A World of Piano in Three Parts

by Joe Major

February 27-28, March 1, 2025

Northampton Center for the Arts

After a years-long hiatus, A World of Piano marked its third straight festival series at Northampton Center for the Arts. Jazz Shares circuit-goers welcomed the annual three-day return with equal parts heightened anticipation, determined examination and pilgrimage-worthy stamina — qualities that in no small measure were reflected in the solo pianists themselves.

They hailed from a big tent, did practitioners Matthew Shipp, Greg Burk and Sylvie Courvoisier. And from within their improvised music spheres, there existed a consistent wondrous through line of varied probing aspect: from expressive driven intonation to expressive mathematic chordal contortion to expressive check-under-the-hood innards manipulation. Expression reigned.

Night One: Matthew Shipp. Instant ignition. From the opening of the nearly set-long piece that I came to think of as Opus One, Shipp immersed listeners in tumultuous storm-tossed furies. His relentless scrums of muscular glissandos, followed by lulls barely porous enough to allow a recuperative shard of hopeful light to escape, formed a thrum beat of heaving, reluctant elasticity.

With a prospector’s fervor to persist, persist, perchance to comp, perchance to rep, plus a rarely exercised penchant to alight, nothing was safe from his roiling bottom register checklist of assertive edicts, grievances and pronouncements. That rise and fall schematic seemed simple enough, but what sustained it were the intricacies embedded in the full throttle fusillade. There was inevitably an integrated back-channel leverage of chiming, extoling, bursting release — rooting out the verities from the calamitous dross.

A concert comrade of mine mentioned that henceforth he’d “think of piano as a verb.” That’s it; that unfettered, uninhibited, regenerative pianism deployed in the service of translating emotion, and showing your work while doing so. Shipp finished by surfing over and navigating through the mild undulations of a slurred, feathery, ethereal cloud — levitating, as if to suggest there were more tools in his toolbox than just thump widgets. After the set I approached Shipp and deferentially offered that the evening brought to mind the Walt Whitman line, “I contain multitudes.” And to my everlasting delight, Shipp responded, “Huh, I love Whitman!”

Night Two: Greg Burk. Prestidigitation. Many of Burk’s painterly, pastoral compositions were undeniably beauteous; sweeping, lushly saturated soundscapes that belied an inner, angular gravity.  Coursing through his tapestry, a nuanced thread of wariness might be discerned in the otherwise shimmering fabric. His lavish light-fingered classicism was initially overwhelming, sprouting as it did with cascading upper register filigree. On numbers like “Petals on the Water” and a lovely reverent piece dedicated to his mother, Burk subtly transitioned from haltingly articulate, swooning melodic bits to velvety comped pangs of abstraction. Cloaked abstraction, abstraction born of seemingly plain-view lines intersecting with one another in just the right sequences to create an introspective, suddenly outside-of-self otherness.

There was no ambiguation about “Blues for Yusef Lateef.” He opened with a breathy ceremonial-sounding pipe flute meditation that evolved into a jaunty syncopated exploration featuring a rollicking knockabout bottom and a squirrelly high end. The aftermath of the big crescendo led to a leeward slide, a stilted stride-style cadence that never abandoned the look-inside-oneself ethos.

Nor were there any doubts about a couple of outright prancing romps, one of which Burk said was Bird-inspired. Both were replete with pixilated, unabashedly jazzy pokes and runs that, despite the louche aura of the Parker-esque tune, retained a signature Burk sparkle. And both bore the earmarks of Burk architecture; grand archways in which substantive and exquisite chord arrays could investigate.

Two tunes, “Sequoia Song” and “Clean Spring,” swapped out any semblance of the shell game gambit. There were no opaque intentions or quick-look-there legerdemain, and abstraction distractions were vanquished. Instead, a crisp effervescence permeated the joie de la nature; sinewy for one, bubbly for the other. Their straight forward direction lent a dexterous air of dimensional relief to Burk’s work. And to my ear, wispy hints of Abdullah Ibrahim only added resonant grace to the performance.

