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[Giant Steps]
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Equal signs
Ben Schwendener and Marc Rossi excel in Living Geometry
BY JON GARELICK

Attend a concert by the piano duo of long-time Boston jazz musicians and composers Ben Schwendener and Marc Rossi and you’ll notice an odd credit in the program regarding each piece: " Improvisational structure design by . . .  " That’s not the typical composer credit, but Schwendener and Rossi, in the duo project Living Geometry, have chosen an unusual path.

" It’s not playing off head charts, where you play a head, each person takes a solo, and then you do the head again, " explains Schwendener when I get together with the two at a Newbury Street café. " And it’s not free improvisation, even though there’s a lot of freedom within it, because free improvisation doesn’t have the kind of control that Marc and I as composers are looking for. "

Examine a Schwendener/Rossi score and you might see nothing more than a circle with particular chords indicated at points around its circumference. The circle is the circle of fifths — the fifth being the interval that can take a player or composer through modulations of all 12 of the diatonic keys. In some pieces, Schwendener and Rossi will cycle through all 12 — or not. Cueing each other musically, or through eye contact as they play opposite each other at a pair of nestled grand pianos, they indicate how long to stay with a particular scale or chord, and when to move on.

What does this sound like? At its least compelling, it can sound new-age spacy (there are no wrong notes, man), but more often the same " design " creates a texture that’s closer to the rich, chromatic French Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. Then again, " YKY " breaks into spiky, dissonant lines that suggest serialism. Although tempos and meters are fairly free, " A&P Swing " lives up to its name with a walking-bass line and bebop melodic sequences, and " Origins of the Universe (Miles Remembered) " adapts the juxtaposition of ostinato funk bass lines and the free-tempo passages of Davis’s early electric bands.

Schwendener and Rossi met in their overlapping student careers at the New England Conservatory in the 1980s. The fundamentals of their procedure are based in NEC professor George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept — the system of tonal organization that found its first popular incarnation in the Kind of Blue experiments of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. To oversimplify (vastly): the concept allows players to improvise on a particular scale rather than a sequence of chords. Rather than moving through that cycle — say, a chorus of a 32-bar song form — the soloist can improvise scales on a single chord for as long as he or she chooses, then move on.

Schwendener, who has for years worked as a teaching assistant for Russell at NEC, echoes Russell in insisting that the concept " is not a methodology. The concept does not create music, all it does is organize naturally occurring elements and principles. "

Or, as Rossi says, " It’s a macro-structure that gives us guidelines from which to exercise our freedom. "

Schwendener and Rossi first tried the duo concept at a 1993 Schwendener recital at Longy School. Rossi says, " My original reaction to it was that I was making choices I would not have made otherwise. It opened me up in a way. It’s a doorway to choices. "

" The stuff that works best is the stuff with as little instruction as possible, " Schwendener suggests. " But the cues become very direct, and because Marc and I have done this long enough, we can sense where things need to change . . .  "

" Like an old married couple, " Rossi adds, and they both groan.

" One of the reasons the simple designs work better is that they’re more easily digestible, " Schwendener continues. " When you have two pianos, the potential for cacophony is enormous. " As is the capacity for beautiful sonorities, as anyone who’s heard the duo live would likely attest. The challenge that gave birth to Living Geometry (also the name of their CD on Schwendener’s Gravity Records, online at http://www.gravityarts.org/) is an old one for jazz, and for art: how to be spontaneous within a form; how to create form without being formulaic.

This Monday, Schwendener and Rossi will play a set as a duo, then be joined by saxophonist (and former Schwendener student) Uwe Steinmetz and the great free-improv guru Joe Maneri, also on reeds. Schwendener calls the addition of the saxophonists " satellite geometry. " He says, " It’s going to be fun, because I don’t know what to expect. "

Adds Rossi, " We’ll find out when we get there. "

 

Issue Date: March 13 - 20, 2003
The Giant Steps archive
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