#i came into the venue ambivalent on their music and emerged from the venue a fan

[cuntvonkrolock]

i need to see simple plan live again they were so fucking awesome

[sfjazz]

Celebrating John Luther Adams, a composer of land, air and water - SF Chronicle

http://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Celebrating-a-composer-of-land-air-and-water-11300053.php

Celebrating a composer of land, air and water

By Joshua Kosman

July 19, 2017 Updated: July 19, 2017 12:11pm

For decades, anyone searching for the composer John Luther Adams knew pretty much where to look. It might not have been easy to actually get to him, because beginning in the 1970s, Adams was mostly ensconced in a small wooden shed deep in the interior of Alaska.

But the steady flow of compositions coming out of that shed — innovative, grandly scaled works that were deeply imbued with a sense of place and attuned to the sounds and rhythms of the natural world — bore witness to his rooted existence in the Arctic Circle.

Now Adams, at 64, is on the move.

Three years ago — shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy for his vast, shimmery orchestral work “Become Ocean” — Adams and his wife, Cindy, pulled up stakes and relocated to New York City. When we spoke by phone recently, he was in Santiago, Chile, a location about which he speaks with a lover’s ardor.

And this week, Adams will be in San Francisco, where SFJazz is hosting a full-scale immersion in his work — a weeklong, six-event musical smorgasbord featuring percussion works, a sound installation at Grace Cathedral and a complete traversal of his string quartets, including a world premiere, presented by the virtuosic Jack Quartet.

Jazz, you say? Well, not by any traditional reckoning. Adams’ work sits more squarely within the experimental tradition of American classical music, nodding to such predecessors as John Cage, Harry Partch, Henry Cowell and Pauline Oliveros. Its vistas are expansive — often unfolding over an hour and more of gradual evolution — and its language is alternately lush and delicate.

Yet neither composer nor presenter is at all fazed by the seeming incongruity of this project.

“I love the fact that this is happening at what is, nominally at least, a non-classical venue,” Adams says. “And it strikes me more and more that listeners don’t care what music is called, or how it’s categorized — just how it speaks to them.

“So I hope they will come with a certain high curiosity, ready to hear something they haven’t heard before.”

Randall Kline, the founder and executive artistic director of SFJazz, sought Adams out on the basis of “Become Ocean,” which was premiered and recorded by the Seattle Symphony under its music director, Ludovic Morlot.

“I started listening to that piece, and I thought, there’s something about this that has an SFJazz aesthetic,” says Kline. “There’s that sense of openness, of not being confined. And a lot of it is about the experience of deep listening.”

In the interests of clarity, it’s worth pointing out — although this has become less necessary as his work has grown in prominence — that John Luther Adams uses his full name professionally for good reason. Of the two Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composers named John Adams, he is the younger one, and still arguably the less famous. He’s not the Berkeley composer of “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic,” although the two have known one another since the early 1970s.

“I remember in around 1980 that John and I both released recordings at the same time,” John Luther Adams recalls. “There was a review in Stereo Review under the headline ‘Two John Adamses.’ But it wasn’t long after that it came to seem like maybe there was just one John Adams, and pretty soon I knew I had a problem.”

Adopting his middle name for the first time since childhood was a difficult decision.

“I’d always hated my middle name — my mother only used it when she was mad at me — but one of my great heroes is Martin Luther King, and so I decided to just go with it. And over time I came to embrace it.”

For listeners unfamiliar with Adams’ work — its vivid blend of energy and stillness, its exquisite gradations of instrumental color, its gift for invoking spiritualism without sanctimony — the week’s festivities promise an immersive range of musical experiences. One of the highlights, surely, will be a performance of “Inuksuit,” Adams’ outdoor extravaganza for up to 99 percussionists splayed across a carefully chosen performance site — in this case, Sutro Baths at Lands End.

“This is a piece that has certain needs in order to mount an effective performance,” says Adams. “You need some reflective surfaces, you need some topography, and you need birds. There has to be a relationship with the acoustic environment.”

Yet despite its constraints, “Inuksuit,” completed in 2009, has emerged as one of Adams’ most frequently played works. In 2012, there was a ravishing performance on the UC Berkeley campus as part of Cal Performances’ presentation of music from the Ojai Festival. The piece has even been done indoors, in a 2011 performance at the New York Armory that garnered plenty of attention but left the composer feeling a little uneasy.

“That was the one and only authorized indoor performance,” Adams says. “The guest list was stellar. People had rapturous responses. It had sounds I’d never heard before. But it wasn’t ‘Inuksuit,’ because so much of that piece is a call-and-response with the music of the place it’s performed.”

