The four-day festival was opened by the popular indie band Dirty Projectors. (Photo: Zachary Weg)
BY ZACHARY WEG | news@queensledger.com
The progressive and transgressive spirit of Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival was on full display throughout Brooklyn this past week. Featuring countless musicians playing over 70 concerts from Wednesday night to Sunday evening, the innovative music festival held its fifth — and perhaps best — edition this year.
Commencing the festival on Wednesday night was Brooklyn indie rock institution, Dirty Projectors, at Public Records in Gowanus. Singer and multi-instrumentalist, David Longstreth, founded the band in 2002, helping to set off the Brooklyn rock boom that would ignite New York City for the next decade, and his appearance here was undoubtedly a highlight.
Dirty Projectors has consisted of several notable musicians over the years, including Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend and Angel Deradoorian, and Longstreth now has Chris Bear of Grizzly Bear on drums and Karl McComas-Reichl on stand-up bass in a new trio format. Ahead of a new album, Dirty Projectors played four mostly sold-out shows during the festival and set Brooklyn in a raucous rock groove.
On Thursday night, another highlight of the festival was the appearance of Oneohtrix Point Never at Pioneer Works in Red Hook. The moniker of the composer Daniel Lopatin, Oneohtrix Point Never has earned wide recognition over the years for his entrancing scores to the films of the Safdie brothers. The brothers split creatively to make their own films not too long ago but, as recently as this past December, Oneohtrix Point Never provided the score for Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. Synthy and pleasantly unpredictable, Lopatin’s music exemplified the explorative ethos of Bang on a Can.
The performing arts organization, which began as a 12-hour marathon music festival, was started by musicians, for musicians. Co-founded by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe in 1987, Bang on a Can of course has always had the audience in mind, playing to their eclectic tastes, but the festival has a uniquely communal approach. Unlike the bigger festivals such as Governors Ball and Coachella, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival brings together musicians from all over the world while centering Brooklyn as the vanguard of new music.
It’s a festival that convenes musicians as diverse as the Houston-born performance/installation artist, Suzanne Bocanegra, the New York stalwart jazz drummer, Billy Hart, and the venerated composer, John Luther Adams. This year, the festival also gathered organist, Kali Malone, and, it demands mentioning, the Bang On a Can All-Stars performing Philip Glass’s Glassworks, and Sō Percussion playing in Steve Reich’s 90th Birthday Marathon. These avant-garde music titans could have played anywhere but they came to Brooklyn, “the ancient kingdom,” as the late Paul Auster once called it.
One of the many visitors to the borough this year was festival attendee, Ron Soferman, a Tel Aviv native and innovative music buff. “The first day, we had percussion, a very good piece of percussion,” he says at Fulton Hall, a sports bar a block away from BRIC House in the Brooklyn Cultural District. “The first one was by GOAT and, for the second one, there was a group [coming from Japan], and they played very good, incredible pieces.”
Having a cup of tea between shows, ‘90s rock playing from overhead speakers, Soferman continued, “I started to remember that there was Bang on a Can and that they were doing a festival, at Roulette, which is a place that I really adore for all of the new music. Actually, my son, who is a musician, told me, ‘Father, the real thing is happening in Brooklyn.’ The real innovate thing you see in jazz, and you see it in new music and experimental music. So this festival was a unique opportunity to hear them all.”
A show that particularly struck Soferman was the Anzû Quartet and Friends playing Ken Thomson. Taking place in the BRIC Ballroom, the set held the audience in quiet rapture as clarinetist Thomson played his dark compositions before the green velvet curtain. Thomson’s first piece was the U.S. premiere of, “Keep Your Head Down,” which, during his introduction, he described as being about the push-and-pull of paying attention to the constant news cycle. The composer proceeded with similarly jagged pieces that, at times, sounded like Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho and even the Krzysztof Penderecki tracks that accompany The Shining. However stark, Thompson’s pieces were certainly compelling and drew loud applause in the ballroom.
For a different yet no less intriguing performance, and as a pleasant send-off into the night, guitarist Miles Okazaki played the music of Thelonious Monk on the BRIC Stoop a few hours later. Monk was perhaps the most influential jazz composer/pianist of the 20th Century and, as played by Okazaki, he still sounds simply beautiful.
Yet Bang on a Can wasn’t quite over. At 10 p.m. on this unseasonably chilly spring Sunday, the experimental rockers Secret Chiefs 3 were set to play at Roulette in downtown Brooklyn, dispelling any case of the Mondays and carrying over the festival’s glorious ruckus to next year.
