[Moshe]

Practice man, practice.

http://www.carnegiehall.org/article/...ddate=12052006

Bang on a Can All-Stars will play a piece by Thurston on December 5th.

[Moshe]

No love for Thurston?

How about this one?

Nov 17, 2006
Sunday Nov 19 @ Artifacts of the 20th Century 6:30-10:00
28 N Maple Florence, MA

Two Dollar Guitar
Thurston
Vashti Bashers (dredd foole, mascis, rick, anna)

I have a strange feeling that Thurston will play songs from his forthcoming solo album...

[Jef Mertens]

Originally Posted by Moshe

No love for Thurston?

How about this one?

Nov 17, 2006
Sunday Nov 19 @ Artifacts of the 20th Century 6:30-10:00
28 N Maple Florence, MA

Two Dollar Guitar
Thurston
Vashti Bashers (dredd foole, mascis, rick, anna)

I have a strange feeling that Thurston will play songs from his forthcoming solo album...

I'd bare a heart attack if he would play songs from his forthcoming solo album. If he would play with Steve and Tim as the Male Slut outfit for this album I would bare a second attack

[greenlight]

cool!!!

[Moshe]

so?

[guitarpro]

Practice
Practice
Practice

[Moshe]

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...usic-headlines

Can you hum a few bars? Odds are, probably not




BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
Newsday Staff Writer

December 8, 2006

The electro-acoustic new music band Bang on a Can All-Stars thrives on hybrids and impurities. Its Zankel Hall concert on Wednesday skipped from the music of a Yale professor to pieces by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and the jazz clarinetist Don Byron. Improvisation, electronica, rock and roll, cerebral modernism, klezmer and a whole range of ethnic traditions - the Bang on a Can aesthetic throws all these elements together and grinds them into a hyperactive minimalism.

The concert was a tour de force of noisemaking, and the hall was filled with people who like their music new, loud and crackling. There was less diversity in the program than met the eye. Moore's trancelike "Stroking Piece No. 1," grew steadily in volume, drifting through iridescent clouds of electric guitar.

Julia Wolfe's "Big Beautiful, Dark, and Scary" covers the same territory. Long crescendos reach their quadruple-forte destination slowly, like the rider moving from the horizon into a close-up in "Lawrence of Arabia." The arrival is deafening and little happens along the way to justify cranking the volume or to give it the feeling of a climax rather than just the turning of a knob.

The godfather of the group is Martin Bresnick, a Yale professor who had the good fortune of teaching three students - Wolfe, her husband Michael Gordon and David Lang - who turned into acolytes, then proselytes, then establishment figures themselves.

Bresnick turns 70 this year, a good number for a sage, and the All-Stars celebrated by playing two of his etudes in economy from a series called "Opere della Musica Povera," or "Works of a Poor Music."

Each piece erects itself out of humble stuff. "The Bucket Rider," based on a Franz Kafka story, is a slow processional of whispery creaks and flutters. "BE JUST!" rests on a hard-edged rhythm laid down by dropping chains on the skin of a kettledrum. The pieces are not long but you can't rush them: They exude the we've-got-all-night feeling of music that is happy to stay wherever it happens to begin.

If Bresnick is the group's gray eminence, Conlon Nancarrow is its ancestral spirit. Being weird was a weirder choice in the 1940s than it is today, and Nancarrow defined his life by a series of unconventional rejections. He was an American who chose exile in Mexico. He was a composer who kept his music away from musicians, entrusting it instead to the impartial mechanisms of the player piano, which doesn't make mistakes. He was a recluse who began to influence young composers around the time he turned 80.

The All-Stars' clarinetist, Evan Ziporyn, reached back to the radical piano studies that Nancarrow wrote in the 1940s and arranged them for his ensemble, producing four miniatures of bracing strangeness. Simultaneous but different rhythms go their own implacable way, generating intricate arrangements of simple patterns.

But it's the combination of impishness and rigor that captivates Ziporyn, the way a languorous, swinging clarinet line drapes itself over the rhythmic armature. The arrangements are brilliantly clear and brutal, and the ensemble plays them with the taut ferocity of a great rock band.

BANG ON A CAN ALL-STARS. Zankel Hall, at Carnegie Hall. Tuesday night.

