Latest news with #Schoenberg
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ginastera: String Quartets album review
Alberto Ginastera divided his own composing career into three phases, and each of his string quartets falls conveniently into one of those phases. Composed in 1948, String Quartet No 1 belongs to what Ginastera called his period of 'objective nationalism', when, following the example of his teacher Aaron Copland, he incorporated the folk music of his native Argentina more or less unaltered into his own music; 10 years later, in the 'subjective nationalism' of the second quartet, those colouristic elements have been absorbed into the energised textures of his works, which are organised using Schoenberg's 12-note technique. As the Miró Quartet's performances of the first two quartets show, both are attractive works, full of vivid incident, which deserve to be included in recitals far more often than they are. But it's the third quartet that's the real discovery here. By the time it was composed in 1973, Ginastera was living in Europe (he would die in Geneva in 1983) and in what he described as his 'neo-expressionism' phase. Taking its cue from Schoenberg's second quartet, it adds a solo soprano to the lineup, for passionate, dramatic settings of texts by three 20th-century Spanish poets: Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. The recording places the soprano, Kiera Duffy, rather farther forward than ideal, but there's no denying that the effect is totally compelling. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alfred Brendel obituary
In the postscript to his 1998 book of poetry One Finger Too Many, the pianist Alfred Brendel cites among his muses an elderly woman who stopped in front of the bench on which he was sitting at New York's Museum of Modern Art, pointed at him and asked: 'Are you Woody Allen?' The fact that he could be confused with the American actor and director is not in itself surprising: with his puckish face, quizzically raised eyebrows and thick-rimmed Eric Morecambe glasses, Brendel, who has died aged 94, did have the air of a comedian. It was an aura he relished and cultivated in his quirky poetry and it goes to the heart of his personality. For Brendel's art was characterised by a paradox. On the one hand lay an intellectual discipline, academic rigour and search for perfection; on the other a delight in the absurd. He once listed 'laughing' as his favourite occupation and was fond of observing that 'humour is the sublime in reverse'. In a performing career that spanned six decades Brendel commanded a respect that came, especially in the later years, to border on reverence. His authoritative interpretations of the classical repertoire – primarily Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert – were second to none, though in his earlier years he was also a fine Lisztian and helped to establish Schoenberg's Piano Concerto in the concert repertoire. But for a sense that he would not be able to do it justice and that it would draw him away from his beloved classical repertoire, he might have been an active advocate for contemporary music, for it interested him keenly and he was a familiar sight at avant-garde events. In 2007 Brendel announced his intention to retire following a year-long series of concerts and recitals. The final London recital, at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2008, was representative of his last years in that, while lacking something of the flair and muscularity that had so impressed in his prime, his playing of Mozart and Beethoven had all the nuanced subtlety and consummate artistry we had come to expect. Schubert's valedictory Sonata in B flat, D960, was delivered with inspirational insight, while encores by Bach and Liszt paid tribute to masters recently neglected by him. The last appearance of all came in December 2008 in Vienna, where Brendel chose to bow out with Mozart's youthful Piano Concerto No 9 in E flat, K271, the 'Jeunehomme'. Born in Wiesenberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), Alfred was the son of Ida (nee Wieltschnig) and Albert Brendel. He had a somewhat itinerant childhood on account of his father's diverse occupations (architectural engineer, businessman and manager of resort hotels). It was when his father became a cinema director in Zagreb, Croatia, that he had his first piano lessons, at the age of six, from Sofia Dezelic, followed after the second world war by study with Ludovika von Kaan at the conservatoire in Graz, Austria, and private composition lessons with Artur Michl, a local organist and composer. His relative lack of formal training in music was, Brendel later considered, a blessing, for it encouraged him to be self-critical: 'A teacher can be too influential,' he once said. It was entirely characteristic that his first public recital, in Graz at the age of 17, should have consisted of works by Bach, Brahms, Liszt and himself, but only works that included fugues. Even the four encores contained fugues. It was an early manifestation of the intellectual streak that was to define him; also evident was his interest in literature and the visual arts – he held a one-man exhibition of paintings in a Graz gallery in conjunction with his recital. After taking fourth prize at the prestigious Busoni competition in Bolzano, northern Italy, in 1949 he began to tour Europe, taking part in masterclasses by Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann (a pupil of Busoni and Schoenberg) and, crucially, Edwin