The Inner World of Shelley Hirsch

Certain artists are conduits. Spirit flows through them. They have easy access to memory and the subconscious, with all the freedom that implies. Their stories, full of fine particulars, reveal enduring truths. They are natural improvisors, allowing characters and emotions to mingle and merge organically, like they do in dreams.

Shelley Hirsch is such an artist. On Wednesday, November 7, as she created – with words, music and movement – discreet, detailed, slightly ambiguous worlds, I thought of the assembled shadow box universes of Joseph Cornell. Like all great storytellers, the 66-year old vocalist was able to transport 60 participants into a fantastically collaged world of people and places. The concert, held in the UMass Old Chapel, concluded the first half of Season 30 of the Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Alone on stage, Hirsch used text, theatrics, fashion, movement, recorded sound, and all manner of vocalizing to create unique sound worlds. Her free mixing of form recalls the creative tumult of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s, a scene Hirsch was very much a part of.

After a rich childhood in Brooklyn (chronicled brilliantly on her recording, O Little Town of East New York,) Hirsch dropped out of the High School of the Performing Arts and began a career that took her to San Francisco, Amsterdam, and finally, Tribeca. Her work is shaped by an intense intake of both the natural and created worlds, as well as her interactions with an incredible number of actors, visual artists, dancers and musicians. The list is long, but includes Christian Marclay, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Rothenberg, Jim Hodges, Anthony Coleman, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, and Butch Morris.

During her two days in western Massachusetts, we repeatedly stopped to marvel at popping red and yellow leaves. She listens intently to the sounds around her, Hirsch told Jason Robinson’s Amherst College students, and tries to reproduce them in her mouth and body. “The body is the world’s largest recorder,” she said. When drawn to something – Butoh, Romanian Gypsy music, wind through trees – she “would not try to imitate it, but try to inhabit it.”

Hirsch’s voice is an incredible instrument, able to produce a wide range of sound and accents. She had a couple of years of opera training, but is largely self-taught. She told us that early on, she didn’t want to be “the singer” in the band, but wanted to be thought of as “one of the instrumentalists.” She developed a prodigious technique and a unique vocabulary. But over time, she’s become less interested in being a virtuoso and has come to place a higher value on words and stories.

She “read” (much too dry a word) three untitled poems, including a hilarious one about the double meaning of the word “boner.” But the center pieces were “Power Muzak” and “States,” two longer compositions that saw Hirsch in highly interactive engagement with pre-recorded music that included kitsch, Latin, drones, abstract soundscapes, and stretched versions of “Blue Skies,” “Tenderly” and “Blue Moon.”

As a child she was drawn to the reverberations in her apartment hallways; in concert she used reverb to draw us into a hazy past, lending a feeling of indeterminacy and faded memory. Hirsch is a memoirist, using her past to create very contemporary music. At the end of O Little Town of East New York, she goes back to the old neighborhood and tells her friend’s mother all the things she remembered growing up. “How do you remember all these things?” Mrs. Calabro asked in thick Brooklynese, “How do you remember?”

We felt so thankful to have witnessed the inner reach of Shelley Hirsch’s far out world.

Darker Than Blue: Darius Jones’ Shades of Black at UMass

After the concert, when I had a chance to talk with Darius Jones about the project he brought to the UMass Magic Triangle Jazz Series, it all began to make sense.

The unrecorded project is called Shades of Black. Jones writes:

The music explores the partial or total absence of light, and the artistry within a dark spectrum. A lack of light can bring about feelings of uncertainty or fear of the unknown, causing some to perceive black or dark things as devoid of beauty and having a certain negative connotation… In the large black textured surface of Chiyu Uemae’s oil painting, ‘Untitled,’ I discovered how rich an environment absence of light could be. I found myself standing in front of the painting and asking, ‘What would this sound like?’

One hundred people inside the UMass Old Chapel on Thursday, October 25 got the world’s first glimpse of Jones’ answer. With the leader on alto saxophone, and Sam Newsome, soprano saxophone, Cooper Moore, organ, and Chad Taylor, drums, Shades of Black produced a 75-minute torrent, producing an intense wall of sound that elicited both exhilaration and distress among the crowd.

Last week, in reaction to the Hearts & Minds concert at the Shea Theater, one Amherst College student wrote, “I was frazzled and awestruck by the music.” That seemed to be a common reaction to Jones’ concert as well. The frazzled fled, while the awestruck were swept up in a vortex of permutating sound. “As you look into the black, you begin to see colors,” Jones told me afterwards. Sometimes I would listen to the music as one overwhelming mass of sound, but as I moved my concentration from one master musician to the other, I began to hear iridescence.

In 2008 I produced a project called Doom Jazz featuring Jaime Saft and Bobby Previte, which utilizes the dark, foreboding aesthetic of Doom Metal. Some people were quite frazzled by that one, too. But while the oppressively down-tempo heaviness of Doom Jazz settled on us like a fog, Shades of Black whacked us upside the head, infusing the room with a barely contained energy.

Since the effect was so intense so often, it was easy to forget that the band consisted of four fully realized creative souls, each playing intensely musical lines. During stretches when both saxophonists were circular breathing and playing multi-phonically and Cooper-Moore was laying forearms and dense chords on his keyboard, the sound was enveloping.