[Moshe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/ar...gewanted=print

Music Review | 'Bang on a Can All-Stars'
Melodic Inventions, Frenzied to Calm

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Bang on a Can, the collective of composers, performers and activists who champion hip contemporary music, began almost 20 years ago with an all-inclusive festival. Marathons and festivals are still the main attractions of this enterprising outfit.
But the festivals are sometimes inclusive to a fault. Concerts by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, a roster of six elite performers, tend to be more discriminating, the classy events. The All-Stars program on Tuesday night at Zankel Hall was no exception. Four of the six new and recent works performed were inventive and captivating, a high satisfaction quotient in any field of art.
Fred Frith’s beautifully conceived “Snakes and Ladders” is set in motion with a repetitive series of pensive, bluesy piano chords, nudged now and then by the bass and electric guitar, and woven through with melodic bits in the clarinets and cello. What keeps the music from becoming excessively soothing are staggered rhythms in the percussion and abrupt melodic flights that keep spiraling upward — the “Snakes and Ladders” of the title. Eventually the flights turn fitful and skittish, almost pointillistic, until the piece winds down, thins out and ends in wistful calm.
The versatile and highly skilled All-Stars — Robert Black (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Lisa Moore (piano), Mark Stewart (electric guitar), Wendy Sutter (cello), Evan Ziporyn (clarinets) — seemed particularly engaged by the next work, two pieces from the “Opere della Musica Povera” series by Martin Bresnick, a mentor to several founding members of Bang on a Can, including Mr. Ziporyn. In these scores, inspired by grimly poignant tales from Kafka, Mr. Bresnick strives to create astutely structured and organic works using only minimal materials.
“The Bucket Rider,” with its delicate pedal tones, murky sonorities and a chorale-like pattern of pungent chords, was a mesmerizing prelude to “Be Just!,” a breathless work, like some wild toccata that began and ended with the terrifying thump of rattling chains dropped upon a bass drum.
Four studies originally created for player piano by the iconoclastic American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who died in 1997, were heard in recent arrangements by Mr. Ziporyn. Nancarrow’s evocations of boogie-woogie, swing, wailing jazz, African rhythms and his trademark frenetic pummeling are made more explicit in these colorful and effective arrangements, though you lose some of the honky-tonk plainness of the originals.
The composer and clarinetist Don Byron describes his jazzy, punchy and pulsating “Show Him Some Lub” as a confessional piece. Mixed into the instrumental textures are the amplified voices of the performers giving answers to personal questions about their ancestors, ethnic backgrounds and aspirations. The audience heard only the answers, not the questions, so the flow of disconnected words, though affecting, became just another musical element.
For me Julia Wolfe’s “Big, Beautiful, Dark and Scary” was a tiresome din of perpetual motion and swelling cluster chords. Thurston Moore’s “Stroking Piece # 1” was also blunt, blaring and orgasmic. Both works shook the place, though, and earned some lusty cheers. I wouldn’t be surprised if the aural onslaught loosened up the granite walls surrounding this underground hall, just in case Carnegie Hall is thinking of excavating some more to expand the place.

[Moshe]

http://blog.bangonacan.org/?p=15

Thurston Moore and the All-Stars
check out the video

[Moshe]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/ar...=1&oref=slogin

The Bang on a Can All-Stars — a sextet of electric guitar, cello, keyboards, bass, clarinet and percussion — riffled through compositional strategies built on patterns and propulsion. Michael Gordon’s “I Buried Paul,” conducted by David Cossin as he stood at his snare drum, placed brief, dissonant curlicues in staggered layers, regularly shaking them like the shards of color in a kaleidoscope. Louis Andriessen’s “Workers Union” had the members playing in rhythmic unison on dissonant pitches: short lines stopping and starting, delving into various registers, all with a choppy industrial drive.
“Stroking Piece No. 1,” by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, transferred an evolving Sonic Youth drone to sextet, with Mark Stewart’s guitar upfront. The set’s centerpiece was four transcriptions of Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano, originally performed by punched piano rolls. The transcriptions held to the complex, staggered rhythms and fugal passages of the originals, but also discovered jaunty, bluesy melodies amid the dizzying counterpoint.

[Moshe]

listen here:

http://www.bangonacan.org/audio/unpo...roking_piece_1