by Andrea Mazzariello
Photo by Jayme Halbritter Photography
There is an infant sitting in the bandleader’s lap. This is not what I expected to happen after hearing the same infant vocalizing, moments before, somewhere in the audience. This is in some respects a classical music concert, after all, and such interruption of rarefied, attentive silence typically sets off a ripple of poison glances followed by an ushering into the lobby. Also there’s no lobby; we’re in a bar. And as it turns out the infant belongs to Ambrose Akinmusire, the aforementioned bandleader, who offers a knee. The little one settles and focuses primarily on Marcus Gilmore, which is understandable given what he is doing to the drums, how he is making them somehow sing in counterpoint, multiple textures and grooves interlocking to create a swinging technicolor breakbeat.
Photo by Jayme Halbritter Photography
Photo by Jayme Halbritter Photography
This particular instance, infant-in-lap, of What We Were Not Expecting To Happen frames the performance, profound risk disguised as causal violation of art music’s norms and terms. This includes the norms and terms of genre collision itself; there are ways we will accept the fluidity of boundaries between music cultures versus ways in which a porous boundary feels uncomfortable. It is one thing to invite a rapper (in this case, Kool A.D.) to collaborate with a jazz combo and a string quartet, it is yet another when said rapper’s verses pull no punches in terms of graphic sexual content or when the freestyle-that-wasn’t encore lasts a half hour. Programming a piece written in the 21st century is a risk of sorts; this particular collaboration, though, even in the context of “redefining classical music,” does something else entirely.
Photo by Jayme Halbritter Photography
Perhaps especially in that context. Bringing wildly different musical worlds into contact invites Venn-diagram performances, sounds we can all agree upon, overlapping moves, consensus. Here, though, we got the sense that the abutting edges existed in aesthetic conflict, were even more idiosyncratically themselves precisely because they were being asked to hold ground. Mivos’ thorniest, most aggressive digging in was instructive in this regard: the gestures deliberately resisted the pretty or cinematic string quartet trope that might fold, with a minimum of friction, into a jazz situation or a “live sample” on a hip hop track. And the crowd was with it. Which is not to marginalize the beautiful, lyrical playing that became a kind of refrain throughout the piece; rather, it’s to suggest that the moments of intersection between musical worlds, the overlapping modes, meant catching our breath. The jagged edges, though, could take it away.
Andrea Mazzariello is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. He teaches at Carleton College and runs One More Revolution Records. The Operating System will release his first book in December 2017.
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