When I changed my focus and tried to discern what Sam Newsome was saying, I was astounded. His control, his references to early jazz styles and his originality, thrilled me. He attached balloons to his soprano; he inserted some tubing into his horn then blew; he used mutes and bells; at one point he played just his mouthpiece. I’ve heard others do that, but I’ve never heard anyone make more music doing it than Newsome. He said he played the Iron Horse decades ago with Terrence Blanchard, probably before he gave up the alto sax to devote himself to the straight horn. We have been in conversation about bringing him back to the Valley.

Drummer Chad Taylor is becoming a regular Valley visitor. He was in town with Hearts & Minds, and he’s coming to the 121 Club on December 14 to perform with tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. My friend Jon King observed how calm Taylor looked and how relaxed he played while creating mountains of sound. In lieu of taking typical drum solos, he would feed the fire by pushing himself to the front of the rumble and letting loose.

Someone should make a movie or write a biography about Cooper-Moore. Charismatic and endlessly inventive, Cooper-Moore is an instrument maker, pianist, educator, and community organizer, who at 72, continues to influence the music and many lives within it. Jones called him a “unique individual” and told us that Cooper-Moore took him and Chad Taylor to Europe for the first time. At the Magic Triangle concert, he played his Korg keyboard through a Leslie cabinet, giving his sound a Hammond B-3 vibe, at one-third the weight.

In the New York Times, Giovanni Russonello wrote that Darius Jones is “the most visceral and distinctive alto saxophonist of this era.” That unique sound serves a first-rate musical mind, constantly on the look-out for new ideas to explore. He was just awarded a commission from Harvard’s Fromm Music Foundation, so watch out. Jones has previously worked in the Valley with Matthew Shipp at UMass and with Adam Lane and Jason Nazary at the Parlor Room. It’s very exciting for me to build relationships with people who are not only playing at the highest levels, but shaping the music in all its multi-hued splendor.

The Complicated Made Easy: Anna Webber’s Simple Trio at IMA

What happens when you combine evocative writing, instrumental mastery, and inspired imagination on one bandstand? On Saturday, October 20, Anna Webber’s Simple Trio gave us one convincing answer, providing 40 lucky listeners with entre into the musical world of one of the brightest jazz minds to emerge in the last decade. The 35-year old tenor saxophonist, flutist, and composer was joined by pianist Matt Mitchell and percussionist John Hollenbeck. Together they constructed a complex universe of sounds that occupied a sweet spot where composition and improvisation melt into music that moves souls.

The concert in the rustic, well-equipped barn at the Institute for the Musical Arts in Goshen was sponsored by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, which has hosted three (very different) trios to begin Season Seven. As befits someone awarded a 2018 Guggenheim for music composition, Webber brought sheet music galore. But fear that the results would be academic or dry were quickly put to rest. Elaborate compositions, yes. A formalism that comes from reading, yes. The virtuosity we expect from classical musicians, yes. But this music also had personality and quirk, it had energy, and it swung. In fact, many of her pieces were built on complicated rhythmic figures that had a driving momentum.

Saturday’s concert was their second in a five-city tour. They had one rehearsal before their first show in Montreal. At least half of the pieces performed were new, from Webber’s numbered “Idiom” series. Although Mitchell and Hollenbeck had the music in advance, the level of execution on their third try was more than impressive. There are not that many musicians who can navigate that level of complexity and infuse the music with such life.

The great John Hollenbeck, who in recent years has performed in the Pioneer Valley with his Claudia Quintet and his Large Ensemble, as well as with Tony Malaby’s TubaCello, has lived in New York, Berlin and Montreal. Webber has also lived in those cities, but only at the Jazz Institute Berlin, where Hollenbeck taught and Webber studied, did they co-locate. Hollenbeck was an exacting technician, and when appropriate, used two tables worth of little percussion to chatter and create mess. For Webber to have her endlessly creative mentor in her band must feel very good.

At the post-show reception, Hollenbeck talked about Russell Black, his early mentor in Binghamton, NY, a rigorous teacher who insisted his students be able to read music. As head of the local musician’s union, Black would funnel a variety of jobs to his young drummer. Playing experience with polka bands, the circus, and jazz gigs, added to a first-rate education.

One can easily understand why Matt Mitchell is a valued member of the bands of Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, Dan Weiss, Jonathan Finlayson, Steve Coleman, Kate Gentile, Mario Pavone, Ches Smith and Dave King. He was glue, sticking landing after demanding landing, nailing oddly shaped melodies and idiosyncratic ideas as if he’d been playing them for years.

There were no solos in the conventional sense, just passages where one or the other musician would be foregrounded. As a result, it was the compositions that took center stage. They were each highly individual pieces, with intricate twists and distinct turns. The degree of difficulty was off the charts, but made to look easy by these masterful artists. The improvising on these tunes made clear how thoroughly they inhabited the written material.

After the concert I asked Webber how the Simple Trio got its name. Her chuckle acknowledged the obvious irony: the music was anything but. Turns out the first of her two recordings (both on Chris Speed’s Skirl label), was called Simple, and the name stuck. While predicting success in a field as precarious as creative music is a fool’s errand, Anna Webber seems destined for great things. I have to believe her Simple Trio will be a big part of it.