Last night saw the launch of Unsolitary, a quarterly series for the presentation of improvised music produced by avant-garde guitarist Karl Evangelista. “Opening night” was a video compilation of three sets of highly imaginative and inventive spontaneous improvisations. That video was live-streamed last night through YouTube and now has a Web page, which is available for viewing and listening at any time.
The program began with a set of two extended improvisations performed by David Boyce and Phillip Greenlief. While this was my first encounter with Boyce, I have experienced and enjoyed several past solo gigs by Greenlief, the most recent being a video of of Monk from the archives of performances at Bird & Beckett Books and Records. Greenlief’s set with Boyce, on the other hand, was entirely and unabashedly original, with any signs of creations by past musicians being purely coincidental.
Indeed, the set pretty much departed from any sense of familiar tunes or themes, exploring instead the diversity of sonorities that can emerge from a saxophone, many of which were the products of extended techniques. In that setting, much of the listening experience involved the interplay of those sonorities, sometimes exchanged and sometimes explored mutually. Given that the set, as a whole, lasted for slightly less than half an hour, the inventiveness of both players was nothing short of prodigious, consistently moving into new territory just as the attentive listener was beginning to grasp the current one.
Boyce and Greenlief were followed by a solo set of a koto performance by Kanoko Nishi-Smith. My last encounter with Nishi-Smith took place at the Center for New Music in September of 2017, when she was improvising in a quartet led by oboist Kyle Bruckmann. I thus expected that she would again depart from the traditional techniques for playing the koto in favor of her own inventive explorations, and I was not disappointed. Through both striking and then bowing the strings, she elicited an imaginative spectrum of sonorities, presenting each as if she were holding it under a microscope for detailed examination. Her set lasted for about twenty minutes that unveiled a consistent series of surprises for the attentive listener, climaxing in a return to the original plucked technique for which the instrument had been intended.
The Revenant trio of Rei Scampavia, Karl Evangelista, and Nava Dunkelman (screen shot from the video being discussed)
Evangelista then wrapped up the program with his own Revenant trio. This included his Grex duo partner Rei Scampavia on keyboards, working with samples created by Tom Djll. (I last wrote about Grex this past July when Bird & Beckett live-streamed their performance of the five tracks from Alice Coltrane’s album Journey in Satchidananda.) The trio involved the addition of percussionist Nava Dunkelman.
Like Nishi-Smith, Dunkelman’s approach to her instruments made for a viewing experience as engaging as that of listening. Most impressive was the extent to which she maintained continuous motion, engaging with both traditional and unconventional instruments and, more often than not, attending to the subtleties of their sounds, rather than just percussive rhythms. This resulted in an absorbing parallel with the diversity of sonorities that Scampavia summoned through her keyboard work. In the midst of that activity, one could almost approach Evangelista’s guitar work as a continuo, providing a platform for the sonorous exchanges between Scampavia and Dunkelman.
Taken as a whole, the program invited the never-a-dull-moment cliché. Indeed, the abundance of inventive techniques that pervaded the entire 80-minute video made for a highly demanding listening experience. In uploading this video to YouTube, Evangelista was kind enough to provide the time-codes for the beginnings of each of the three sets. Experiencing these sets individually may well disclose further aspects of invention that might have eluded the listener dealing with the program in its entirety.
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