Clarinet Sonata

also brief comment on Claude Bolling, Nikolai Kapustin, Jon Batiste, and Carla Bley

Craig L. Byrd has written a fabulous review of the new record.

The album cover makes you think this will be a playful album. And I suppose on some levels it is. But it’s also a solidly written, produced and performed addition to the contemporary classical music canon – one filled with plenty of references to legendary jazz musicians which you can hear throughout. And if you can’t, he’s written notes to explain each piece and its inspiration.

Playfair Sonatas is an album I will return to over and over again.

I also can’t resist amplifying a lovely tweet from Joel McGlothlin:

I’m gonna dive into the weeds:

One name people have mentioned to me in connection with Playfair Sonatas is Claude Bolling, who had the big crossover hit Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. While Bolling was obviously a talent, he is also the quintessential “classical composer trying too hard to be jazzy.” There is not much of an organizing voice there other than pastiche.

I’m not really a huge fan of Nicolai Kapustin, either, which is sort of like written-out Oscar Peterson for virtuoso pianists. God bless everyone who does that stuff, for it is certainly hard to do, but it is decidedly conservative.

Byrd also reviews Jon Batiste’s new Beethoven album, which features excerpts of famous pieces mashed together with Professor Longhair and James Booker tropes. For me this is grimly populist in nature, indeed almost nakedly capitalist, on par with the Mariah Carey Christmas Tour.

Batiste can play the piano, obviously, that is not what I’m complaining about. He’s certainly got confidence.

Bolling, Kapustin, and Batiste go straight in with no hesitation. But hesitation is warranted. There’s more to aesthetics than just getting over with the audience. There should be a deeper, more internal reality to the notes and rhythms.

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In Playfair Sonatas, the dedicatees of the slow movements are Carla Bley, Roswell Rudd, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Joe Wilder, and Paul Desmond. They all thought about combining European and African idioms on a deep level. For those six, varied forms of sophistication such as irony, nonchalance, theatre, and stubbornness meet in the subconscious on the way to a finished personal aesthetic.

“Interlude (Drinking Music)” from Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra was the debut Carla Bley piece in her music hall style.

It’s jazz, of course, but it is more like classical music than most jazz. There is two part counterpoint over a sophisticated progression, the tempo goes up and down, the composer finishes off the tiny beast with a solo piano cadence somewhere between Thelonious Monk and Beethoven.

(It doesn’t seem to be streaming, but I like even more the version of “Drinking Music” from European Tour ‘77, one of the best Carla Bley albums. )

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The scrolling score of the Clarinet Sonata is online.

There’s a substantial clarinet repertoire, including masterpieces by Mozart, Brahms, and Copland, while Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto is one of the best “jazz” pieces by a classical composer. I have played Leonard Bernstein’s early Clarinet Sonata and Derek Bermel’s SchiZm with Bermel himself.

Clarinet is one of the few instruments that is reliable in every register, and thus a key binding ingredient in orchestral writing, not to mention Duke Ellington’s big band. (Ellingtonian clarinet from masters like Barney Bigard, Russell Procope, and Jimmy Hamilton is one of the best things ever, of course, but my favorite jazz clarinetist might actually be Lester Young.)

The Clarinet Sonata is the only one of the six Playfair Sonatas set in a minor key. There is something rather driving and dour about the first three movements; the atmosphere then lightens up for a joyous finale.

The middle dedication movement is “Music Hall (for Carla Bley).” I had scrapped a previous Adagio for clarinet, and wrote a new middle movement I really liked, starting with a fragment of melody that was from my first composition, “What Do Crows Know” for Marion Lang and the Greenwood Players (1988). However, was this "oom-pah" rhythm too much like one of Carla Bley's amusing "music hall" pieces? Well, what if I dedicated the movement to her? That would fix the issue of appropriation...

As it turned out, Carla passed away the same day I finished "Music Hall" and devised the "dedications" stratagem.

The clarinetist for my Sonata is Carol McGonnell, a big virtuoso. Bio:

Dublin born clarinetist Carol McGonnell is celebrated for the expressive power of her playing of standard repertoire as well as her fearless exploration of cutting-edge developments in new music. Carol is a founding member of the Argento Chamber Ensemble.

Carol has appeared in the inaugural concert of Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall and in Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series, has performed as soloist in both John Adam's "In Your Ear Festival" at Carnegie and in LA's "Monday Evening Concerts", curated by Esa-Pekka Salonen and with numerous orchestras around the world and ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Zankel Band of Carnegie Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert. She has performed at the Marlboro, Mecklenburg, Museums, in association with the National Gallery of Ireland, and involving Museums such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston, J.P. Getty in LA and the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Carol has been broadcast on RTE, Lyric FM, BBC, WQXR and NPR and is awaiting the release of her latest CD including a new concerto by Phillipe Hurel. She is on faculty at the Aaron Copland School of Music of CUNY and auxiliary faculty for contrabass clarinet at the Juilliard School in NYC.