Photo courtesy of Present Music
Though preceded by an excellent online piano recital in September, Saturday marked the first ensemble concert of the Present Music season with a bold, sometimes searing online video entitled “Reality Check.” Only in these coronavirus times would a chilly afternoon performance on the rooftop of the Interstate Parking Brewery Garage likely have occurred, with serendipitous and smashing results.
Formidable actress Sheri Williams Pannell became a great orator as she spoke the narration to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970) by the ground-breaking jazz poet and composer Gil Scott-Heron (arrangement by Jonathan Goldsmith). Despite defiant, colorful references to the specifics of its era, the text remains chillingly relevant in a restless city when the final line declares in an emphatic, rising voice: “The revolution will be live.”
Versatile and smooth-voiced soprano Sarah Brailey was featured in two substantial pieces. Intricate instrumentation and a bubbly recorded track accompanied long vocal lines in Constellations (2018) by young Irish composer Emma O’Halloran. David T. Little’s sweet light crude (2007) mixes rock influences with contemporary classical, and Brailey―who can sustain a line so long it seems to flirt with forever―showed intelligence and technique in vocal colors, whatever the range, aptly conjuring the mix of musical styles.
Milwaukee jazzer and rapper Klassik’s “Reality Check” is a track from his 2019 award-winning album Quiet. Creative combinations of words, notes and rhythms, smoothly and stylishly sung, rode over the coolness of the instruments in an arrangement by co-artistic director David Bloom. Klassik’s “Spirit” displayed his inventive art as a rapper, with a playful knack for writing complex rhythms in the underlying score.
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I was taken aback by the relentless insistence of guitarist Derek Johnson's arrangement of mFrederic Rzewski’s Coming Together (1971), inspired by its spoken text from the letter of a reflective prison inmate. Klassik brought rapper-poet presence, powerhouse authority, and incredible imagination in his delivery of the brief piece of prose, repeated dozens and dozens of times. Emotion slowly built as the video frame eventually brought in grandly sweeping, then flyover views of a segregated city known for disproportion incarceration of African-American men.
David Bloom conducts complex compositions with precision and energy. The terrific musicians played challenging music almost throughout, ending with a marathon of minimalist figures in the final piece. They seemed to gain gravitas by being spaced so far from one another against views of city and sky. Co-artistic director Eric Segnitz (violin) was joined by Jennifer Clippert (flutes); William Helmer (clarinets and saxophones); Derek Johnson (electric guitar); Mariane Parker (keyboard); Andrew Raciti (double bass and electric bass); Don Sipe (trumpet); Carl Storniolo (percussion); Adrien Zitoun (cello).
Present Music has had a deliberate agenda of connecting to the city by venturing into unlikely venues, giving music nuanced context in each place. This accomplished video, produced by the media production company TankThink, took to a newly persuasive level Present Music’s statement about its intrinsic relationship with Milwaukee.
Tickets are available at www.presentmusic.org and viewers can access the online content for the next three months. Additionally, you can enter for a chance to get free access to the video concert by signing up here.
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