Fischer, to whom (along with Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff) he believed he owed the most. He made his first recordings in the 1950s, and became the first pianist to record the entire piano works of Beethoven, a memorable and highly praised issue on the Vox–Turnabout label (1958-64). His Queen Elizabeth Hall debut in London led to offers from three record companies, and having been signed by Philips as an exclusive artist, he recorded a Beethoven sonata cycle in the 70s. His complete Philips recordings (114 CDs) were reissued by Decca in 2016. Beethoven was always to loom large on his musical horizon: in the 1982–83 season, for example, he gave the complete cycle of 32 sonatas in 77 recitals in 11 cities across Europe and America, and further similar tours were made in the 90s, with a third recorded cycle completed in 1996. Inevitably, perhaps, some of the fire and spontaneity present in the first of those recorded cycles was no longer evident in the third, but in its place was a spiritual profundity, the product of a lifetime's experience. Alongside Beethoven, it was Mozart and Schubert who had pride of place. Clues to Brendel's approach to Mozart can be gleaned from a revealing essay entitled A Mozart Player Gives Himself Advice, in which he proclaims that: 'Mozart is made neither of porcelain, nor of marble, nor of sugar.' The 'touch-me-not' Mozart and the 'sentimentally bloated' Mozart were to be avoided at all costs. Neither was Mozart a 'flower child' with weak or vague rhythms and dreamy tone, Brendel asserted. Rather it was the duty of the interpreter to find the ideal balance between freshness and urbanity, unaffectedness and irony, aloofness and intimacy. Playing Schubert, on the other hand, was, according to Brendel, akin to 'walking on the edge of a precipice'. In this music, happiness was always on the verge of tragedy and Schubert's brooding moods were projected as harbingers of the phantasmagorical visions of Schumann. It was also the case that Brendel revelled in the romantic, Sturm und Drang – storm and stress – aspects of Haydn and Mozart, which similarly looked forward, in his hands, to the emotionalism of Beethoven. With regard to Liszt's music, Brendel drew attention to its fragmentary nature, and amply fulfilled what he saw as the interpreter's responsibility to 'show us how a general pause may connect rather than separate two paragraphs, how a transition may mysteriously transform the musical argument'. He claimed it was 'a magical art' and therefore, one might assume, a particular challenge for a man so ruled by his intellect. But in his performances of such works as Vallée d'Obermann and Sposalizio it was precisely the otherworldly, transcendental quality of the music he captured so well, not least by his perfect calibration of their silences. The aim was to integrate passion and introspection, and while it goes almost without saying that the cult of the self-advertising virtuoso held little appeal for him, he was also, in his prime, able to surmount the fearsome technical demands of such a work as the Rákóczy March, deploying a rock-steady rhythmic control to generate its expressive force. A similar intensity characterised his rendering of Busoni's formidable Toccata, while his knowledge of the spooky world of German romanticism informed his response to the enigmatic aspects of Schumann's fantasy pieces. In the last decade or so of his career, physical problems with his back and his arm prevented Brendel from essaying the big virtuoso works, though it has to be said that this was all of a piece with his concentration in these years on the inner essence of things: a striving after truth. In some of these late recitals, the repertoire for which focused increasingly on the classical period, Brendel's playing often lacked the inspirational quality of his earlier years, but there was more than adequate compensation in the authoritative, penetrating readings he delivered. Such an evolution in his style may well have been related to a psychological development: inner emotional conflicts were perhaps reflected in the more volatile interpretations of his earlier period, while the sublime revelations of his late maturity were the product of a more reconciled, integrated personality. Beyond the solo piano repertoire his recordings likewise reflected his predilections: major releases included four complete sets of the Beethoven concertos (most memorably with Simon Rattle), complete Mozart concertos with Neville Marriner (together with a further eight in conjunction with Charles Mackerras), the two Brahms Piano Concertos with Claudio Abbado and the Schumann with Kurt Sanderling. He collaborated also with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on a Winterreise and with Matthias Goerne on lieder by Schubert and Beethoven. Chamber recordings included the complete works of Beethoven for cello and piano with his son, Adrian. His literary abilities and incisive mind resulted in two collections of immensely rewarding essays on music: Musical Thoughts & Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out (both 1990). A third collection, Alfred Brendel on Music (2001), gathered together both published and previously unpublished essays. A further collection of essays and lectures – Music, Sense and Nonsense – distilling his thoughts on music over the decades, appeared in 2015. If those collections amply demonstrated his erudition on musicological matters, his two volumes of poetry, One Finger Too Many