Adams says friends have sometimes compared “Inuksuit” to Terry Riley’s 1964 minimalist classic “In C,” mostly because it’s the piece of his that gets performed most frequently. But it also shares with “In C” a celebration of a communal experience — an aspect of the work that Adams himself was slow to grasp.

“The piece relies on a community not just of musicians, but of its listeners and of the site itself. And this was the ultimate irony for a reclusive Alaskan composer. When I was working on it, I thought this was a piece about solitude. I imagined each performer and each listener as a solitary presence on this vast performance landscape. But then I discovered it was actually a community. The joke was on me.”

The string quartets on the schedule are a little more traditional, but only up to a point. They include two pieces in which the players never dampen a string against the fingerboard — both scores are entirely built out of open strings and natural harmonics. The new work, “Everything That Rises,” is constructed from a series of melodic and harmonic spirals that trend endlessly upward.

Also on the schedule are the percussion solo “Illimaq” (like many of Adams’ titles, this one derives from the indigenous languages of Alaska) and “Veils and Vesper,” a gradually evolving electro-acoustic soundscape to be installed in Grace Cathedral.

Born in Mississippi, Adams grew up in various locations around the U.S. His earliest musical experiences were as a rock ’n’ roll drummer, and an early passion for the music of Frank Zappa led him — as it did for many experimentally minded rockers — to the works of Edgard Varèse, Morton Feldman, Cage and Webern. Soon after graduating from Cal Arts in 1973, he moved to Alaska and found a home and an artistic motivation.

At first, though, he and his wife devoted themselves chiefly to environmental activism. They helped work toward the 1980 passage of a federal act, signed by President Jimmy Carter, to protect millions of acres of Alaskan land as parks and wildlife refuges.

Throughout the ensuing decades, much of Adams’ output — works bearing such wintry titles as “Dream in White on White” or “In a Treeless Place, Only Snow” — played to more urban listeners like bulletins from a remote outpost.

But more recently, a confluence of factors worked to dislodge the Adamses from their Arctic home. The political climate grew chillier and more polarized. Adams was beset by a series of eye problems that required one surgery after another. And the landscape itself had begun to shift.

“The undeniable and rapid advance of climate change was a big factor. Scientists have been predicting that changes would show up first in high latitudes, and boy, were they correct. We were right on the bleeding edge of it.”

So Adams and his wife decided that there was time for one more big adventure. They bought a small apartment in Manhattan, and moved there. It’s a decision about which he already sounds ambivalent at best.

“We love New York — to me it is still the city, and we’ve seen a few — but we have discovered, surprise surprise, that we’re not really city people. We love going there, and we love leaving. So it remains to be seen how New York will figure in our lives long term.”

At the moment, Adams is hip-deep in two large projects: a memoir of his life in Alaska, and a characteristically massive choral work scheduled for an outdoor premiere next summer in New York’s Central Park. It’s planned for some dozen choruses and, Adams hopes, upward of 1,000 voices.

“It does seem very Alaskan — very larger-than-life,” he acknowledges with a laugh. “Maybe it’s the masterpiece complex, which is absurd and outmoded, but for whatever reason, after living for virtually all of my creative life in a landscape like that, in that geography, I’ve come to measure everything that I do, and everything that humans do, against the natural world.

“You know, I went north all those years ago, as a romantic young crusader and artist, and I imagined that in Alaska I could step outside my own culture — which is patently ridiculous.

“But somehow I was able to draw music from the air and the earth, and that has served me well. Even though it’s obviously a ridiculous idea, it’s given me a life’s work.”

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@JoshuaKosman

John Luther Adams Festival: Wednesday-Sunday, July 26-30. $35. SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin St.; Sutro Baths, Lands End; Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F. (866) 920-5299, www.sfjazz.org

Spotify playlist of music by John Luther Adams: http://tinyurl.com/y8gdgtsh

[rockandrollportlandor]

