Pavilion Theatre,
Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin
24 August 2008

Sa Dingding is something of a media phenomenon. Perhaps this is because China’s famously awful pop industry has finally exported something less inevitable than the ‘Chinese Boyzone’; indeed she is billed as the ‘Chinese Björk’. The twenty-something is gifted with the sort of heritage most can only barely picture: her father was Han Chinese and her mother from Inner Mongolia. Dingding was raised as a nomad in the extreme north of China by her grandmother. While travelling to university in Beijing, she spent time in Tibet and the equally endangered Laghu province, where she learned both her trademark extended vocal technique and the languages in which she now sings. I presume the extra element of pop-electronica came from Beijing.

With all this world-beat acumen, the Festival of World Cultures in Dún Laoghaire sounds like a perfect Irish platform, having played WOMAD in London the previous week. Sadly, not so. The music Dingding and her band play is more suited to rock venues, and to an audience several decades younger than the audience in the Pavilion, who were greatly affronted by having to stand for the performance and instead sat cross-legged (and generally cross) on the floor, impatiently awaiting entertainment.

Dingdings’s entry was theatrical: in dimmed lighting, with a harmonic-rich drone on the Tibetan medicine bowl, and Chinese cymbal splashes and synth touches reminiscent of early Clannad, the tone was set. Dressed in immaculate rags adorned with Buddhist imagery, her face expressing some infinite sadness, Dingding began with a song in her self-invented language, which later fused into the more up-beat and radio-friendly ‘Alive’. The addition of some highly entertaining dancers cum martial artists failed, however, to distract from Dingding’s nervous and imperfect performance: her ornaments went astray, her chest-voice switches were full of intonation problems, and she was apparently uncomfortable with her head microphone.

Dingding did settle down somewhat, and ‘Mama Tian Na’ was excellent, but the ridiculously frequent costume changes meant that the singer was actually only on stage for maybe half of the hour-long concert. Her band and dancers, however, held the show together and covered the singer’s absences expertly. A flag dance with a Mongolian horse-head fiddle solo was particularly impressive. I wonder if we actually heard her entire repertoire: ‘Chinagirl’, from her first album, was a Eurovision nul points in the grand tradition of Chinese pop, and, incredibly, by the final song, ‘Holy Incense’, Dingding looked and sounded tired. The Chinese Björk? Not by a long shot.

Andrzej Bauer (cello), Roger Doyle (keyboard), Keith O’Brien (guitar, laptop), Brian Ó hUiginn (uilleann pipes)
Liberty Hall, Dublin
19 September 2008

This year’s burst of concerts from Music 21 was as diverse as ever, taking in the quite introverted guitar music of frequently extroverted French maverick Maurice Ohana (played by Stephan Schmidt), a Brazilian cocktail from Kenneth Edge and Izumi Kimura, an Augusti Fernandez/Barry Guy duo weighted more towards tender Hispanic-flavoured lyricism than towards the improvised fireworks that appear to frighten off most of the Dublin jazz world, Ian Pace playing Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, a fine programme of compositions by Kurtag, Benjamin Dwyer and Barry Guy (the latter featuring as player alongside Maya Homburger and David Adams as well as throwing in two improvisations), more Messiaen (and works by Greg Caffrey and Dwyer) from Bobby Chen and Elizabeth Cooney, and a concert of Irish and Polish electro-acoustic music.

The Irish/Polish collaboration was, more precisely, a Music 21/Art Polonia collaboration. In the few years of its existence, Art Polonia’s director Monica Sapielak has engaged in an impressively wide and imaginative range of activities across the arts. In Liberty Hall, Ireland was represented by Roger Doyle (with guitarist Keith O’Brien and piper Brian Ó hUiginn), Poland by the cellist Andrzej Bauer.

We began with some semi-improvised compositions for keyboards and electric guitar and laptop. In recent years, i-and-e concerts and festivals have given us the opportunity to see musicians like John Butcher, John Edwards, Jerome Noetinger, Andrea Naumann and Eric Carlsson work in small formations that can produce gripping drama based on intent listening and instant responsiveness. With no disrespect to the musicians involved and to their many accomplishments elsewhere, there was little sense of such active dialogue here, largely because the keyboard sounds were broad and blurred in outline, splashy and generalised. This was in stark contrast to Doyle’s other contribution, Under the Green Time, in which highly textured electronic or electronically treated sounds, and piping that seems to rip traditional idiom apart, battled for space.

The second half of the concert, wuth Andrzej Bauer, offered a sampling of a larger-scale project, Cellotronicum, organised for the Warsaw Autumn Festival of 2002, when the many possibilities open to composers working with cello and electronics were demonstrated in a series of specially composed works. There is an element of the lucky dip to this kind of thing – who knows whether individual composers may be stimulated by the idea, or merely cobble together something to fit the specifications? Was what we heard in Liberty Hall the best or a representative selection? There was quite a variety to the pieces we heard in any case.

