Category Archives: Previews

Tim Berne’s Snakeoil: A Sure Remedy for the Everyday Blues

If necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation must be the mother of reinvention, judging from Tim Berne’s story of his introduction to the saxophone. The intrepid alto
saxophonist and composer didn’t touch the instrument until he was in college, and although he was a huge music fan, the only thing he’d played before that, he confesses, was “a little
basketball.”

“I couldn’t imagine being a normal person, having a job, so I was kind of desperate to find
something that wasn’t quite the norm,” he says. “So by accident, I got a saxophone for a
hundred bucks.”

Nice accident. Four decades later, with an immediately recognizable sound on his horn and an impressive body of work to his credit, it’s hard to imagine how Berne could ever have been
anything but the groundbreaking musician he is. This Thursday, he’ll bring his Snakeoil band, featuring Oscar Noriega (clarinets), Matt Mitchell (piano), and Ches Smith (percussion), to GiG and the Outpost, to celebrate the release of their third album on the ECM label, You’ve Been Watching Me.

Continue reading →

Bébé La La Finds Their Balance on High Wire

Bébé La La: Maryse Lapierre and Alicia Ultan.

The French-Canadian idiom “bébé la la” refers to foolish behavior, but the singing/songwriting duo that call themselves Bébé La La—Maryse Lapierre (vocals, accordion, harmonium) and
Alicia Ultan (vocals, guitar, viola) are anything but. Fun, high-spirited, and occasionally giggly for sure, but never foolish, as their debut album, High Wire, clearly demonstrates.

Beautifully produced by John Wall and Bébé La La, and recorded and engineered by Wall at his Wall of Sound Studio, the tunes on High Wire face down a variety of difficult situations—from
income inequality on the political front to trying love affairs on the personal front—on the strength of mesmeric harmonies and a spunky equilibrium. Bébé La La will be celebrating the release of High Wire with a performance this Saturday at Las Amapolas Event Center. Continue reading →

Blossom Blooms in Barbara Bentree

Barbara Bentree

Vocalist/pianist Barbara Bentree wasn’t particularly impressed the first time she heard a
recording of the late vocalist/pianist Blossom Dearie. Bentree’s husband, pianist John Rangel, suggested that she check out the singer, whose career spanned seven decades and who won the respect of some of America’s greatest songwriters. “Then, of course, what I would pull up was ‘Peel Me a Grape’ or something,” says Bentree, “and I was ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’ ”

One day, though, Bentree entered Dearie’s name into the iTunes search field, and over 400 recordings came up. “I went, ‘Wow, that’s significant,’ ” she says, “and then, so I just started
playing them and then downloading them.” Bentree enjoyed the material that Dearie chose for herself, and the more she heard, the more she realized that the singer was not as “cutesy” as she had first believed, and had a wonderful “range in her sound.” When she started researching Dearie’s life, Bentree found a strong woman ahead of her time.

“I’m not a jazz aficionado, but in my mind, I just don’t know if she’s really gotten her due,”
Bentree says.

With Thursday’s concert at the Outpost, Bentree, who won the 2012 New Mexico Music Award for Best Vocal Performance on her album Green, hopes to raise Dearie’s visibility a bit, with the help of Rangel, guitarist Michael Anthony, bassist Andy Zadrozny, and drummer John Trentacosta. Continue reading →

Vijay Iyer Trio: Breaking Good

Vijay Iyer Trio: Stephan Crump, Vijay Iyer, Marcus Gilmore. Photo by Bart Babinsky.

Pianist/composer Vijay Iyer (Vid-jay Eye-yer) notes that he has been labeled as “dealing with
abstractions” in his work, and yes, there are abstract qualities to his compositions. It’s
something that you might expect from someone who was working on a Ph.D. in physics before altering course and choosing to pursue a career in music. (He has a Ph.D. in music cognition,
instead.) Nevertheless, his compositions are built on quite concrete ideas of what music is, how it is generated and perceived, and to what purpose. What’s more, his interaction with his
instrument reflects an alert physicality that is not at all abstract. You might say his compositions germinate in his brain but flower in his heart and hands.

DownBeat magazine’s 2014 Pianist of the Year, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, and a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist, Iyer will bring brain, heart, and hands to the Outpost this week, with his long-standing trio, featuring virtuosi Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. They are riding on the acclaim for the trio’s latest album, Break Stuff, Iyer’s third release on the ECM label since signing there last year. Continue reading →

Sofia Rei: ¡Voz y Corazón!

Choirgirl, classical mezzo-soprano, punk rock drummer, explorer of South American folkloric traditions, and student of jazz, Argentinian singer/songwriter Sofia Rei has crossed many
musical borders. Her passport has always been a strong and supple voice, one of those rare
instruments that bypasses the circuitry of the listener’s brain and plunges right into the chest—it’s a visceral experience.

Faced with choices of what and how to sing, the answer for Rei was easy: Sing it all. That
decision forced her to develop a vocal instrument capable of the task, and it has produced an artist as comfortable singing with John Zorn or Myra Melford as she is with Aquiles Baez or La Bomba de Tiempo. As a songwriter and arranger, she has forged a cross-cultural musical genre, blending jazz and folkloric, acoustic and electronic. It’s only fitting, then, that Rei’s most recent release, De Tierra y Oro, won the 2013 Independent Music Award for best album, and her song “La Gallera” also received top honors.

This Friday, the National Hispanic Cultural Center’s Latin Diva Series, under the umbrella of the Chispa musical season, presents Rei in concert with her multinational band, featuring Eric Kurimski (guitar) from the U.S.; Leo Genovese (keyboard), from Argentina; Josh Deutsch
(flugelhorn and trumpet), from the U.S.; Pablo Menares (bass), from Chile; and Franco Pinna (drums and percussion), from Argentina. Continue reading →

Musically Speaking

An avid listener’s observations