and Cursing Bagels (2004), attested to a dadaist sense of humour and a florid imagination. In one poem an extra index finger was developed by a pianist 'to expose an obstinate cougher in the hall' or to indicate the theme in retrospect in a complicated fugue. Other poems mused on Brahms, beards and the Buddha. After his retirement from the concert platform, Brendel continued to give lectures, in which he often attempted to distance himself from what he regarded as the self-indulgent excesses of the historically informed movement. Seeking his own authenticity in a balance between fidelity and interpretation, he evinced little patience with exaggerated phrasing and accentuation, and even less with over-brisk tempi: 'There is a reductionist theory that all music is dance,' he wearily intoned, 'and what a treat to hear an Agnus Dei or Miserere skipping along.' All forms of the absurd fascinated Brendel: kitsch and masks (of each of which he had amassed collections), nonsense verse and cartoons. But his extra-musical enthusiasms embraced also Romanesque churches, baroque architecture, literature, film and much more. The sum total was an artist who relished eccentricity yet focused on the inner essence, who countered a cerebral image with a delight in the whimsical, and above all who never ceased in his search for musical truth. In 1960 he married Iris Heymann-Gonzala, and they had a daughter, Doris. They divorced in 1972, and three years later he married Irene Semler. They lived in Hampstead, north London, and had three children: two daughters, Katharina and Sophie, in addition to Adrian. They divorced in 2012, and he is survived by his partner, Maria Majno, his four children and four grandchildren. Alfred Brendel, pianist, born 5 January 1931; died 17 June 2025
The Guardian
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Celebrated pianist and writer Alfred Brendel dies aged 94
The celebrated pianist and author Alfred Brendel has died aged 94 at his home in London. The musician was born on 5 January 1931 in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) and spent his childhood mainly in Croatia and Austria. 'I was not a child prodigy or eastern European or Jewish as far as I know,' he told interviewers. 'I'm not a good sight reader, I don't have a phenomenal memory and I didn't come from a musical family, an artistic family or an intellectual family. I had loving parents, but I had to find things out for myself.' He studied piano and composition until he was 16, thereafter he was largely self-taught. Aged 17 he gave his first public recital in Graz with works by Bach, Brahms and Liszt on the programme, one of the encores was his own composition – a sonata with a double fugue. The teenage Brendel was also an author and an exhibited painter, but in 1949 he won fourth prize in the prestigious Busoni competition, which launched his career as a performing musician. His concert and recording career lasted more than 60 years with performances at the world's most important musical centres and festivals alongside the leading orchestras and conductors. He became particularly associated with the music of Beethoven, and made the first complete recording of the composer's entire piano music. He took a prominent role in highlighting Haydn's importance as a composer, in establishing Schubert's Sonatas and Schoenberg's Concerto in the repertoire, and rekindling interest in Liszt's piano music. He moved to London in 1971, and made his home in Hampstead, his second marriage brought three children (his son, Adrian is an acclaimed cellist, his daughter by his first, Doris, is a pop and rock singer). His final public concert was in Vienna in 2008 but in the succeeding years he published poetry and essays, lectured and continued to teach and give masterclasses. 'I don't feel guilty about being 'intellectual' if that means thinking about the structure and character and humour in a piece of music,' he told the Guardian in 2010 on the occasion of receiving Gramophone magazine's Lifetime Achievement award. 'But I'm not talking about dry analysis, which is relatively easy if you know how. I do the opposite. I familiarise myself with a piece and wait for it to tell me what it's about, and what makes it a masterpiece. That's what fascinates.' Widely regarded by colleagues as the 'musicians' musician' as well as the 'pianists' mentor': Brendel's pupils include Paul Lewis, Imogen Cooper, Kit Armstrong and Till Fellner and he devoted a significant part of his time to sharing his experiences as a musician with younger artists. 'Alfred Brendel was my guide, mentor and an endless source of inspiration for more than 30 years, and his passing is an enormous loss not only for music, but on a personal level for those of us who were fortunate enough to be guided and touched by his wisdom and insight, of which he gave so generously and selflessly,' said Lewis. '[He] was unique in the pantheon of great pianists – inspirational and uncompromising, with a formidable knowledge of literature and art as well as of music. His playing was intense and visionary, his teaching no less so – but dry humour was never far,' added Cooper. Brendel received 23 honorary degrees from universities including Weimar, Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and The Juilliard School, the Honorary Vice-Presidency of the Royal Academy of Music and a number of prestigious awards such as honorary membership in the Vienna Philharmonic, the Sonning and Siemens Prizes and the Praemium Imperiale in Japan.
