Why?

Because they are one of the most wonderful things one can experience - anywhere: a paragon of community, family and music. This Sunday evening, Larry Och's Sax and Drumming Core stopped in between their tour stops at the Dali Museum in St. Pete and their next stop in Buffalo, NY. This kind of audacious programming is not unusual for these concerts! The last concert I attended there was Lucas Ligeti - and the next will include Elliot Sharp!! 

The setting is warm and beautiful, in Benoit Glazer's home set in residential Orlando. This is not the usual home - this is a home of a musician (a fine trumpet player and the music director at Orlando's Cirque du Soleil) who believes in community. Benoit and his wife have opened the doors of their home for 9 years to all strangers who enter their door. Sometimes, the best of our local musicians are there, sometimes grad music students, sometimes international touring artists. There are no ads, just his website calendar. A few years back, the Glazer's moved from their modest home in West Orlando and built their current home, called the White House, specifically to present these concerts and to provide a great practice and performance hall for their whole family - all of whom are musicians. (Almost every concert begins with a performance from the Glazer family, his children playing classical and jazz styles on a variety of instruments. Beautiful to see and hear.) The performance hall is exquisite: quite large, with a very high sloping cedar ceiling with two levels of loft seating that tower many feet above the beautiful stone floor reached by a lovely spiral staircase. The whole room is wood and adorned with a local artists work that is beautifully lit. Every concert of music is also joined by a professional visual artist, many times who 'perform' creating a work onstage during the concert. This concert featured Toni Taylor, who painted a cosmic spiral in deep blues. The White House concerts are full of good wine and good treats. All of this for free. Unbelievable. How is this possible? Because of Benoit and his lovely wife. And for this event, two other behind the scene heroes that Orlando has been blessed with over many years: Woody Igou and Matt Gorney. 

Larry Och's, the well know saxophonist and composer, was joined by 

     Scott Amendola: drums

     Donald Robinson: drums

     Larry Ochs: sopranino, tenor saxophones

and Special Guests:

     Satoko Fujii: piano

     Natsuki Tamura: trumpet

Their music was not cosmic beautiful like Toni's unfolding nautilus in the heavens - it was gut wrenching, troubling, rough and confident. Och's music was real, like out of a Hemmingway novel, honest and unflinching. The music was organized with detailed roadmaps interspersed with composed musical notation. Lot's of astonishing moments unfolded from the beginning: 

Mr. Tamura's trumpet - NEVER have I heard such flexibility with this instrument! The opening work, a pretend animation score, gave him the freedom to create a hissing, growling monstrous animal character. I have never heard the true octave (extreme

 low) of a trumpet played with control or musicality. His sheer dynamic range was physically awesome. Later in the night, we heard his full bore tone, gorgeous, with vibrato as golden as that of one announcing a Toreador that filled the room. 

The group is also joined by the beautiful Satoko Fujii on piano and keyboards. The White House's grand piano was presented, lid off - and from our perspective in the 3rd loft presented quite well both acoustically and visually. Mrs. Fujii played both keys and piano like Rick Wakeman, and being on a swivel stool would deftly move from MIDI switch controller to call up pre-organized patches for the keys - always keeping her attention to her music. Most memorable to me was her ability to play with one hand while the other prepared the piano. The preparations were well thought out by Larry Ochs - provided a multitude of excellent surprising colors yet not damaging the instrument. For example, a short strip of wide masking tape over the top strings (what a cool sound!), or the use of what looked like ear plugs between note strings in the middle register that provided a bell like steel drum sound. 

Two great drummers in the same room can lead to overload, yet, this only happened with compositional intention. One of my favorite moments with the drums was when Donald Robinson established a standard rock groove - that was overlayed by Scott Amendola with a different tempo. Wonderfully interesting! As Donald provided a solid timing framework, hearing a temporary 5:4 ratio on top of it just for a bar, and then lengthening the layer in a systematic way provided a great deal of brain candy! Scott's strength is in color and texture. Too often for me, however, there was simply too much sound from the drums that covered their constant subtleties of color and rhythm. 

Larry Ochs, also a member of ROVA, is a listener. That is what makes him a good composer. He understands perception. He understands performance. His balance of written and unwritten music deserves study. Never did his music become boring or predictable. His tenor sound is huge and colorful. He has the ability to change the color of entire phrases as blocks - for example, exciting the overtones more than the fundamental in his tone that produced a second instrument. This is not typical of extended playing, where changes in sound are usually rapid and approach speech. His playing, leadership and composition are well tuned for this group of excellent musicians. 

Thank you Benoit, Matt and Woody - for a memorable musical evening!