Many things pass over the desk of the recess editor, or would if I had a desk. Most of them end of getting chucked, but some are too weird to pass up. Like this one.
Tight on the heels of Viking Storm, the two-day celebration at the Coffeehouse and the Pinhook to mark the release of Hammer No More the Fingers’ Looking for Bruce, High Master–which bills itself as “Durham’s only Viking power rock band”–is playing at the Pinhook Saturday night with Pink Flag and Rat Jackson.
The band includes our friends Paul Overton and Ken Rumble from Duke Performances, and Saturday night will prove whether they’re any good, or if they should stick to presenting real musicians.
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Bela Fleck on stage at Page Auditorium, 4/7/09. Credit: Chase Olivieri/The Chronicle
Time flies when you’re having fun; when you’re having fun and watching Bela Fleck and friends, fingers fly, too. But while pretty well everyone in the sold-out house was awestruck at the likes of D’Gary, more than one audience member was overheard remarking that they were shocked three hours had passed. It was that kind of show.
It’s one thing to put together a stunning band, and that’s something Fleck has done. Take the world’s greatest banjo player and add: a leading blind Tanzanian singer-instrumentalist and his guitarist, playing blazing marimba lines; Madagascaran guitarist D’Gary (I’ve seen some fast guitarists, from John McLaughlin to Richard Thompson, but I have never seen anyone play a six-string with anywhere near that much speed) and percussionist Mario; South African singer-songwriter Vusi Malhasela; and Fleck’s counterpart on the kora, Toumani Diabate. All of them were part of his new CD and documentary film, both called Throw Down Your Heart. (Also contributing was class A bluegrass fiddler Casey Driessen.)
It’s another thing to turn that into great music, and that’s also something the band did. African music has been perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the world-music boom, and that’s partly because it resonates well with American ears. (Maybe that’s a product of the fact that much American music comes from African roots. One of Malhasela’s songs, written about the brutalities of apartheid and the need for forgiveness, often sounded like a Piedmont blues.) Each set of musicians or musician played a two- or three-song set before being joined by Fleck for another song.
Fleck’s an amazing musician—although I knew his music, I’d missed his frequent tours here and in high school, a mistake I won’t repeat—but being able to see the masters make their music alone was magical (attempting to rank them would be foolish and impossible; attempting to describe each would take far more words than anyone wants to read). And the minisets allowed listeners to get a feel for each style and country, something that the more segmented disc makes impossible. When he did join them, his contributions were judicious and virtuosic. But perhaps my favorite moment was the last song of the first set, when he was joined by D’Gary, Mario and Driessen. With the three other musicians on-stage, Fleck was free to relax and occasionally lay out. Letting the banjo rest for a moment he stood back and watched the other three; the joy on his face was as strong as the joy in the audience, and said everything that needed to be said about the night.
Previously: Throw Down Your Heart album review
Charles Tolliver
A few days before his Duke Performances- and Center for Documentary Studies-sponsored concert at New York’s Town Hall Thursday night, Charles Tolliver spoke with me about how the show had come about, the challenge of transcribing the scores and his memories of Monk’s 1959 Town Hall concert–er, well, I’ll let him tell it.
What was your introduction to Thelonious Monk? How did you discover him?
As a teenager, all of us kids who were into jazz, we were into all the guys including Thelonious Monk. He was one of our major listening guys.
You were at the Town Hall show in 1959. How old were you?
I guess I would have been not quite 17.
What was the vibe, and what do you remember about it?
To tell you the truth, I would not remember. I actually would not remember. We started trying to get into a lot of places. At a concert hall, you could get into that; the clubs were a little different because of the cabaret rules and the drinking rules. There actually was another place just around the corner where concerts were put on as well—the Fraternal Clubhouse. But both those places, as I understand, were created as houses where people could protest thing. I think Town Hall was created for that reason, not for concerts.
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Jason Moran
NEW YORK — Before his concert Friday at Town Hall, pianist Jason Moran took a few minutes to speak with me about his upcoming performance and how his In My Mind has changed since it was premiered at Duke.
What was your reaction to Charles Tolliver’s performance last night?
I thought last night was great. It’s a real accomplishment. I’m really happy to hear the music as it was, some of those same notes played. I guess some revisionist classical people would do something similar to this, perform a piece the way it would have been played, so it was nice to hear jazz classicized that way. I was also really happy to hear the liberties that the musicians were taking—Gene Jackson, Stanley Cowell. And also the way Charles—like, how he moves when he directs that music. It was really hip to see.
Does that success make tonight high pressure?
I’m not even so worried, because it’s a difference of recreation as opposed to reaction. In My Mind is kind of a reaction to Monk at Town Hall, and it just shows how I think about Monk, his history as an African American, him as a piano legend, how he’s affected me.
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Thelonious Monk
NEW YORK — Greetings from the Big Apple, where I’m covering celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Thelonious Monk’s legendary 1959 Town Hall tentet show, (for background on the projects and these two shows, read this and this and this).
Last night’s show was the Charles Tolliver Tentet playing note-for-note transcriptions from the Monk show, which was Feb. 28, 1959. Tolliver’s star rose quickly in the late ’60s, but he doesn’t have the same profile of some other musicians of his vintage. Perhaps he deserves more–last night he led a fiercely intense (and star-studded) band through energetic readings of the charts, elecrtifying an equally energetic (and star-studded) audience.
Tolliver premiered the transcriptions at Duke last fall, and that show, while interesting, showed a certain roughness around the edges, and was outshone by some of the other shows in Duke Performances’ “Following Monk” series. For the New York show, everything worked better, and the show struck a balance between excitement–as judged by the occasional shouts from the house–and solemnity, with many attendees speaking about the spooky, chilling magic in the air.
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