Starting with clickings and tickings, Slawomir Kupczak’s Anafora V moved through a more submarine phase; then bowing and scraping to denser accompaniment led into richer, almost old-fashioned cello sounds that gave way to electonic distortions of the same. If you fastened your safety-belt and didn’t worry too much about map and destination, you could enjoy the way Michal Tulma-Sutt’s Cellotronicum rushed you up narrow lanes, down busy streets and across parks as the driver demonstrated as many cellotronic and percussive techniques as possible. There was something thrummingly gentle, with a hint of desolation, to Karen Tanaka’s The Song of Songs. Jacek Grudzian’s Ad Naan put an end to any reverie, but had little to offer beyond its emphatic rhythms and energy.

Throughout, there was plenty to relish in the utter concentration and dexterity of Andrzej Bauer’s playing.

Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin
13 September 2008

There’s a 1982 interview between John Cage and the then young Belgian composer Wim Mertens on UbuWeb. The soft-voiced Cage talks of a Glenn Branca performance the night before:

‘I didn't really enjoy it. It wasn't that it's so loud, but I felt negatively about what seemed to me to be the implications. I wouldn't like to live in a society like that in which someone require other people to do such an intense thing together. [It’s] an example of sheer determination of one person to be followed by the others ... [it’s] not a shepherd taking care of the sheep but a leader insisting that people agree with him ... The only breath of fresh air that comes is when the technology collapses: an amplifier broke.’

I was reminded of this standing in a tent in Kilmainham with 4,999 others. Kraftwerk are exhilarating live, and there is nothing quite like hearing their analogue, single-malt sound at that decibel level, but the experience is also unsettling.

Four silhouettes fall on a giant curtain. It’s a tease, making full use of an enigmic aura that has taken the group decades – and countless refused interviews – to create and sustain. ‘Machine, machine, machine’ declaims a vocoded voice. Enter the keenly placed treble riff of ‘Man Machine’, followed by it’s stop-start bass counterpoint.

The curtains open to reveal four men in identically tailored leather suits. They stand at lecterns, equally spaced, almost motionless, to each a computer screen. Since 2002, Kraftwerk have used computers and sequencing software for their performances, which has obvious logistical advantages, but visible manipulation of instruments also adds to the great secret of what and who they are. (In fact, for this tour, founding member Florian Schneider was mysteriously absent, replaced by the groups video technician, Stefan Pfaffe.) Behind them, large-scale projections display words and shapes in time with the music.

Such musical construction, using simple, well-defined layers, is the classic Kraftwerk formula. Their music is economical, disciplined, simple, elegant, restrained, it embodies and reflects modern technology. It’s a seductive aesthetic, but oppressive and totalitarian too. Technology equals power, and Kraftwerk have that harnessed.

For ‘Robots’, the group are replaced on stage by actual, dancing robots. A kind of triumph of machine over human? Not quite: a faulty curtain mechanism on this occasion reduced the set to pantomime, causing Kraftwerk to break character, the spell momentarily broken.

‘The only breath of fresh air that comes is when the technology collapses.’

John Abercrombie (guitar), Michael Buckley (saxophone), Ronan Guilfoyle (bass), Joey Baron (drums)
Whelan’s, Dublin
14 September 2008

Since moving from Berklee College to New York City in 1969, guitarist John Abercrombie has brought his superb technique and lively musical curiosity to a variety of contexts, from his work with the Brecker Brothers to a pair of Hendrix tribute albums with Dr Lonnie Smith to his thirty-year-plus creative relationship with Manfred Eicher’s ECM label. By his own account, Abercrombie is both ‘a traditionalist and a free player’, who on the one hand loves the work of the classic Bill Evans trios, and on the other plays free jazz with such harmonic awareness that it sounds, as he puts it himself, ‘like chamber music.’

This paradoxical approach is shared by Abercrombie’s current drumming partner, Joey Baron, who has the chops and the vision to create the rhythmic platform such a complex mode requires. ‘He is so completely there in the moment,’ Abercrombie says of Baron, ‘that you can do anything. He can make something from nothing more than any drummer that I’ve ever played with.’ Such experience and adventurousness break down conventional barriers, so that even standards have the exhilaration of free jazz. ‘Because I know standards so well,’ Abercrombie says, ‘I’m very free with them. I’m just as free with them as when I’m playing no chords at all.’

All these qualities were on display when the Irish duo of Michael Buckley on tenor sax and Ronan Guilfoyle on bass joined Abercrombie and Baron in Whelan’s last September. From the opening number, the Dietz and Schwartz standard ‘You and the Night and the Music’, to the groove-filled encore, the Sonny Rollins blues ‘Sonnymoon for Two’, the band delivered a hugely satisfying range of tunes, marked by marvelous group virtuosity and a relish for strong rhythms, abstract harmonies and forceful free playing.

