Lending a Few Riffs to a Well-Trained EAR Unit

For most of our century, jazz composers and classical composers have eyed one another with much interest and occasional suspicion. And yet it has been mostly a one-way street, jazz being of great use to classical music, but jazz musicians who thrive on freedom of expression being in less need of confining classical compositional techniques.

A clear-cut, almost classic (so to speak) instance of this occurred Monday night at the Leo S. Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as the Monday Evening Concerts series launched its new season with the versatile California EAR Unit. The guest for the program was a formidable improviser, Wadada Leo Smith, who came to fame as a trumpet player in the Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Smith was represented by two works, one in which he played and one in which he didn’t. And when he did play, at program’s end, he was stunning--every dark, husky, Milesian utterance pregnant with meaning. Yet the music he wrote for the ensemble seemed to contain little more than new-music cliches.

The ways of classical new music simply allow him no room to roam. Phrases, atonal and sometimes surprisingly Scriabin-esque ones, repeat over and over until another comes along, like a caged animal pacing back and forth with nowhere to go. But when Smith participated in his “Tao-Njia,” the trumpet sounded exalted in its flight, in its ability to free itself from the ensemble’s mundane music. When Smith was not involved, as on the opening “Moths, Flames and the Giant Sequoia Redwood Trees,” the effect was more like a still photograph of the forest.

However, two terrific pieces on the rest of the program--Louis Andriessen’s “Disco” and David Lang’s “Cheating, Lying, Stealing”--demonstrated just how empowering jazz can be for new music. Andriessen, the hard-edged Dutch minimalist who has been a significant inspiration to a generation of young American and British composers, reduces music to bare essentials and then vigorously pounds them in. In “Disco,” written in 1982 for violin and piano, single notes are sometimes emphatically hammered on the piano while the violin holds long tones, the angry rhythms and forms of attack coming straight out of the jazz world.

Lang’s “Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” which is also the title of the latest CD from Bang on a Can, a festival the composer from Los Angeles co-founded in New York, has a jazz posture. Lang says in his notes that he tried to get away from writing music about how great he is, which is what composers are taught to do in school, and write about the warts. Like Andriessen and Smith, Lang likes to play things over and over, but here he relishes in imperfections, in watching phrases go astray, in wrong compositional turns. It makes for music that is a lot of fun and also slightly disturbing.

The other piece on the program was a hoot. Jay Cloidt, who probably is best known for the elegant sound enhancement he provides for Kronos Quartet concerts, calls his duo for bass instrument and percussion “Karoshi,” the term for stressed-out Japanese businessmen suddenly falling dead on the street. The piece, made of sampled crashes and kabooms and cartoony melodies, knows exactly how to fill to five minutes.

Throughout the program of Los Angeles premieres, the nine-member EAR Unit, which began its 15th season with this concert, played in splendid form. For a listener who heard the ensemble often in its early years but hardly at all over the later ones, the playing was a revelation--unerringly virtuosic, full of life and with just the right touch of attitude. Rand Steiger’s conducting, moreover, has matured from giving adequate beat to being downright impressive. I don’t think there is a better small new music group in America right now.

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* HERE’S TO HOLLYWOOD: Salonen led the Philharmonic in his first film music concert. F2