St. Charles East & Avenue X
Last night Nic, her sister Angela, and I made a trip out to St. Charles East High School for the last band concert of their school year. All the music was by BCM composers: they played Steve's "Interruption Overture", my arrangement of Moussorgsky's "Hopak", and no less than FIVE of Newman's pieces -- including his latest work, "Avenue X". This was one of the schools that had commissioned this piece, and it has been dedicated to St. Charles East's director of bands, Jim Kull. You can read more about Newman's trip by clicking here.
St. Charles has a great music program, great directors, and great players, and I've been so fortunate to have the opportunity to play and work with them -- playing Chaos Theory with their concert band, sitting in with the jazz band on a few of Tim Davies' charts, as well as testing out a rough version of "TranZendental Danse of Joi" on them. I did get to see a few of my old friends from St. Chaz -- Justin (trumpet player and die-hard metalhead), Tara (french horn and future composer), Nora (very kind and friendly clarinetist), Tom (drummer extraordinaire), as well as Jim Kull and Gil and many others who I have enjoyed getting to work and play with. They have always been so kind and generous and enthusiastic and I'm always very grateful for the opportunity to be able to work with them.
But I digress -- I wanted to tell you about Newman's new piece, "Avenue X". It's great. It's really great. It's very "Newman" -- it has that downtown, hipster feel that is characteristic of several of Newman's more recent works, but it's leaner and more wily than his previous ones. Like many of Newm's pieces, it's loaded with syncopated motives, and it's layered counterpoint is made up of these jaggedly woven ideas which collide and contrast and ultimately come together to all coexist inside of one irresistable groove. The orchestration is clean and tight -- it's one of Newman's most finely crafted scores. And it has this... humanity, and this sense of self-aware humor, that I appreciate so much in Newman's work. It's a great tribute to the last stop on the "F" Train, which happens to be in Coney Island -- home of the footlong red-hot, amusement rides, and the long history of freaks who let their freak flags FLY on Avenue X. This piece is smart and it's fun and it's funny -- and deserves more than a casual listen. It has become, quite immediately, my favorite Newman piece, and that's some tough competition. I can't wait to check out the score and hear it again!
Oh yeah, and St. Charles East TOTALLY ROCKED on "Chunk".
St. Charles has a great music program, great directors, and great players, and I've been so fortunate to have the opportunity to play and work with them -- playing Chaos Theory with their concert band, sitting in with the jazz band on a few of Tim Davies' charts, as well as testing out a rough version of "TranZendental Danse of Joi" on them. I did get to see a few of my old friends from St. Chaz -- Justin (trumpet player and die-hard metalhead), Tara (french horn and future composer), Nora (very kind and friendly clarinetist), Tom (drummer extraordinaire), as well as Jim Kull and Gil and many others who I have enjoyed getting to work and play with. They have always been so kind and generous and enthusiastic and I'm always very grateful for the opportunity to be able to work with them.
But I digress -- I wanted to tell you about Newman's new piece, "Avenue X". It's great. It's really great. It's very "Newman" -- it has that downtown, hipster feel that is characteristic of several of Newman's more recent works, but it's leaner and more wily than his previous ones. Like many of Newm's pieces, it's loaded with syncopated motives, and it's layered counterpoint is made up of these jaggedly woven ideas which collide and contrast and ultimately come together to all coexist inside of one irresistable groove. The orchestration is clean and tight -- it's one of Newman's most finely crafted scores. And it has this... humanity, and this sense of self-aware humor, that I appreciate so much in Newman's work. It's a great tribute to the last stop on the "F" Train, which happens to be in Coney Island -- home of the footlong red-hot, amusement rides, and the long history of freaks who let their freak flags FLY on Avenue X. This piece is smart and it's fun and it's funny -- and deserves more than a casual listen. It has become, quite immediately, my favorite Newman piece, and that's some tough competition. I can't wait to check out the score and hear it again!
Oh yeah, and St. Charles East TOTALLY ROCKED on "Chunk".
1 Comments:
When the score is lost in The Great Global Warming Flooding of Manhattan of 2025 and all the musicologists of the 30th century have left of AVE X is your blog entry -- I guarantee you some thus-inspired wonk will try to reconstruct the piece. Meanwhile I'll be yuckiing it up in the great 10x12 studio in the sky...
Thanks, maestro. Too kind.
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