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Alliance for Improvised Music |
Scott Rosenberg
Scott Rosenberg & John Shiurba will play a show on Tuesday April 25 at Go! Studios that will include a collaboration with Micro-East Collective, hopefully starting around 9. They will play in a trio setting with percussionist Ian Davis at Humble Pie in Raleigh on Wednesday April 26, starting around 10.
Scott Rosenberg has an approach to reed instruments and composition that selects from the best of new music and jazz and presents it with wit and virtuosity. I’ve seen Scott play in solo, duet, trio, quartet, and very large ensemble settings. I have heard him calm a large room full of musicians with the gentlest breathing through contrabass clarinet – not too much, just the appropriate amount of sound that intrigued in its timbral diversity and breadth. I have heard him perform a “sandwiched” word piece that had his audience alternately stunned, laughing uncontrollably, and smiling sympathetically (interlacing contrabass clarinet and a story about an incident that had to be embarrassing at the time but became, in Scott’s objective and generous mind, more grist for his honest artistic mill). I have seen him lead a large parade of improvisers in the midst of traffic and elicit uncomprehending non-verbal responses from passersby in a corporate plaza in downtown San Francisco. I saw him build Micro Collective, a Mills College-based large ensemble that formed the entire idea behind forming Micro-East Collective (an homage, a playful sort of franchise), and saw it disperse under multiple pressures. I’ve even seen his first memoir, a recounting of strange adventures on tour in Europe. In short, I’ve seen Scott do a bunch of amazing stuff and the best thing to say is this is still a young guy with a portfolio crammed full of possibilities that haven’t yet been seen or heard.
Perhaps this is due in part to the folks he’s been exposed to. He studied under Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan for his undergrad degree and under Alvin Curran, Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, Glenn Spearman, and Annea Lockwood at Mills. He has played with many of the luminaries of the Bay Area and the world, including John Shiurba, Matt Ingalls, Morgan Guberman, Gino Robair, Matthew Sperry, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Hautkamp, Marco Eneidi, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Tim Perkis, and Ralph Carney. He has moved to Chicago now – always an active place for improvised music – and has done some playing with a growing variety of its improvisational scene. It is hard to tell what else might be coming from this guy, but it will probably be music and words and captivating performance – sometimes altogether, sometimes randomly distributed, sometimes as a huge media sandwich. He’s a guy to listen to and follow.
Scott Rosenberg taught me more about drum possibilities than any record or performance has to date. How does a reedman do something like that? For a drummer? With slim reading skills? By establishing a complex sonic environment that is not about rhythm but demands a new voice from the rhythm instruments. By eliminating the totalitarian pulse, the anchor to which so much music is irrevocably bound. By playing so eloquently at the tiniest extreme of the dynamic range that typical drum stuff would be an obvious insult to the musical context. By creating a large ensemble that captured the intimacy of a small group and allowed a reformed thumper access to the musicians he had gathered. By assigning me the flute part in a score with no percussion stave and forcing me to think about the broad – and narrow – implications of the assignment. In short, by opening possibilities to me that I had never thought existed – all in the short year or so I hung out with Bob Boster and friends at Mills College.
Scott’s coming to the Triangle for a couple of shows and John Shiurba’s coming too. The candy for Micro-East Collective is another collaboration with some folks that have worked the large improvising ensembles. The candy for me is that I get to learn more from some folks I respect and enjoy immensely. The candy for those who show up at one of the two gigs is that they will see and hear performers that are well on their way towards defining new voices in improvisational music. What will it sound like? There are no words that will do justice to the sounds you will hear or the context within which they are placed. You will just have to come and learn as I have from these pleasant, funny, modest, and huge fellows as they work through their latest obsessions with sound.
- Ian Davis, 4/00
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