Part of the purpose of this post is to let folks know that I have relocated from Durham NC to Brooklyn NY. While the move was a personal one motivated by the desire to remove the “Long Distance” prefix from a relationship I’ve been in for three and a half years, it comes with some musical benefits. I was very happy living in Durham for 13 years, but sometimes wished I lived in New York when I would see notices about shows happening in NYC by artists that seldom if ever come to Durham. This became even more true after Aaron Greenwald left town, where he had been booking the Duke Performances concert series, for the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Thanks to his leadership, I’d been able to see performances by folks like Anthony Braxton and Zakir Hussain that you don’t often see touring the South. DP became less adventurous after he left and my eyes more frequently wandered to listings of shows in NYC. When Elizabeth and I began dating, I began to see some of them on my trips to Brooklyn, such as William Parker’s tribute to Duke Ellington at the Lena Horne bandshell in Prospect Park last summer.

Soon after arriving here, Elizabeth gifted me a pass to Bang on the Can’s Long Play Festival as a reward for playing an improvisational duet set at Creatures, an art show she had with three other artists in Brooklyn. I saw a lot of great sets over those days but the one that got to me the most was the last one I saw: a duet set from pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. I wasn’t alone in being impressed. I sat in the second row and heard several gasps and breathy statements such as “Wow.” from my neighbors over the course of the set. Many of them carefully framed and snapped pictures in a way that made me feel I was amidst a gaggle of teenagers at a pop concert. This state of rapt attention enhanced my perception of the music greatly in a way that called to mind the proverbial home field advantage of major sporting events!

My initial motivation to skip the Phillip Glass piece that friends were attending a few blocks away in favor of this show was to see Wadada Leo Smith. I was familiar with him through reading about and listening to various musicians associated with the AACM, (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.) Many of the names that I’d seen listed in upcoming performances in NYC I wished I could see when I was living in Durham came from this diaspora. However, I wasn’t familiar with Sylvie Courvoisier by name going into the show. I later learned that I had appreciated her playing on records I was familiar with by others, such as the cellist Erik Friedlander’s 2013 album Claws and Wings about the death of his wife Lynn, a choreographer and writer who was a former student and good friend of my stepmother’s. Her playing blew me away that night and now I’ll be looking out for future shows of hers and have been combing through her extensive back catalog. While she is significantly younger than Smith – 57 as compared to 84 – they both qualify for this Top 40 Over 40 series with ease.

Seeing so many performances in a row at a festival can lead to some interesting comparisons. A few struck me here. I had seen performances earlier by Billy Hart, David Murray and Steve Lehman and others where they spoke more frequently to the audience before or in between songs. Here the entrance of the musicians was silent, and only one word was uttered the whole time: “Trumpet.” It may or may not have been preceded by the words “It’s a…” Smith said it when someone in the first row looked at his cylindrical leather case with some curiosity. It had laid on the stage next to his chair before he walked out and looked a bit like a strange pinhole camera taking a long exposure. Other than that one point of clarification, Smith and Courvoisier let their presence and music do the talking in a way that made the connection between them apparent – eye contact signaling when to stop improvisations, putting their arms around each other to bow to the audience at the end. I found it made the whole evening feel more like a strange fever dream.

Another thing that struck me were certain details about the technique. One common point I noticed among some of the horn players at the festival was the technique of bringing the sound of the breath through the horn to the forefront, sometimes without even the hint of a conventional musical note. Some would remove the mouthpiece to do this and some would not. The sounds reminded me of a difference between recording string instruments close enough that the friction of the bow on the strings becomes prominent enough to be abrasive, vs. more traditional far away mic technique that makes that friction inaudible, producing an airy and idealized vibe like in Hollywood scores and and recordings of great symphony orchestras. Smith used this technique subtly in a way that felt to me like there was this tension between the emotion that could be put across by a phrase and the material conditions that made it possible for that emotion to be evoked – the metal, the buttons, the breath. He also left a lot of space in between his runs and phrases in ways that reminded me of Miles Davis but expanded out to more open vistas.

Courvoisier stood out from other pianists at the start of the set by eschewing the use of pedals to produce sustain to the notes of the piano. I experienced the instrument as something more obviously consistent with Cecil Taylor’s description of a piano as a collection of 88 tuned drums. The initial impact of the key on the string was the star of the show rather than the prolonged decay of ominous tones, which I sometimes react negatively to as if they are manipulating me into being overcome with the emotions the notes bring to mind. It felt consistent with the breath emphasis in Smith’s trumpet playing in a way that felt very earthy. The notes faded away in time to let the next ones make a fresh impression rather than be subsumed into an overhanging wash of sound.

She began to use the sustain pedal more as she began introducing plucked and prepared piano techniques in the second half of the set. Despite having listened to John Cage records for years, I had never seen a piano played like that live before. Or if I had, it wasn’t changed as often during the set as the treatments were here. Black tape was applied and removed, metallic objects placed carefully on some strings but not on others, and then moved around to suit the song. It reminded me a bit of a guitar player interacting with a pedal board, but here there were no electronic circuits involved. There were a lot of sets at the festival where pedals I recognized were deployed to alter the sound of traditional jazz and classical instruments, (Hologram’s Microcosm and Chroma Console for example.) They didn’t sound as good as the textures Courvoisier got with her metal and tape and fingernails. When she moved around the keyboard, she knew exactly where the muted notes were – often in the high octaves for the tape and mid octaves for the metal objects – and hit them interspersed with untreated strings extended by the sustain pedal to excellent effect. Meanwhile, Smith used a mute on his horn periodically that cut the volume and frequency range down more drastically than I had heard with other uses of trumpet mutes before. Those tones reminded me of the effect of the atonal breath-through-the-horn moments but with a more consistent texture that added variety mid way through the set when things might have began to feel same-y.

When they stood up quietly at the end and the room burst into applause I felt glad to be in a big city where a larger audience can come together for creative and adventurous music like this. I’ve since listened to their recent duet album Angel Falls and recommend it but there was something about the live nature of that performance that interacted with the audience in a way I won’t forget.