On Monday and Tuesday of this week we worked with Dennis DeSantis (above, making himself at home in one of 8bb’s comfy chairs); two concentrated, intense, productive days of rehearsal in advance of 8bb’s concert at the Harris Theater, Chicago, on January 26.
As has been the case with a number of our projects this season, nobody quite new what to expect of this collaboration.
Dennis is a composer, percussionist and DJ based in New York and Berlin. 8bb commissioned a work, Powerless, from him in 2000, as part of a project to commission all members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective. We worked with him again in 2006, when, at our instigation, he was commissioned by Cedille Records (our absolutely bloody marvelous record company) to create the final track of our Grammy-nominated album, strange imaginary animals. Called strange imaginary remix, the track was an imaginative, hugely entertaining dance remix of material from the rest of the pieces on the, um, Grammy-nominated album. (A little bit of self-promotion never hurt anybody. Well, surely it has never hurt many people. Well, okay, so it has hurt lots of people, but we’re just a nice, innocent new music group…Really.)
This successful experiment got us thinking about a related collaboration for this season, and we decided to invite Dennis to come and play laptop with us, providing a live remix of all of the works on a concert program. Also named strange imaginary remix, we programmed the concert to include most of the pieces on strange imaginary animals (which, by the way, is Grammy-nominated; did I mention that?).
During the 10 hours of rehearsal that took place before our workshop-style studio concert on Tuesday night, we all danced a variety of different musical and interpersonal dances, struggling to get on the same collaborative page.
Dennis is an inventive composer who, by his own admission, can’t remember when he last wrote for an acoustic ensemble. He came into the collaboration feeling quite tentative about imposing too much of himself onto other composers’ pieces. In particular, he desperately wanted to avoid what he saw as the hackneyed, cliched and just bloody awful tendency for groups to cynically add electronics, thinking that “classical+fat beats=funky”. When Matt, who was the most bullish of us 8bb folks this week, suggested that a sequenced beat pattern could underpin certain moments in Steve Mackey’s Indigenous Instruments, Dennis seemed taken aback.
A significant amount of rehearsal time was spent on Cliff Colnot’s faithful arrangement of the Radiohead tune Dollars and Cents. Did we want to just “cover” the song, or really come to our own interpretation? What could we do to sound like more than just classical musicians? Some ideas tried, abandoned, tried again: intentionally play out of tune (leading to some micromanagement: “Bar 8 should be in tune, no vibrato; then get softer and go flat by bar 12.”); have Dennis electronically distort our instrumental sounds; sing while playing (which Matt and I both tried – with some measure of success); do some improv. We also chose a “climactic” moment in the song, then had the electronics (consisting of sequenced drum patters and samples of our instruments) overpower the other instruments.
Dennis worked particularly well with his own piece, Powerless. As a composer, he is interested in overlapping, interlocking, colliding pulses and beat patterns. It is common for him to set up a catchy groove only to immediately undermine it: suddenly a simple rhythm in 3 has to battle against one in 4; then 3/4/5; then 3/4/5/7. Using different amounts and speeds of reverb on our sounds, Dennis was able to insert himself in this joyous cacophony. Occasionally this caused a rhythmic derailment, but Dennis encouraged us to think of him as a seventh member of the group, and to let him “play chamber music” with us.
The studio concert was the perfect testing-ground for our two days of work with Dennis. This series lost its focus last season, when we began to use the concerts as an end in themselves. We are endeavoring this season to turn the into what Eric Booth calls “very open rehearsals”: sessions that allow for trying out untried and uncertain repertoire and collaborations in front of friendly, encouraging, yet brutally honest listeners. If you would like to score an invite to future studio concerts, join our email list.
The verdict on the whole shebang? Go further. We were too timid during rehearsals, always trying meet Dennis in the middle; we should have been pulling him, kicking and screaming, into our screwed-up musical universe. For his part, Dennis left knowing what we want to achieve, and we are confident that he is behind us 100%. We will have another two-or-so days of rehearsal in early January, and then it’s showtime. Bring it on!
Below, the whole gang (l to r): The Alb, the Kap, the Den; the Mac; the Ing; the Phot; and the Aussie.
Below, the official 8bb Menorah (the wikipedia link is for those Aussies who, like me, had no bloody idea what a Menorah was until last week), which took its place beside a few holly branches, creating a political-correctness-gone-mad Holiday Season display.
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