Throughout the concert, the tension between freedom and collective focus was negotiated skilfully by the entire quartet. Every tune sparkled, but particularly bright was ‘George’s Hat’, a movement from Renaissance Man, Guilfoyle’s suite in memory of his father, which he and Abercrombie had recorded the week before this show. Opening with a sublime dialogue between bass and drums, the piece moved into a funky quartet excursion that absolutely cooked, with guitar and sax trading breaks before Baron contributed a masterful, hands-only sound sculpture that flowed like melody and cleverly played with audience expectation.

As well as featuring several Abercrombie originals, the rest of the set selected liberally from the canon – Ornette Coleman’s ‘Round Trip’, a sizzling version of Monk’s ‘Nutty’, the Coltrane masterpiece ‘Lonnie’s Lament’. But no matter the source, every piece was enlivened by the trademark Abercrombie tendency to float in and out of the prevailing rhythm, by Buckley’s solid and accomplished soloing, and by the obvious freedom and joy shared by Guilfoyle and Baron as they laid down such infectious grooves. A memorable night of terrific music.

Cora Smyth (fiddle, low whistle), Breda Smyth (fiddle, whistles, low whistle), Pauline Scanlon (voice), Donogh Hennessy (guitar)
Ballina Arts Centre, Co. Mayo
17 September 2008

It was ten minutes before showtime when I arrived at the Ballina Arts Centre to find an almost packed house. In the small gallery room, around 100 people had squeezed in for the first night of the Music Network ‘The West Awake’ tour.

The combination of Mayo sisters Cora and Breda Smyth with Pauline Scanlon and Donogh Hennessy provided an interesting mixture between group performance and solo showcasing. What really stood out, however, was the contrasting dynamics of the ‘staged’ concert setting with the informal group arrangement. Through ‘The Blackberry Blossom’, ‘The Bell Table’ and ‘The Rights of Man’ the music flowed with the wonderful looseness of a session; beginnings, changes and endings seemed open to the moment. At first, this hint of uncertainty in their playing clashed with my memories of the highly coordinated recordings of the Smyth sisters and the atomic-clock synchronisations of Hennessy’s former band Lúnasa. The Music Network flyer, however, described how ‘for all four this tour marks a return to their musical roots’. This concert was not only that, but also a narrowing down of their musical self to that of an individual performing in a room: no special status, no intricate arrangements, no fancy lighting and no microphones.  

As the evening progressed the concert began to feel more like a private gathering, with the interaction between audience and musicians becoming ever more free and familiar. The level of ease became such that as Pauline Scanlon began the final chorus of ‘The West’s Awake’ a gentle choir of voices joined her in a manner fitting to informal sing-songs. We were no longer merely an audience; we were neighbours ready to share in a musical event.

‘The West Awake’, or at least this particular concert in the tour, highlighted the strange contrasts that surround the performance of Irish traditional music in its dance between the concert hall, the pub session and the living room. When the encore was extended out from the song ‘Wearin’ the Britches’ into a rousing version of the ‘Foxhunters Reel’ it would have felt quite appropriate for the chairs to have been pushed back and for partners to have been lined up for a set.

Photo: Dónal Sarsfield

Amstel Saxophone Quartet, Maria McGarry (piano), Cathal Roche (saxophone)
Various venues, Sligo
20 September 2008
 
This year, with the the Model Arts and Niland Gallery’s reduction to building site, Sligo New Music shrank to a one-day event, visiting two new venues about Sligo Town: the Presbyterian Church and St Anne’s Community Centre. But, as this SNM revealed, size really doesn’t matter. Eccentric but intelligent curation, a consistently high standard of instrumental performance and a buoyant festival energy all reaffirm SNM’s identity.

The Dutch composer, Jacob Ter Velhuis, better known as the ‘rebranded’ Jacob TV, took centre stage, with numerous pieces for performer and ‘boombox’: dense, rhymical collages made from cut up recordings of American media and pop culture, from Jerry Springer shows to street preachers. They are slickly produced, virtuosic pieces showing the ridiculous through a kaleidoscopic lens. The occasional addition of instrumental tracks in the boombox part gives the parody a Karaoke flavour. (A PA was used rather than an actual boombox, which may have been less ‘authentic’, but it certainly made everything louder.)

For all the fun and games, there’s something irritatingly provocative and reactionary about Jacob TV. A glance at his website will reveal that he stands out ‘to the washed-up avant garde’ making him ‘a controversial figure’, ‘spurning dissonance’ as a ‘devalued means of expression’. An inspired programming move followed TV’s Heartbreakers with Stockhausen’s 1961 Klavierstück IX, a piece that still sounds fresh nearly half a century later. In that jarring light, TV’s attack on a perceived avant garde seemed adolescent.

