There are eight million music stories in the naked city. Here are three of them:
October 24: Last Thursday marked my official return to Carnegie Hall this season, and it helped that I was hearing The Knights. This small, vigorous orchestra, founded and still led by the brothers Colin Jacobsen (violinist) and Eric Jacobsen (conductor), is a perfect match with Carnegie’s medium-sized, acoustically warm Zankel Hall, which is large enough to accommodate the sold-out crowd of fans and small enough to feel intimate. The Knights always manage to surprise me, and this time the surprise was better than ever. I had been drawn to the program by the weird combination of the jazz-inflected (orchestral adaptations of George Gershwin and Keith Jarrett pieces) and the classical (Beethoven’s Fourth), but what I had not expected was to be impressed and delighted by the final piece on the program: a world premiere by the youngish composer Michael Schachter. To say it stood up against the Beethoven would be ridiculous—nobody stands up against Beethoven, and nobody is meant to—but it didn’t pale by comparison, and it more than held its own with the Michael Atkinson jazz adaptations. In particular, it outshone, at least in my eyes, the version of Rhapsody in Blue that opened the program—a much-loved piece on which Schachter had explicitly based his own new Being and Becoming: Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra. What tied the whole program together, in addition to the fact that it was bookended with twin rhapsodies, was the stellar performance of pianist Aaron Diehl. First on the piano in Rhapsody in Blue, then on a harpsichord in the three-part Suite from Jarrett’s Book of Ways, and finally back on the piano for the Schachter premiere, Diehl elegantly and skillfully made each of his solo parts glow, even as he blended in beautifully with The Knights. It was hard to say whether the music alone or the powerful feeling of collaboration onstage was the most pleasing element of the evening, but who cares? And now that I have been treated for the first time to a work by Michael Schachter, I will certainly keep my eye out for him in future.
October 25: The next night, Friday, I had signed myself up for something unusual: an installment in the “Un-Silent Film” series at the New School’s College of Performing Arts. In this case, the program consisted of the 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning, with a live accompaniment composed a number of years ago by Philip Glass. Because the tickets were free, the event in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium attracted a wildly enthusiastic crowd, ranging from neighborhood oldsters to savvy undergraduates to costumed New Yorkers of all kinds. The movie, which occupied that strange middle range between sound and silence—it had titles, but you could also hear the characters speaking—was memorable but a bit creaky, especially when you compare it to Tod Browning’s masterpiece, Freaks, which he made only a year later. But the musical performance by five College of Performing Arts students, led by the Philip Glass Ensemble veteran Michael Riesman, was top-of-the-line, and the combination of the two was just right for the Friday before Halloween, in an only-in-Greenwich-Village kind of way.
October 26: I rounded out my trio of musical evenings by going on Saturday night to hear another kind of trio—that is, the Ethan Iverson Trio at Birdland, a venerable midtown jazz venue. I am not a jazz afficionado, though I sometimes get taken to performances by my more knowledgeable friends and relatives, but in this case I myself had chosen the concert. I’ve known Ethan Iverson for decades, ever since he was the music director of the Mark Morris Dance Company, and I’ve followed him on both coasts and through numerous incarnations—as participant in the groundbreaking Bad Plus, as an independent jazz composer, as the adapter of Beatles songs and Burt Bacharach songs for recent Mark Morris productions, and as a performer in previous versions of the Ethan Iverson Trio. The present combo, if you ask me, is the best yet, with Ethan himself on the piano, Peter Washington on bass, and Peter Erskine on drums. The three of them melded so subtly and beautifully together than they felt as if they had been playing these semi-improvised, carefully composed pieces for years. They are all masters, so no one had anything to prove, and nobody tried to outshine the other two. Every piece on the program was good, and many of them struck me as quite personal: “There Is No Choice,” for instance, which Ethan introduced by saying, “They say opposites attract, but sometimes what attracts you is people of similar viewpoints”—his quiet way, I assumed, of alluding to the upcoming election. (In his Substack newsletter, Transitional Technology, Iverson has already, and unusually, stressed the importance of casting a vote for Kamala Harris.) Or “That Was Interesting,” a lively piece which Ethan introduced by telling us that his midwestern aunts used to greet his fledgling efforts at producing art with exactly that phrase. The performance as a whole felt familial, in the best possible way, and the audience responded accordingly.
A final note: Every variety of music venue has its own implied rules of behavior, its own set of courtesies and discourtesies. At Zankel, it was basically sedate classical-music behavior, though a few people clapped after the first Beethoven movement (a sign of audience inclusiveness, and therefore welcome, if you ask me), and many people augmented their final applause with approving shouts. At Tishman Auditorium, there were rare moments of isolated weirdness—the middle-aged woman next to me leaned forward into my space and started to film the whole thing on her iPhone, until I emphatically shut her down—but mainly the audience was silently appreciative for the entire seventy-five-minute performance; even the scattered chuckles at the film’s evident datedness were quiet and respectful. But at Birdland, where the management requires patrons to purchase drinks and/or food, a rudeness problem arose in the very first row of tables (which happened to be right near where I was sitting). Even after the set had actually begun, and far into it, two young women, both extremely drunk, continued to play with their iPhones, chat with their boyfriends through said phones, speak aloud to each other in non-whispery voices, burst into fits of unrestrained giggling, and other audience-disturbing behavior. Because I am not a jazz-club regular, I had no idea how such things should be handled, but Birdland evidently did. After receiving one or two whispered warnings from a shaven-headed man who looked like a bouncer but was probably just the manager, the two were gently escorted out by their (and our) waitress, with no visible fuss whatsoever. When the waitress returned, everyone in my corner thanked her profusely. And since I had not allowed these two entitled little jerks, even at their worst, to distract me completely from the beauty of the music, I felt that overall it was a win-win.