GOOD CHEER RECORDS HOLIDAY SHOWCASE

I've expressed before my affection for Good Cheer Records, a local label that emerged from the DIY all ages indie rock scene in Portland, but whose personnel have connections and influence in the mainstream of local and national indie music. Geek rockerMo Troper, also a writer for the Portland Mercury (cleverly disguised as Morgan Troper), even scored the coveted Pitchfork review, something which has eluded many of the best bands in town at the moment. Troper, the label's co-founder with Blake Hickman, has vanished to Los Angeles, replaced by Maya Stoner, a performer in several GC bands. Kyle Bates' project Drowse has seen praise from Vice's Noisey blog and SPIN Magazine, while another one of the label's star acts, Little Star, have gotten great reviews all over the place, including here on ROCK AND ROLL PORTLAND, OR. My favorite Good Cheer band, Mr. Bones, is sadly over, but the label, with so many other good acts, has hardly been damaged by these shifts--or a scandal that saw Jackson Walker, a member of Good Cheer band Naked Hour, excommunicated in the wake of his much younger ex-girlfriend's allegations of physical/emotional abuse. Good Cheer's bands are each unique, but broadly speaking they traffic in a hyper-sincere, heart-on-sleeve, guitar-based pop/rock that seems to trace its roots back to the 90's and early 00's, a time before MP3s--or at least a time when a single MP3 took a whole morning to download. It's the art-damaged cool and guitar abuse of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth injected with the bloodletting melodicism of emo and the sweetness of twee-pop. It's a reminder of the truth in that old quote about Pavement being "the band that launched a thousand Weezers." These tendencies make the label's roster a refreshing departure, perhaps even a necessary counter-reaction, to the various fusions of psychedelic rock, dream pop, and blissed-out oddball party music so often seems to dominate Portlandian "pop". The earnestness of Good Cheer's bands, which the label proudly declares free of "mercenary ambition", makes a lot of what was represented by 2016's now-tainted "Mt. Portland" compilation seem positively decadent. On the other side of the coin, that comp's hip groups, often resented across the music scene for their perceived complacence and supposedly undeserved "fame", offer a sense of easy fun and trippy euphoria that the Good Cheer bands often lack--the label's name is pretty ironic, since good cheer is just about the last thing you'll get from most of these bands. Rather, they provide what Kurt Cobain ambivalently called "the comfort in being sad," the paradoxical sense of suffering as painful but life-affirming. At best that means a strangely joyous catharsis on the other side of the pain, at worst it might be written off as wallowing, navel gazing, and irksome preciousness. It's not for everybody, but it's way up my moody emo kid alley. These bands' music is about intimate feelings--even at its most bombastic, it's introverted almost as a rule, and perhaps that's how they create the feeling that they're Your Special Band, even when you're, as I was on this December Wednesday night, surrounded by a bunch of other people watching them. Good Cheer maintains the sense that their acts are the best band in your shitty hometown, who you see in some basement when you're 17, and finally, you've found a place where you fit in, finally, some people who speak for you. Perhaps the ideal place to see these bands is indeed someone's basement, but it was also fitting to see them in a major mid-sized venue like the Holocene--it was a sign that Good Cheer have emerged from a scrappy underground operation to become a major force in that vague genre known as "Portland pop". I didn't catch the entire show, which crammed six acts, successfully, into three hours, but the first group I caught was ALIEN BOY, one of the moodier bands on this moody label. Frontwoman Sonia Weber sings with the lovelorn yearning of Morrissey, but without the sass--unlike with the Moz, we never wonder if she's just milking it. The guitars hiss like TV static and twinkle like stars seen out a car window in the vanishing autumn, the rhythm section sprinting with teenage energy, paradoxically despondent and enthusiastic. At the Holocene, Weber's vocals seemed pretty off key a lot of the time, but it didn't really matter. The melody's largely in the guitars, and even the melody isn't that important. It's the mood the band creates with all of these elements that makes them such a powerful emotive unit. Even off-key, Weber's vocals are the definite not-so-secret weapon here, her contralto timber pitched perfectly in the dead center of the human vocal spectrum, neither male nor female, and therefore unusually universal in a social order still cleaved traumatically in two by a gender binary inherited from a religious order no one even believes in anymore. The group's latest EP, "Stay Alive", is a fantastic piece of gothic power pop, the fury of the instruments on tracks like "Burning II" contrasted to heart-rending effect with the vulnerability of Weber's vocals. These guys are one of my favorite acts Good Cheer has in its corner for 2017. Next up were a pair of musical twin bands, both involving Kyle Bates: DROWSE and FLOATING ROOM. Drowse is the more ambient of two, creating a storm of darkly psychedelic mood energy, as if Bates were some mad scientist attempting to isolate The Feels in their pure plasma form. Bates has been admirably candid about his struggle with clinical depression, even in his press releases, and some of his music is meant to be a literal translation of these horrifying experiences in musical form. As a person who's visited similar hells, I can definitely relate, and if you haven't, Drowse can give you a taste. It's the kind of music you