Night Three: Sylvie Courvoisier. Avant-garde acoustic bric a brac boutique. En garde! Buckle up! Courvoisier’s set was a riveting, careening tour through what essentially amounted to her sound sculpture. She staged the piano so that it was chockablock with hardware items, whimsical trinkets and everyday jetsam, integrating the resulting sonic effects with her oft measured, oft rampant keyboard trajectories. It was a curated exploration of the symbiotic string/soundboard relationship.

The sounds — from ticks and tocks, to clinks and clunks, to harmonic drone-like vibration, to the anvil-like thunk of her elbow on the keys — cleaved to her demonstrative, fervent, asymmetrical piano playing. But beyond that, the whole enterprise writ large sought to find and develop a cohesive, viable syntax for this ungainly, instantly-appearing piano language.

There were four forays. The first was a stringy pluck-and-play that alternately veered from progressions of thunder and lull into rivulets of tinny pie plate-sounding classical, jazzy-tempo jive, and sacred temple tonalities. She paced herself with some near-ragtime, near-stride, and then, like a Dave Burrell, she’d succumb to out of the blue chaotic spasms of abstraction and distraction. Her piano-speak concoctions were punctuated with violent black hole implosions, leaving gaping, gulping voids of finality. Another piece began with Flight of the Bumblebee flurry and then wavered from mid-tempo contemplation to a bluesy dissonance segment where her right hand felt free to scatter at will. Crescendo, climax, calm wake, then seismometer-worthy Mach 1 boom!

A third sortie gave the accoutrements a real workout, with the piano strings getting a rhythmic knocking, punching, pinching, vibrating and tingling. That grew into a legit rippling jazzy riff that in turn devolved into particles and shards. Some low-end pirouettes gave lyricism to strains of an old blues that was forgotten but was there all the time. Finally, the last number pulled out all the stops, or more precisely, unloaded the whole gadget shopping cart as Courvoisier geared up to peak arpeggio power and melded noise and, oh yeah, notes. It had a lopsided, loopy gait; kind of a stride-akimbo, teetering imbalance that eventually found its legs and, as unadorned piano, flared brightly. Intense rolls, runs and slides; chrysanthemum flourish; sudden stop, and out. There was a brief encore duet with her touring and recording partner, clarinetist Ned Rothenberg. They performed a layered, sensitive peekaboo/hide and seek interplay that featured his extraordinary circular breathing and referenced the earlier coalescence-seeking syntactical togetherness that resided in the heart of her whole customized endeavor.

Following Nights: Epilogue. The Northampton Center for the Arts is not set in 490 CE Marathon, and I did not run home twenty plus miles to Athens, or even my corner of Western Massachusetts, to convey news of a victorious battle — yet my takeaway from this three-prong music marathon, these creative front lines, is just as endearingly momentous. Attaining zero-degrees-of-separation proximity to artists of this echelon is in itself a triumphant privilege. Their poignant commitment to craft, and their zealous shielding of personal inner vision, is resolute enough, by extension, to bolster tribes of attentive listeners.

The Sweet Smell of Success: Jenny Scheinman's All Species Parade

There are many ways to measure success in the jazz world. Financial remuneration, and its related gauge, popularity, is one common metric. Accolades and critical response is another. Other yardsticks of success, like being part of a collaborative community of like-minded artists, and sharing your creative life with appreciative audiences, offer more intrinsic rewards. By all those criteria, violinist and composer Jenny Scheinman is flourishing.

The 45 year old daughter of Humboldt County brought her latest project, All Species Parade, to the Community Music School of Springfield on January 9. Featuring Steve Cardenas (guitar), Julian Shore (piano), Tony Scherr (bass), Kenny Wollesen (drums) and Julianna Cressman (dance), Scheinman’s band was on a three day jaunt through Portsmouth, NH (Jimmy’s Jazz and Blues Club) and New York (City Winery), with a western Mass stop in-between, courtesy of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares.

Touring in support of her recent Royal Potato Family release, All Species Parade, the project is a paean to the Lost Coast, the remote, northern section of Californian coast where Scheinman grew up. The live performance mostly mirrored the material on the album, which is an impressive, fully realized body of work.

