An exciting virtuoso new-music ensemble from Los Angeles pays a rare visit to New York City bearing three disparate, complex, and fascinating programs, each departing in some way or ways from standard convention. The concerts are chock full of fresh music. The first includes the world premiere of a commissioned work by a highly regarded composer in residence at the venue, with text by a local-hero librettist whose other labors have made headlines. The last features the local debut of a young artist of established appeal and substantial promise. Naturally, the city’s press corps assembles en masse…

…except no.

It was a sobering sight to everyone involved with November’s three-concert series by wild Up that for all intents and purposes, no press resulted. No one could explain how it had happened. The presenter, Beth Morrison Projects, had earned the respect of critics from coast to coast. The publicists involved were professional and diligent. The marketing push was sufficient to fill the house amply each night, despite a near-complete lack of advance press notices. And wild Up’s New York debut concert, just over a year ago at Roulette, elicited effusive praise, the kind that would lead anyone to believe the group’s further adventures would be chronicled eagerly and widely.

A sign of the times (and certainly not only The New York Times). Drastic evidence that coverage the new-music community long could take for granted – coverage essential to visibility, growth, self-awareness, and sustenance – has vanished practically overnight.

How do we even start to address the enormity of this loss?

My own impulse, as an arts journalist and critic by training and by instinct, is to step into the void. Yet obviously given that I’m employed by National Sawdust, the idea that I would review concerts that happen here – even those presented by or with independent partners – tests boundaries of propriety and principle.

Does a cultural need for documentation and evaluation outstrip those specific concerns? I’ve struggled with that question – and honestly I’m hard pressed to answer in the affirmative, even under the present circumstances. Honesty and integrity are essential to any writer intent on building and sustaining an relationship with readers. Ethics matter.

Still… were I to report on what I witnessed and heard during the programs wild Up presented in November, the results would look a lot like this…

Ellen Reid
Photograph: James Matthew Daniel

PART I: Memory / Nostalgia / Somesuch Thing

You might have anticipated a raucous blast, one suited to the representatives of a rival nation as they establish a beachhead on local soil. What you got, if you were in attendance at the first concert of a weekend triptych by the Los Angeles chamber orchestra wild Up at National Sawdust on Nov. 18, was a whisper; if you weren’t paying close attention, you might not have realized the concert had started.

What you heard on arrival was a subtle wash of sustained tones – ambient music as Brian Eno coined the term, amenable to listening but as happy to float in the background unnoticed. A handful of instrumentalists, likewise unnoticed, hit their marks throughout the space, and without fanfare joined the murmur. At some point it hit you: the concert has started.

Ellen Reid’s Knoxville Memoryscape opened a program described in unusually evocative promotional copy as “lined with filaments of the past.” Reid, a Los Angeles composer and sound artist whose own National Sawdust residency aligned profitably with the ensemble’s, was setting the stage softly, evoking memories of past ties to Knoxville, TN, using tones borrowed from Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as base material. Cognition engaged, wafting tones suddenly were referential – as if Reid somehow had distilled the wistfulness and melancholy that permeate Barber’s songful reminiscence into a crystalline suspension, its associations contained within a glistening droplet.

Alchemy, and not the last instance. After a brief welcome from the industrious impresario Beth Morrison – whose presentation of wild Up in Williamsburg, she explained, essentially amounted to introducing a new beau to family back home – the ensemble mustered onstage with Christopher Rountree, its energetic and persuasive founder, artistic director, and conductor. More Barber followed, the early Four Excursions for solo piano decked out in snappy, sympathetic orchestrations by Richard Valitutto, a composer and wild Up’s pianist. The ensemble showed prowess, panache, and Hollywood polish in bluesy Gershwinesque slow drags and blithe Coplandesque dance sequences.

If by this point you’d presumed Reid a nostalgist, her next two originals set you straight. Ground to Steel Dust – Uneaten, brittle and abstract, matched cello (Derek Stein) with percussion (Matt Cook) in pealing concords and scuttling jousts. Drifting Untitled, quirky and appealing, combined Brian Walsh’s gaseous, pugilistic bass clarinet with Valitutto’s junk-gamelan prepared piano and wordless patterns from vocalists Justine Aronson and Solange Merdinian.