bathe in almost more than listen to. I find it pretty hard to articulate with a vocabulary developed for pop songs--do yourself a favor and just listen. Undergirding the pure emotional whirlpool is a theoretical edge, at least according to Drowse's bio, which references Roland Barthes and Sarah Manguso alongside Mt. Erie and Unwound. I'm pretty sure those are uncommon influences for an indie music bio. Floating Room is the more conventional indie rock side of Bates' muse, but he still hangs in the background, and Maya Stoner writes lyrics and sings lead, while he continues his role as a sound-sculptor. Under this moniker he deals in his version of the Good Cheer house sound, described on the group's Bandcamp page as "the type of sadness felt at 4 in the morning, reserved for the heartbroken and the nervous." The guitar squalls of Drowse, almost more like weather patterns than music, wash over the structure of the songs like photo filters, providing a depth and texture that the more purely rock n roll acts on Good Cheer can't touch. Eschewing the crunchier "alt rock" guitar tones and punk rock enthusiasms of Alien Boy, Mr. Bones, or Cool American for a generously reverberated, fuzz-soaked, more plodding sound, Floating Room crosses definitively into shoegaze territory. It's gloriously eerie and ice-cold in temperature. It's the perfect soundtrack for walking through the woods in the snow, when all sounds are muffled by the falling flakes a the beautiful deathly calm seems to pervade the landscape--and it is a landscape, one you can seemingly gaze far into. On some tracks, the band is almost too delicate for this world, and the sounds seem made of glass, or icicles, ready to crash and fall the moment the temperature gets back above freezing. It's music for winter, for the low-hanging winter sun, gone as soon as it comes up, peering over the leafless treetops, secretly gathering power again once the solstice has passed. TURTLENECKED, the stage name of Harrison Smith, came up next, playing a very short set. Lanky and nervous, he paced the stage, singing R&B songs about being neurotic and narcissistic and romantic, all from electronic backing tracks played from his laptop. It was a very amusing break from all the intensity--even as he sang about heartbreak or unrequited love, Smith was funny, unlike anyone else who I saw perform that night. The stuff on his Bandcamp is mostly minimal indie pop, just electric guitar and drums, very dressed down and sparse, focused on Smith's deadpan vocals, both snarky and pathetic, but always charismatic. An older album, "Pure Plush Bone Cage", was fuzzier and noisier, but Smith's newer style, clean and clear, works better, matching the music's emotional exhibitionism. This presumably even newer R&B stuff is another pretty much genius leap forward. Turtlenecked captures the fine line between self-pity and self-aggrandizement, or rather signals its non-existence, refusing to apologize for anything--or else apologizing for everything--it doesn't really matter which--who ever believes an apology anyway? Good Cheer's brand can, as I said above, come off as overly precious, but Turtlenecked is an exception--one gets the wonderful sense that he barely even believes himself, but it's only the same sincerity of his labelmates doubling back on itself. Morrissey knows this trick well--it's basically his bread and butter. While most of the Good Cheer bands seem to work as band entities, Harrison Smith of one of the few who doesn't really need a band, or for whom any backing band would only be a backing band. He's just an entertaining and engaging enough figure in his own right--perhaps only Mo Troper, among his labelmates, rivals him for sheer personal charisma. Finally was the band I was most keen on seeing, COOL AMERICAN, named for a brand of Doritos. It's the project of singer-guitarist Nathan Tucker, a serious-looking dude who blew through the set with apparently great anxiety, often failing to sing directly into the microphone, seemingly wound tighter than a human can be wound. The band's tall bass player, Tim Howe, with his goofy grin and a santa hat borrowed from Maya Stoner, provided the necessary humorous counterpoint. Cool American's style is a pleasantly loose but melancholy power pop, filled with breezy riffs, mid-tempo grooves and smoothy shifting tempos and beats. But there's also a punk edge in it--at some point in every song, Tucker upshifts into a cathartic yelp, from which I felt sympathy pangs in my own vocal chords, before this explosion of his nervous energy receded, and he began to recharge again. Tucker's vocal range is limited, but the melody's in the guitars, spinning circles around each other, swirling and looping when they aren't exploding. Probably the most direct example of my Pavement-meets-emo description above, Cool American's unusual combination of mellowness and tension feels very much like West Coast life as I've come to know it, the cycle of putting up a veneer of "no worries" chillness and having it break down in the face of un-chill reality, only to put it up again, because fuck life, life should be better than it is. Better to try and fail to be chill and hopeful than live in cynical detachment. And for all their moodiness, the Good Cheer bands are never cynical. They don't just express heavy feelings, they believe in them, affirming their value and meaning in a society that usually runs scared from them. Unlike so much of the buzzy music in Portland, these bands never come off as careerist--you get the sense that any day one of them might break up because so-and-so had to move away for school or whatever. One could be cynical in response and argue that this sincerity is just another brand, but if so, I'll take it over the glassy-eyed smugness and empty glitz of so much of what passes for indie music these days. Long live Good Cheer.