The evening opened with “Ornette Goes Home”, a folk-flecked swinger with solo room for everyone, then stretched out for 90 glorious minutes. Each composition had something distinct to say, blending and borrowing from multiple genres without becoming puree. “Shutdown Stomp” was a down-home hoe-down, revealing Scheinman’s honky-tonk fiddler side. “House of Flowers”, a lovely piece with the air of a British isle traditional, featured a delicate melody that highlighted Scheinman’s beautiful tone. The band was expert and brought the written material to life.

Scheinman explained in her introduction that “Jaroujiji” was a Wiyot word that means “where you sit and rest”, and references a place settlers came to call Eureka (“I have found it”). The Wiyot are a small northern California tribe that in 1860 were massacred almost to the point of extinction. Scheinman, who has done extensive research about the region and its history, was moved to hear Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page’s family story. Page’s great-great grandmother, two years old at the time, was one of 100 Wiyots who survived that mass killing on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay.

The band was anchored by bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen, who are the rhythm team for Steve Bernstein’s Sexmob and various Bill Frisell ensembles. Their easy rapport put us all at ease. At the post-concert reception, Wollesen shared the story of his grandmother, Rose Thorne, who wrote a dozen songs in the 1920s and 30s that were thought lost in a fire but were recently found. Wollesen arranged and recorded the songs and shared a download code for one of them: “Moon Swing”, featuring Wollesen on vibraphone and the massive bass marimba, which he bought from Scott Robinson (who had two!) Scherr’s bass permeated the elegant Newhouse Hall with a deep luscious sound. He used a bass supplied by the Music School which was in need of some tender loving care. Scherr was gracious about the state of the instrument and resourceful in bringing it up to snuff.

The Jazz Shares streak of confounding medical issues reached three consecutive concerts when Carmen Staaf, who is on the recording, got sick and was unable to play piano. Luckily her husband, Julian Shore, was able to pinch hit at the last minute. He told me that unlike his friends Noah Preminger and Dan Weiss, who delight in throwing musical curve balls at musicians, Scheinman and her band were terrifically supportive as he embarked on a crash course to learn the material. He acquitted himself quite well. His extensive solos on “Shutdown Stomp”, and the as yet unrecorded, “For B”, showed his fluid bop chops and his rapid learning curve understanding the architecture of each composition.

Steve Cardenas is the consummate professional. He has an incisive, unadorned sound and a thorough grasp on jazz guitar history. He was a long-time member of Paul Motion’s Electric Bebop Band, Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and multiple ensembles led by Ben Allison. He has recorded extensively as a leader for Sunnyside Records, his most recent being Healing Power (The Music of Carla Bley) featuring Allison and Ted Nash. His work on the evening’s concluding piece, “Song for Sidiki”, written by Scheinman for the Malian percussionist Sidiki Camara, highlighted Cardenas’ innovative take on the west African electric guitar tradition. 

Scheinman has led a charmed life in music. She’s been a regular in bands led by Allison Miller and Bill Frisell, and has toured with Lucinda Williams, Jason Moran, Ani DiFranco and Robbie Fulks. She performed on the original cast recording of Anais Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown”, and has written the score to the movie, “Avenue of the Giants”. Her bandmates are all good friends; it’s clear that relationships matter to her. Scheinman is engaged in the here and now and spent the day of her concert walking to the Connecticut River. She was a gracious bandleader and was clearly having fun on stage. Her playing was confident and easily cut across styles.

All Species Parade is performing at the Big Ears Festival, the Savanah Jazz Festival and the Green Mill (Chicago) in the coming months. She’s also performing in Allison Miller’s multimedia piece, Rivers in Our Veins at 92NY Center For Culture & Arts, and will be at Bombyx on Feb. 4 with Bill Frisell’s In My Dreams. Jenny Scheinman is playing bigger, more prestigious venues these days. The critical acclaim is pouring in and she’s making music of high quality with close collaborators. She’s got success written all over her.

Thinking On Your Feet: New Muse4tet in Springfield

About a third of the way through the New Muse4tet concert at the Community Music School of Springfield on January 4, violinist Gwen Laster, the leader of the ensemble, reminded us that “all of us have to improvise every day.” The quartet, reduced to three when violist Melanie Dyer took ill and couldn’t make the trip from New York, had to reconfigure repertoire and arrangements on the fly. Luckily, for seasoned jazz artists like Laster and her bandmates, Teddy Rankin-Parker (cello) and Andrew Drury (drums), improvising is second nature. It’s what they do.

