Village Vanguard luckily happened on a night that boasted soul-jazz saxophonist Lou Donaldson and the, at the time, bizarre Dr. Lonnie Smith, all done up in a turban playing a huge, crushing sounding organ. I think I was supposed to be visiting colleges, NYU and Columbia, but never actually made it due to two of three nights in jazz venues, and the other wandering around bars and whatnot with my dad. This night was one of the greatest nights of musical awakenings and whatnot. Lonnie Smith laid out shifting 10-finger chords instead of traditional solos and the whole room shook when he did so. People were screaming and aside from Steely Dan when I was 10 years old, it was the greatest show I had ever seen. Afterwards, I got into some Lou Donaldson records and like a lot of them, although some seemed too smooth. This track comes from a live set at Club Mozambique played and recorded on May 21, 1970. Among the many band members, you have George Benson on guitar, Joe Dukes on drums, Dave Hubbard on tenor, Gary Jones conga, Clifford Mack tambourine, Ronnie Cuber baritone. All songs written by Lonnie Smith with a Miles Davis cover and a Sly and the Family Stone cover. Rockin' set with much energy.

2. Derek Bailey | CLB Drums | PlayBacks

PlayBacks is one of the more interesting Derek Bailey releases. The record consists of 12 backing tracks provided by such musicians as plunderphonics-pioneer John Oswald (who plunders DBailey), John French, Jim O'Rourke and Loren MazzaCane Conners, Darryl Moore, Sasha-Frere Jones, and more. The track I picked has the percussion backing of Ko Thein Htay. There are warm drums, melodic percussion, and bits of bells. Derek Bailey almost sticks to strings of eighth-note harmonics and some notes throughout the piece, but I've always felt that some really interesting rhythms resulted from the collaboration. The liner notes quote Derek saying, "Throughout, I aimed to treat each track, many of which seemed to be complete in themselves, as a kind of ensemble I could play with rather than as a 'backing' track."

3. George Gruntz | Swiss Tease | Mental Cruelty

In 1960, pianist George Gruntz wrote the score to the film Mental Cruelty, which was a break from Swiss productions dealing with folklore. The film aimed something grander, like that of a "French nouvelle vague." Anyway, the score is awesome. Here is a short, but sweet piece of it.

4. Makoto Kawabata and Richard Youngs | Red | s/t

Released on VHF, this is a meeting of two very influential minds, Acid Mothers Temple mastermind Makoto Kawabata and Scottish, avant-folkish, minimalist Richard Young. The result is closer to Richard Youngs' side of the spectrum, preferring slow, acoustic drones over fast saturated licks and whatnot. This is a nice track, sprawling building pretty.

5. Bill Callahan | Footprints | Woke On A Whaleheart

Here is new music from Smog-man Bill Callahan. It's real cool, beefier than last time's mostly acoustic happening. I Like The Layers.

6. Susan Howe and David Grubbs | Untitled | Souls of the Labadie

In 1684, members of a Utopian Quietist sect, consisting mainly of Dutch followers of the French Separatist Jean de Labadie, left their headquarters at Wieuwerd in the Netherlands in order to spread the new oeuvre de dieu while preparing themselves for the coming millennium. The settled in Bohemia Hundred, Cecil County, Maryland, where Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland meet. This is the second collaboration between my favorite poet Susan Howe and one of my favorite musicians David Grubbs, of Gastr Del Sol and Bastro. You hear Susan's new poem and Grubbs on khaen baet, khaen jet, VC53 synthesizer, computer.

