Chamber Music America Conference - continued

sorry for the delay! Things have been busy in Loopland. Below is a follow up to the Chamber Music America conference 2010 chronicles.

CMA Ensemble Showcases

This part of the conference provides an opportunity for groups, all CMA members, to showcase their talents and hopefully win over concert presenters and management types who are attending the conference. We were only able to attend about a third of the performances as many were happening at the same time. We prioritized attending some of the jazz and contemporary music showcases. The performances we saw included duoJalal, Weiss-Kaplan-Newman Trio, Madera Vox, Fireworks Ensemble, Ted Kooshian’s Standard Orbit Quartet, and Jeff Newell’s New-Trad Octet.

We can’t take the space here to review or comment on all of the performances, but wanted to give you the synopsis of what we saw, as it seems to be an important event for the industry. The W-K-N Trio gave an impassioned performance of works by Brahms, Smetena, and Sheng. They handled the Romantic to Contemporary works confidently. This wasn’t the most cohesive performance, you got the impression that this collaboration was not their main project, but they were all wonderful musicians and gave a convincing performance.

Madera Vox and Fireworks Ensemble were back to back on Saturday and represented the “contemporary” (quotes explained below) category of ensembles. This combined hour of showcasing was the most confusing and disappointing part of the entire conference. One might expect the contemporary ensembles to be edgy, take risks, and above all to perform works by living composers…not so. The overall esthethic of both of these ensembles seemed to gravitate toward cabaret more that anything else. It appeared to be geared toward entertainment value, which is possibly the marketing angle they felt necessary to find work in today’s economy.

The Fireworks Ensemble delivered a very tight ensemble performance, with much of the music performed from memory, but in the context of this situation, the most striking thing about it was that THEY PLAYED ABSOLUTELY NO MUSIC BY LIVING COMPOSERS!! Um…whom are we fooling here? This is one of the groups selected as a “contemporary ensemble.” Worse yet is that the ensemble members didn’t seem to know that the composers were dead! Bassist and bandleader Brian Coughlin even gave an elaborate introduction about the group’s dedication to contemporary music as a lead-in to the group’s arrangement of G-Spot Tornado by Frank Zappa. Now, we love our Zappa, but we also know this piece was released on “Jazz From Hell” in 1986, over 20 years ago (and that Zappa died, God bless his soul, over 16 years ago). That makes it a 20th century work, modern for sure, a classic in rock/pop terms, but certainly not contemporary. All of this might have been forgiven and forgotten if a really rousing performance followed this nonsense, but it all felt tepid, as if Broadway session musicians had been hired to read some cool charts. The group was tight and well rehearsed, but inventive, passionate or convincing, not to mention contemporary(!), it was not. This reached the point of offensiveness, because either Mr. Coughlin considered the audience to be ignorant, or was himself, and either way there was no integrity in the presentation as regards CMA.

The best thing to say about Madera Vox was that they were honest and knowledgeable about what they were doing. The ensemble playing was less refined than Fireworks'– they played Children’s Song No.6 by Chick Corea and seemed to be fishing for whether or not to play a latin or swing groove, but there was some inventiveness to their arrangements and presentation. Again, instead of giving gutsy performances, they gravitated toward this cabaret esthetic, which seemed out of place at such a conference. These combined sessions left us wondering if CMA stood for Cabaret Mentality Amusement… more to come!

-J.M.