This followed on the heels of another medical mishap on December 19 when cornetist Kirk Knuffke was unable to continue playing with his bandmates, Joe McPhee and Michael Bisio at the Parlor Room. Then, too, the show went on, albeit with some drama and disruption.

Although the band, (New Muse3tet?), largely stuck to their original compositional game plan, there was more improvising on stage. Precipitated by Dyer’s absence, Laster decided that each musician would play a duo with the others. The pairings provided additional intimacy on stage and broke up the soundscape in a very nice way. While the Laster/Drury duet was a funky piece with clear form, Laster’s go-round with Rankin-Parker featured heavily textured string vibrations with little rhythmic roadmap. Both were captivating.

The percussion/cello duo was spontaneously composed and something else entirely. Drury was hardly seated at his kit. He was up playing a set of metal bowls, then some hanging gongs. At one point he left the stage and returned with a timpani (one of the benefits of having the show at a music school), which he proceeded to sing into using a funnel-like devise on the skin of the drum. His kitchen-sink approach to the world of percussion added dynamism and levity. Rankin-Parker matched him surprise for surprise, rapping the body of his cello and producing other-worldly harmonics.

This was my first opportunity to hear Rankin-Parker, who had a gorgeous tone, a surfeit of technique, and a fearless spirit. It was yet another reminder that there are always more first rate creative musicians to meet. Rankin-Parker came up in Chicago, replacing Tomeka Reid in Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, and interacting with other members of the City’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He also has a foot in the rock music world, recording and touring for years with Primus and Sam Beam’s Iron & Wine. In another life, he is a LMSW Gestalt Therapist in New York, as well as the father of two kids under 5 years old. All evening, I had the sense that he was the center of the band, the fulcrum between rhythm and melody.

At another point I was convinced Drury was the band’s linchpin. Stationed in between the two string players, he added excitement and a foundational drive. He served as wild card. Drury is an affable, low key dynamo, both on and off the bandstand. He founded and runs Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit dedicated to education and performance in marginalized communities. He cooks for, and curates, Soup & Sound, a series of world-class concerts given in his Brooklyn home, which has presented over 130 events. He has given masterclasses on three continents, and has led over 1,500 workshops in schools, prisons, museums, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, with Kurdish refugees in Germany, on Indian reservations (including the Oneida Nation where he was artist-in-residence for six months in 2000) and in remote villages in Guatemala and Nicaragua. I first met him in 2015, when the UMass Magic Triangle Series presented Jason Kao Hwang’s cross-cultural octet, Burning Bridge. I’ve been an admirer since. It occurred to me, that with its array of marimbas, timpani, glockenspiel and other percussion, the Community Music School of Springfield would be the perfect venue to present Drury’s percussion ensemble, The Forest.

Gwen Laster was a gracious and resourceful leader, and a fabulous composer and instrumentalist. She referenced Claudia Rankine’s book of poems, “Citizen” and Clyde Ford’s “The Hero With an African Face”, as inspiring two of her compositions. (Cuban music scholar Ivor Miller who was in attendance, immediately ran out and got a copy of Ford’s collection of African myths.) Her playing was strong, definitive and teeming with life, and the music flowed easily between poles of form and abstraction.

There were connections (community) everywhere. Laster’s colleague at Bard College, pianist Angelica Sanchez, was in the house, as was fellow violinist Terry Jenoure, whose writing workshops have helped Laster refine her thoughts. Laster reminisced with clarinetist and Amherst College professor Darryl Harper about their experience as students at the Jazz in July program. Willie Hill, the former director of the UMass Fine Arts Center, and Melanie Dyer’s middle school music teacher in Denver (!), was there to surprise her (alas!)

A roll-with-the-punches, make-it-work attitude permeates the jazz world. That was on stark display Saturday, as New Muse4tet displayed calm flexibility in the face of a last minute change of plans. With our world hurtling towards increased uncertainty, I’m throwing my lot in with those who can improvise, and who value community.