7. Gavin Bryars | Tramp with Orchestra IV (full strings) | Jesus' Blood never failed me yet

Though he has mellowed in his later years, Gavin Bryars composed/found one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of music of the 20th Century. Gavin Bryars displays nearly all the trademarks of late twentieth/early twenty-first century classical music: versatility, integration of visual arts and multimedia, explorations of non-traditional approaches, and extensive collaborations with other composers and arts organizations. Like several of his contemporaries, he has attracted popular attention through the combined innovation and approachability of his compositions, and writes articulately on a wide variety of music and musicians. His first love in music was jazz, and he performed as a bassist with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Some of this influence shows in his use of improvisation. In the late 1960s, he began to study and work with several other innovative composers, including John Cage and Cornelius Cardew. In 1969, he began teaching at the Portsmouth College of Art, where he helped found the Portsmouth Sinfonia... Read More...

8. Federico Garcia | Canon for Violin and Piano

This is a piece by ALIA MUSICA Federico Garcia. ALIA MUSICA was created in September 2006 by a group of young composers based in Pittsburgh, with the aim of joining the cultivation of new music in the city.

The group premiered publicly with an inaugural season in March of 2007, sponsored by the Music Program at Chatham College. The combination of eleven very good new pieces (composed for the occasion by each of the ALIA MUSICA members), the high standard of performance achieved by the ensemble, and an enthusiastic support and reception by the whole community, produced a success that we had barely dreamt. But one that confirms the worth of our vision and ties us even more to the project and to the city. Please check them out. A great source for New Music.

9. Vandermark 5 | Some Not All | A Discontinuous Line

Check out Ken's writing in Notes from the Field. www.kenvandermark.com
THE VANDERMARK 5 TOUR OF NORTH AMERICA

Pt. 1: Midwest
I arrived back home after the duo concert with Paal Nilssen Love in warm, somewhat sunny Utrecht on Sunday, February 4th. On Tuesday the 6th I was in a van with the other members of the Vandermark 5, driving in a blizzard towards St. Paul, Minnesota. Our North American tour started west of Chicago so that we could loop back towards Canada on our way to the East Coast. The weather was terrible, everywhere along the highway there were accidents- cars spun out into the median, 18 wheeler trucks jackknifed and blocking traffic for miles, shredded metal and glass on the side of the road left from previous collisions. Somehow we made it to St. Paul not only safe, but on time for our soundcheck at the Turf Club. Despite the lousy weather we got a very nice turnout, I'm guessing that the people who live in St. Paul are pretty used to crap Februarys at this point. The band's performance was rusty; we hadn't had a chance to work together since our December recording session because I had been on tour in Europe since the start of 2007. As usual, after the gig we went to check in at our motel. What wasn't usual was finding all of furniture stacked in a pile in the middle of the floor when I opened the door to my room. After talking to the night manager, who was simultaneously eating two different pieces of cake during our chat, I found out that she had accidentally given the band rooms on a floor that was getting renovated. So we lugged our equipment and luggage to another room on another floor and tried to fall asleep on a bed that was identical to the one stacked in a pile in the room that was being "fixed up."

… The last two concerts of the tour indicated the strange nature of culture in America. Our gig near D.C., on the 16th , took place in a strip mall. The club itself, called Jammin' Java, was really okay, but when we pulled up in the van we felt pretty ridiculous. Who the hell would find us out here by the Pizza Hut and Bennigans? Surprisingly, we a decent crowd turned up. The next day we played at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. A nice contrast of High and Low that I'm sure Warhol would have appreciated. The concert in Pittsburgh was probably the most successful performance that I've been involved with in that city- the auditorium was standing room only. The quintet finished the tour by playing one of its best gigs on the trip. It feels like there is so much creative energy left to explore with this ensemble, which is unbelievably exciting after working on it for more than ten years.

Courtesy of Unicorn Mountain - Dave Bernabo is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper Business School, is an active writer, musician, and artist. His poetry has been published in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Falderol, and Oakland Review, and a collaboration with Greg Cislon yielded Holy Music and Art, a book of vignettes and experimental writing published by Incredibly Thin. David's musical output consists of five full-length albums and three EP's with Vale and Year, a solo album, and compilation and guest appearances. David is currently working on a book of writing and drawings called Real Titles.

David Bernabo on My Space