Two rearranged songs adhered to programmatic threads of history and memory: “An Die Musik,” orchestrated by violinist Andrew Tholl with pizzicato strings, slap-tongued winds, and toy piano, bridged the span from Schubert’s Vienna to Brian Wilson’s Pacific shore with flagrant charm, while “Take Time,” Reid’s treatment of a song by collage-pop duo the Books, replicated the original’s clockwork mechanisms cleverly and faithfully.

Looking back over it all, you could see how the curious mix had set the stage for the evening’s main business: Knoxville: Summer of 2015, a splendid, imaginative sequel to Barber’s famous James Agee setting, with fresh words provided by the consistently poetic (and understandably ubiquitous) librettist Royce Vavrek. The text concerns Reid’s great-grandfather, born in 1915 – an echo, again, of Barber’s Agee setting:

The antiquity of the wooden framework, erected by great- and great-great- uncles in 1910, has been wrapped in a new coat of fire-engine-red paint applied by a band of teenaged grandkids in the spring a century later. It stands like a homemade monolith with an uncanny ability to turn newborns into men, foals into geldings sixteen hands high. Such a magic act could only describe the life of my great-grandfather. He, a man of gentle wisdom and fading memories. He, whose only regret is that he never learned to play “nothin’ but a jew’s harp and spoons.” He who has never left Tennessee, not even by mistake.

Reid handles Vavrek’s lucid, pungent prose with unfailing musicality, her lean orchestra waxing heroic, hortatory, and reflective by turns behind the vocalist Jodie Landau (remember that name), whose sweetly androgynous voice conjured both childlike wonder and a grown woman’s nuanced insights. The result was a triumph: a strong piece I’d eagerly hear again, and a stirring conclusion to a composer portrait that left this listener struggling – paradoxically, maybe, and pleasantly for sure – to grasp and summarize succinctly Reid’s kaleidoscopic style.

An encore followed: Pete Seeger’s wry medley of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and “Goliath, Goliath,” in a puckish arrangement adorned with toy piano. Perfect.

Ted Hearne
Photograph: Nathan Lee Bush

PART II: Ascension

On Saturday wild Up returned for double duty, offering distinct programs at 7 and 10 p.m. The first set, Ascension, was constructed by Rountree with the composer Ted Hearne, and drew its “inspiration and architecture” from the landmark 1966 John Coltrane album of the same title. Recorded in 1965 with a clutch of fiery upstarts added to the classic Coltrane Quartet, and issued the next year (twice, actually, when Coltrane decided the take initially released was not the one he preferred), Ascension was the saxophonist’s pledge of allegiance to the free-jazz cause.

“With John Coltrane as a guide we explore celestial music, religious music, free jazz, and the avant garde,” the ensemble offered in a program note. The clarification was important and welcome. What would transpire was not a “cover” of Ascension – no appropriation of a seminal creation from another culture’s milieu; rather, Coltrane’s creation served chiefly as a statement of imaginative intent, a kind of trellis to which fresh growth might adhere and intertwine.

A “form cover,” an “energy cover,” the program said. Better that those phrases weren’t taken too literally. Confronted with the urgent claxon blasts, obsessive repetitions, and jerky rhythms of Hearne’s One Like, which opened the concert’s seamless sequence, another potent influence came to mind far more readily: Frank Zappa, specifically the Varèse-enamored prog-rocker satirist’s modernist-composer aspirations and affectations. That Zappa must have influenced subsequent generations of left-coast radicals is conjecture, certainly, yet the evidence was here – and not limited to Hearne’s piece. (It’s worth remembering that Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic tackled Zappa’s lumpen magnum opus 200 Motels as recently as 2013.)

When the exceptional woodwind player Brian Walsh stepped out from from the ranks for a potent rendition of Brian Ferneyhough’s unaccompanied bass clarinet piece Time Motion Study I, you certainly could grasp the thematic idea of Coltrane or one of his fire-breathing colleagues emerging from the din of Ascension, with Ron Wiltrout’s frantic yet stately Drop Trou and Run signaling the band’s surging return. That suggestion of interplay among soloists and ensemble worked equally well later in the set, when the trombonist Matt Barbier stepped forward for an exhilarating account of Tim McCormack’s demanding HEAVY MATTER I.

