To describe the legendary David Grisman as a mandolin player who advocates for acoustic string music makes him sound vaguely academic. Not so the company he has kept: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, Stéphane Grappelli, John Hartford, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, to name just some. A multiple Grammy nominee, Grisman is also a composer, arranger, bandleader and producer whose pioneering synthesis of jazz and bluegrass inspired Garcia to name it “Dawg” music. Grisman headlines the New Music Works spring concert, Whirled on a String, at Cabrillo College this Saturday.
New Music Works programs almost always travel the world and often include world premieres. Grisman’s is “Eight by Eight,” a piece for mandolin and Phil Collins’ NMW Ensemble (the title refers to the number of strings on the mandolin and the number of players). Additionally, Grisman will play “Dawg’s Waltz,” a staple of the Grisman/Garcia collaborations; Opus 57 in G Minor, a quintet written in the mid-’60s; and an arrangement of the traditional prayer, “Shalom Aleichem,” that uses Israel Goldfarb’s well-known melody. Grisman played last fall at Kuumbwa, which is how Collins met him. Explains Collins, “He offered to do these fresh arrangements for us.” He adds, “We got him for a song.”
The ensemble will also perform work by Peter Maxwell Davies, a resident of the windswept Orkney Islands who in 2004 became Master of the Queen’s Music, an historic honor much like musical poet laureate. Like the man himself, Maxwell Davies’ music comes with a twinkle in its eye and no shortage of fanciful impulses. His outrageous “Eight Songs for a Mad King” (1969) still turns heads and wags tongues. The folk music-inflected “Dances from the Two Fiddlers,” for six instruments including one violin, is “thorny with syncopations,” says Collins, who is pleased to describe the Scotsman’s music as “off-kilter.”
Composer Luciano Berio, who died in 2003, may be best known for Sinfonia (1968) for orchestra and The Swingle Singers. His first wife was tour-de-force soprano Cathy Berberian, for whom he wrote much music. “O king,” also from 1968, uses the medieval vocal trick of hocketing (hiccupping) to disguise its tribute to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
Music by American composers Elliot Carter (now 102) and Morton Feldman (who died in 1987 at 61) make appearances here, the former when pianist Sandra Gu plays his exciting and surprisingly unsevere “Catenaires” (2006) and the latter when Gu and the ensemble play “The Viola in My Life,” which, like most music by the “big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens,” as Alex Ross described him in The New Yorker, is “so transparent, very muted and anti-climactic,” says Collins.
Collins, who is the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission’s 2011 Artist of the Year, will hear his own “Springing” in its world premiere by Gu. The composer explains, “It has to sound hard-earned, not effortless” and uses a technique he calls “natural momentum” as it attains higher and higher plateaus.
The other world premiere on this program is Akindele Bankole’s “The Place ‘HA-MAKOM’” for voice and ensemble. About the composer, Collins says, “I was very charmed by him and his Nigerian/German classical voice.” Bankole was born in Berlin; spent his youth in Lagos, where he first got interested in music; than came to study at Sacramento State University before settling in Santa Cruz. The piece itself, in Yoruba, identifies the place where God is found, and was composed in memory of Bankole’s mother. Collins describes it as “three dances bookended with songs, a suite of set forms without development in any classical sense.” The composer is the tenor soloist in this performance. Collins adds that unlike most Western classical practice over the last few hundred years, Bankole’s “relationship to intervals within the scale is not harmony-driven.”
In addition to guests Grisman, Gu and Bankole, the NMW Ensemble welcomes violinist Roy Malan and violist Chad Kaltinger.
WHIRLED ON A STRING
Saturday, 7:30pm
Cabrillo College Music Recital Hall, 6500 Soquel Dr., Aptos
Tickets $23 gen/$17 seniors/$12 students/$3 Cabrillo music students at www.brownpapertickets.com.
