Rhythm Experiments With Bang on a Can

Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” is the strangest kind of classic. When the album came out 20 years ago, we weren’t supposed to pay much attention to the music. Eno called it ambient music, a version of what Erik Satie had, half a century earlier, dubbed wallpaper music--a background that colors the atmosphere but doesn’t overwhelm it.

Satie’s idea had been subverted by Muzak, a more insidious background music intended to have a subconscious effect on listeners, be it settling nervous patients in doctors’ offices, enhancing productivity in the workplace or generating sales in the supermarket.

Eno meant to revive the art in wallpaper music, but the marketplace leaped again into action, adding sweetening agents and creating New Age music.

Now something very curious has happened. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, a cutting-edge new-music ensemble, decided to make music, real music, out of “Music for Airports.” Eno’s original was produced with scissors, splicing tape and synthesizers in the studio. The All-Stars have turned it into concert music, and the group brought it to the El Rey Theatre on Monday night for concentrated listening.

This was the first appearance in Los Angeles of the ensemble, and a long overdue one. The All-Stars evolved from the Bang on a Can festival of concerts and marathons begun in New York a decade ago by three composers--Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe--then just out of Yale. The festival, which was first held in the East Village, moved to Lincoln Center and is now returning to its downtown roots, was noteworthy for two things.

The first was its loose informality. The marathons felt more like musical hangouts than concerts. The second was the festival’s astonishing--for New York--lack of partisanship. Every style was welcome. One was just as likely to encounter transcendentally quiet, extended pieces by Morton Feldman as painfully loud and raw experimental rock bands. Bang on a Can is a good name. It has come to represent an exuberant embracing of possibilities.

The six-member All-Stars has had some success of its own, making recordings, touring and giving a concert series at Lincoln Center. It makes the music of Gordon, Lang and Wolfe a mainstay but also commissions widely, using a People’s Commissioning Fund of small donations from its audience and followers.

The ensemble of bassist Robert Black, pianist Lisa Moore, percussionist Steven Schick, electric guitarist Mark Stewart, and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, with substitute cellist Dorothy Lawson, has become less funky, more tightly knit. The All-Stars on Monday stuck with their own, playing works by the three Bang on a Can composers and Ziporyn in the first half, and their arrangements of “Music for Airports” in the second. Yet the feeling remains as alternately raw and cooked as ever.

Gordon, Lang and Wolfe have become widely known for their Bang on a Can urban edge. Lang’s “Cheating, Lying, Stealing,” which opened the program, is a genuine can-banger, with knife-sharp rhythms undercutting any sense of listener security.

Wolfe and Gordon, who are married, have learned from rock. In “Lick,” Wolfe takes just that, rock licks, Led Zeppelin-style, and gives them the treatment--punching and pulling them into bursts of energy. In “I Buried Paul,” Gordon pursues the experiment in ‘60s rock when fans would play Beatles records backward looking for hidden announcements that Paul McCartney was dead. Ziporyn took his inspiration for “Tsmindao Ghmerto” from Indonesian music, but his hard-blown bass clarinet solo was just as blaringly energetic as the rest.

“Music for Airports,” with the four composers each transcribing a section, calms everything down. Eno’s music really is like very good wallpaper, full of patterns that are fascinating to observe over time, and the transcriptions add much more color and texture than in the original (which now sounds very pale and one-dimensional in contrast). Indeed, the All-Stars’ recording of it, which came out on Point Music last year, has been a new-music sensation, as was, reportedly, a live New York performance.

It is surprising how gripping it could be hearing a piano phrase played over and over, but never quite the same, in Gordon’s arrangement of the first part, or hearing Ziporyn’s hauntingly repetitious clarinet solo in his arrangement of the last. One could easily zone out or one could listen. Missed was the added sonic depth from additional instruments and voices the All-Stars used on the recording (and were Monday electronically mixed in). Still, the effect was startling.

Startling but also depressing in a poorly attended room. The All- Stars seem to have found exactly that place in new music that many listeners say they want--a music that relates to pop but is less commercial and more substantive. But Bang on a Can’s charming lack of commercial savvy has its downside--it produced the concert itself, but without enough publicity hustle.