The Coltrane analogy felt less organic during two incursions by Jen Hill, whose two featured performances – Piece for Rubik’s Cube, in which a swift real-time struggle with the iconic puzzle (projected on a screen overhead) was synched with pop-song recordings that twisted, fractured, and reconstituted in concord with the cube’s permutations; and Piece for Midi Piano, a ticklish invention realized with an Etch-a-Sketch – felt more like playful intermissions in the action than integral parts of it. Eric Dolphy’s “Something Sweet, Something Tender,” led by a pungent trio of bass clarinet (Walsh, again), bassoon (Archie Carey), and trumpet (Aaron Smith), was the evening’s sole direct borrowing from the avant-garde jazz tradition, concluding free-improv irruption included.

Whatever minor misgivings might have arisen during Hill’s intrinsically fascinating media manipulations evaporated during a sublime final stretch: from Barbier’s barbaric yawp in the McCormack soliloquy through a regal arrangement (credited to wild Up) of the Kyrie from Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame; onward into a cover of Björk’s similarly weightless “Desired Constellation,” with sweetly plaintive vocals by Jodie Landau; and concluding with Hearne’s Illuminating the Maze, its fitful alarums, unstable rhythms, and swaggering climax conjuring pent-up energy barely contained.

More than effective, this last traipse across decades, idioms, and intentions was some of the bravest, most imaginative programming and playing I’ve encountered in recent memory. In sum the program – the parts that cohered and even the parts that didn’t quite – gave a clear indication of wild Up’s versatility, vitality, and assurance.

Jodie Landau
Photograph courtesy DotDotDotMusic

PART III: you of all things

Having made indelible contributions to the two preceding wild Up sets, the singer and percussionist Jodie Landau stepped out front for the duration of Saturday’s late set, which emphasized songs from his 2015 debut album, you of all things, released on the influential Icelandic label Bedroom Community.

The album, which features the Icelandic women’s choir Graduale Nobili, mixes a clutch of songs by Landau with selections by Ellen Reid, Andrew Tholl, and Marc Lowenstein. It’s an artful chimera: seductive and chaste, ornate and intimate, plush and brawny, baroque and spontaneous at once.

The set here followed suit, mingling the six Landau songs and Reid’s mythopoeic “Orlando & Tiresias” from you of all things with two further Landau pieces (“last arium,” “homunculus suite”); songs by My Brightest Diamond (“This Is My Hand”) and Björk (“Solstice”); and “For the Love of Her,” a setting by performer, producer, and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurdsson of a text by Carlo Gesualdo.

The mix of contemporary art songs by composers who recognize that art is not exclusive to the conservatory or concert hall felt just right, My Brightest Diamond’s lapidary rigor and Björk’s free-floating lyricism well suited to Landau’s approach and delivery. And Landau’s keening voice proved as well matched onstage as on record by the limber heft of wild Up’s forces and a chorus of five – Aronson, Merdinian, and Abigail Fischer returning from the previous evening, joined by Cree Carrico and Amelia Watkins. More surprising, and consistently arresting, was the contrast between the quavering vulnerability of Landau’s voice and the oversize authority of his stage presence.

Now and again, the music affected genuinely novel fusions of ambitious prog-rock architecture with glossy, radio-ready pop and soul landscaping… “Tales from Topographic Hot Tubs,” I recall thinking during the brassy “last arium” and again during the geometric permutations of “homunculus suite.” This was music that united head, heart, and loins in roughly equal measure. Here again I recalled Zappa – his passion for doo-wop; his subornation of pop singers Flo & Eddie; his predilection for hiring players like George Duke and Chester Thompson, with funk chops to spare.

Art song, prog rock, whatever: the music exerted a siren’s snare from beginning to end. The band played sensitively and supportively, bringing intricate arrangements to life vividly and passionately. Landau’s album proved that he’s an artist of evident gifts and immense promise. Here, assessing his impressive microphone technique and sure skills as a frontman and bandleader even while being seduced anew by that distinctive voice, you could hardly help but think that a significant artist was growing comfortable with his own increasing stature right before your ears and eyes.

Here, too, was one more instance of the range, skill, and assurance common to wild Up’s leaders, players, and collaborators. Contemplating all three sets in succession, you were convinced that this band, alongside New York’s Alarm Will Sound, is equal to the formidable challenge of recasting the concert-music experience – repertoire, location, comportment, the works – into something that might entice anyone open to an amiably sophisticated encounter.

If only the press had been there to report it all.

Steve Smith is director of publications for National Sawdust, and previously worked for or contributed to Time Out New York, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe. He can be reached at steve@nationalsawdust.org.