Burning City Orchestra

"The Noam Faingold Orchestra blew me away! The strings are gorgeous, the lyrics and arrangement are wonderful, and I absolutely love how dramatic the choruses are. I also love how many turns and twists this quirky, delightful song takes." - Anoushka Shankar - BBC

More often than not, aspiring jazz artists from
around the world who seek to drink deeply
from the jazz fount emigrate to New York. Of
course, there are numerous exceptions to relocation,
like the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, which,
since 1994, has evolved its unique jazz voice based
smack dab in Tulsa, Okla.
The JFJO collective—led by pianist Brian
Haas and today comprising lap steel guitarist
Chris Combs, bassist Jeff Harshbarger and
drummer Josh Raymer—staged an impressive
event on June 12 that arguably would have never
happened had the group transplanted itself to
New York. JFJO delivered a largely successful
melding of jazz and classical music in an evening
billed as “Ludwig.” The concert featured
the quartet with the 50-piece Bartlesville Symphony
Orchestra conducted by Lauren Green as
Beethoven’s Third and Sixth symphonies were
re-envisioned with a jazz sensibility. The show
attracted a nearly full house at the 1,700-seat
Bartlesville Community Center (an hour’s drive
northeast of Tulsa).
The concert turned out to be a tour de force of
jazz melded with classical, with a call-and-response
component through Noam Faingold’s
unorthodox-but-respectful arrangements. Staying
true to Beethoven’s melodies, countermelodies
and compositional intent, Faingold allowed space
for pockets of improvisation and chose different
instruments to cover solo parts. For example, Haas
played piano on what were violin spotlights in
Beethoven’s original scores.
The JFJO presided as the dominant factor,
with the orchestra supplying the dynamics, providing
the sheer volume to the shifts in tempo and
rhythm, and responding to the call in the piano and
lap steel lines. The first half of the concert featured
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the lap steel opening
with a peaceful, countrified feel. The piece’s
rural joy was interrupted in the lyrically cacophonic
fourth movement, a musical rendering of a
torrential thunderstorm characterized by Haas’
forceful, driving pianism, Combs’ eerie, FX’d
lap steel voicings of anticipation and Raymer’s
pounding drums.
After the intermission, JFJO and orchestra
performed a jazz-infused take on Beethoven’s
Symphony No. 3. The first movement was forceful,
the second sober, the third set loose in a scampering
scherzo vibe and the fourth, the climax, a
slow-to-burn thriller. The jazz playing was at times
exclamatory with strong rhythmic punctuation
points, Raymer’s drumming taking on a swinging
tango-tinged groove in the second movement.
—Dan Ouellette - Downbeat Magazine

Circles & Lines is the mirror image of most new-music groups. In the more traditional arrangement a steady ensemble of performers puts a composer in the spotlight for a few moments and then moves on to another; in Circles & Lines the composers are the regular members, and the musicians who play their scores come and go.

At the organization’s concert at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday evening a huge assembly of players shuffled on and off the stage, with few performing in more than one work, even when the instrumentation overlapped. A different pianist, for example, played in each of the four pieces that required piano. It was a decidedly inefficient way to proceed, though there was something appealingly luxurious about having so many players at the service of five composers.

The program began with Noam Faingold’s “Berlin Songs,” a pair of gracefully chromatic vocal pieces with lightly dissonant piano accompaniments, sung fetchingly by Meray Boustani, a soprano. A second work by Mr. Faingold, “Continuums,” for solo cello, is clearly the work of the same hand: the cello line, played by Leat Sabbah, shares the songs’ plaintive, melodic quality, and even as the writing grows increasingly elaborate, a lyrical impulse remains at its heart.

Angélica Negrón’s most striking contribution to the program was a quirky approach to scoring. Her “They Swim Under My Bed” is for three violins and piano, an oddly top-heavy ensemble, and you can tell that there will be mischief afoot the moment the piano begins its nursery-rhyme-like introduction. Simple, repeating and slowly evolving string chords take over, and just when you start wondering whether the piece will achieve its apparent desire to become the Barber Adagio, the violins take off into a trilled flight.

Ms. Negrón’s capacity to surprise was on display in a second work as well, “I Can Still Hear You,” for accordion and tape. The electronic sound evolved constantly and included both instrumental lines and field recordings. The accordion part, which Ms. Negrón played herself, was generally less compelling, but occasionally departed from standard chording to create unusual effects using, for example, air from its bellows.

Conrad Winslow’s string and wind sextet “Flying Patterns” injected a touch of harmonic thorniness and rhythmic vitality into the program. More interesting, though, was his “Dilating Music,” an atmospheric exploration of meaty lower brass textures, complete with subtle slides and juxtapositions of muted and open timbres, expertly played by the trombone quartet Guidonian Hand.

Dylan Glatthorn contributed some of the most assured writing of the evening in “Imagining Paradise,” a string quartet that has some of the steaminess and drive of Janacek’s “Intimate Letters” and the harmonic allure of the Debussy quartet. And Eric Lemmon provided an ambitious dramatic work for a large ensemble, “The Cure at Troy,” a scene from Seamus Heaney’s retelling of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes.”

Mr. Lemmon’s work nods at Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach,” both musically (repeated, simple figures are its primary engine) and in its use of overlapping and simultaneous spoken texts. But Mr. Lemmon’s own voice comes through as well, and this setting left a listener curious to hear how he will develop it. - New York Times

Cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson (pictured), viola player Max Baillie and all-string group the 12 Ensemble are among the performers at a new ten-day festival in east London next month. The ‘i = u Festival’ will bring together music with dance, art, theatre and film as it explores improvisation and new approaches to classical, popular and experimental music.

Taking place from 12 to 21 September at the Guest Projects arts space in south Hackney, the festival is curated by violinist Eugene Feygelson, composer and double bassist Noam Faingold and guitarist and photographer Michael Dylan Ferrara. Other performers will include the Burning City Orchestra, a classical–rock hybrid ensemble combining a string quintet with a rock rhythm section and vocals. The Quest Ensemble piano trio will direct two sessions exploring group improvisation, and David Dolan, improvisation tutor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, will present a workshop.

‘We want the festival to be an open experience for the audience, involving broader interaction with the artists,’ said Faingold. ‘It’s also been very interesting to see both the similarities and differences in the different media. There tends to be a thought process or point of convergence for people in any art form who are interested in improvisation, which encompasses more than just the field that they’re in.’ - The Strad