In fact, such juxtapositions were to characterise the festival. Particularly memorable were Maria McGarry’s performances of two piano sonatas (Nos 2 and 4) by the Romanian-French composer Horatiu Radulescu, who sadly died the following week. These are expansive pieces, skirting extremes of dynamic and range. They’re erratic yet controlled, cosmopolitan yet unified. McGarry handled both pieces with patient timing and pedal-work, carefully constructing Radulescu’s resonant worlds.

Sligo-based Cathal Roche performed his own work, The Message, for saxophone and tape, a single text recited by twelve speakers from around the globe. The English text was inconsequentially nonsensical, but the changing accents applied to its repetitions provided the thrust for Roche’s protean improvisations. Roche also performed in Ian Wilson’s Boom!, which featured an excerpt from Irish radio, with occasional looping of individual words and layering of material and a pre-recorded saxophone part. Over this, Roche improvised a busy, saturated sheet of sound for nearly a quarter of an hour. I’m no stranger to prolonged, intense, noise works, but I struggled with this. The tape production was crude, and I was disappointed when, well into the piece, Roche turned to clichéd tongue-clackings in an attempt to make interesting a piece that wasn’t about maintaining interest. It was, perhaps, meant as a comment on the intellectual noise generated by economics babble on the airwaves á la Jacob TV; but in the context of TV’s works it simply demonstrated the relative excellence of Irish broadcasting compared to US media! Wilson seems to have been expanding the gamut over the last year or so, increasingly involving improvisation and other media in his work. Happily, I made it to his Tundra, to me a much more polished multi-media dance work, at the Fringe Festival in Dublin a few weeks earlier.

Siobhán Cleary’s festival-commissioned Conachlann, for piano and saxophone quartet, powered ahead, slowly but forcefully, like a dirge or chaconne. Low drones and miniature melodic steps in the saxophone choir met with athletic piano chords and a hurried soprano saxophone solo. It’s a reconciliation of opposites reminiscent of Radulescu, who subtitled his second piano sonata with Lao Tzu’s line: ‘being and non-being create each other’.

The beauty of a festival like this is that a small community of musicians and listeners develops throughout the day. An informality creeps in: when one concert was delayed, the Amstel Quartet performed Philip Glass’ Saxophone Quartet in the street, from memory, yet it was as taut as any other performance that day. Between concerts, there’s just enough time to take in the myriad points of view over coffee by the river or a pint in Hartigan’s. It’s soon clear that there are as many opinions as there are pairs of ears. It’s not important that everybody likes everything all of the time. Between the black and the white the magic happens.

Dave Flynn (guitar, voice), Liz Coleman (fiddle), Martin Tourish (accordion), Ciarán Swift (guitar), Seán Murphy (banjo)
Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, Co. Kerry
28 September 2008

The aim of the Trad Connections tour was, according to the press release, to bring audiences ‘on an unforgettable journey which will demonstrate how closely linked these musical styles are’. The musical styles referred to were traditional, classical and jazz. Unfortunately, we were not treated to this journey, and the performance on this night would lead the audience to believe the very opposite.

Composer and guitarist Dave Flynn’s performance of Bach’s Partita in B minor, before being joined by Liz Coleman on fiddle for a jig in the same key, was an unsuccessful pairing. With Martin Tourish and Ciarán Swift coming to the stage, we were treated to a slicker and more professional approach, and Tourish’s own composition, ‘The More You Look, The More You See’, was one of the better moments of the concert. There was, however, awkwardness between the performers on stage, and this became ever more magnified by their constant walking on and off stage in between sets of tunes of which they were not a part.

Flynn’s singing of ‘Woodlands’, a song co-written by himself and Pádraig O’Beirne, was pleasant and Tourish added some nice flourishes on the piano accordion. Perhaps they could have added more songs to their set as they worked better than some of the sets of tunes. Flynn’s suite, ‘Omós do Frankie Kennedy’, showed little connection to Donegal music (as was suggested in its introduction) and tended to drag towards the end. There were also problems with tuning, and especially rhythm and timing when the group played ensemble.

The choice of the ensemble sets were very standard (‘The Dublin Reel’, ‘The Foxhunters’, etc.), which is fine, but I had expected to hear more new compositions as well as more interesting arrangements. The only device used by the group as a variation, as such, was a gradual crescendo, which was repeated again and again throughout the night. The highlight of the evening, for me, was the introduction of banjo player Seán Murphy from Abbeyfeale. Joining the group for the final two sets, he injected much needed energy, musicality and style into the performance.

Overall, a disappointing concert. The absence of guitarist Hugh Buckley for this concert may have thrown the performers somewhat, but I have to admit I am not sure how the whole package would have worked in any case.