Los Angeles Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
To capture the outlandish subject of Schoenberg in Hollywood, it takes an opera
There is a small and intriguingly personal sub-genre of operas about composers. Something is always up when one composer deals with another composer's life and music. Subjects have included Carlo Gesualdo, the 16th century madrigalist who murdered his wife and her lover. César Franck and others got a kick out of Alessandro Stradella, the Baroque opera composer who attempted to embezzle the Roman Catholic Church. Rimsky-Korsakov turned to Mozart and Salieri. In the fall, Los Angeles Opera will premiere Sarah Kirkland Snider's 'Hildegard,' about the Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. In the meantime, UCLA presented the West Coast premiere Sunday of Tod Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood' at the Nimoy Theater, with performances through Thursday. Machover, who directs the Opera of the Future group at MIT's Media Lab, says he was drawn to the idea after he learned about the remarkable 1935 meeting of Schoenberg and MGM producer Irving Thalberg about scoring 'The Good Earth.' The uncompromising German inventor of the 12-tone system had just fled Nazi Germany, and the meeting became a battle of high art and entertainment. Schoenberg and the movies ultimately went in their independent directions, but the composer did become deeply integrated in L.A. culture, living across the street in Brentwood from Shirley Temple, teaching at USC and UCLA, playing tennis with George Gershwin (whom he adored), feuding with neighbor Thomas Mann (who opposed Schoenberg's innovations) and hanging out with the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Machover's opera begins and ends with Thalberg as a framing devise. The 90-minute opera is basically a phantasmagoria of how Schoenberg got here. The superb libretto by Simon Robson (based on a scenario by Braham Murray) is a clever series of short flashbacks of Schoenberg's life, with film accompaniment. Some are realistic, some fanciful. The three characters are Schoenberg, Boy and Girl. Boy and Girl represent all the characters in Schoenberg's life with many a virtuosic costume change. We witness Schoenberg, who was born 150 years ago, starting out as a cellist and self-taught progressive composer in his native Vienna and Berlin. He flees the Nazis and, via Paris, Boston and New York, finally settles in Los Angeles in 1934, where he remains for the rest of his life. Moving scenes reveal his personal life and its connections with his music, but as he reaches the New World wacky ones begin to creep in. He becomes Groucho and SuperJew. The films, which are cued as though musical elements, run the gamut of cinematic styles and periods. They include historic documentary scenes, modern enactments, cartoons and graphics. Machover's score for 15 instruments is its own complex delirium. An impossible composer to pin down, Machover has written a traditional grand opera such as 'Resurrection,' based on Tolstoy's novel, and 'Brain Opera,' which is just that, using electrodes on your noggin. A trained cellist, he's comfortable with acoustic instruments but also can't wait to get his hands on whatever crazy invention the Media Lab's irrepressible tech visionaries come up with next. Musically and dramatically, 'Schoenberg in Hollywood' has Schoenbergian denseness along with new-world electronics. Machover is particularly effective in evoking both the trauma and the exhilaration in Schoenberg's spiritual progress as he reinvents himself after horrors of World War I, in which he fought, and again when confronted with new horrors of World War II. The commanding performance by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music ensemble, conducted by Neal Stulberg, makes the high/low dichotomy irrelevant, leading us to a profound middle ground. Choreographer Karole Armitage, who bases the Nimoy production on the original one she created for Boston Lyric, operates, however, on extremes. Schoenberg comes across as either self-knowing prophet or goofball. Whimsy and wit become silly. Marx Brothers, Wild West and SuperJew stagings are saved only by the music. Omar Ebrahim's imposing and magnificently sung Schoenberg is well-suited for visionary gravitas, less so for slapstick. Anna Davidson and Jon Lee Keenan, as Girl and Boy, turn on a dime. They move with dancers' ease, allowing Armitage to create a sense of flow in the episodic opera. They can do silly, but also a lot more. Davidson was particularly gripping as Schoenberg's first wife, Mathilde. In some ways, Armitage seemed to be compensating for the small, bare Nimoy stage. Schoenberg no doubt attended movies in what is now the Nimoy, which was a movie theater until its recent renovation as a performing space for UCLA. It is an intimate space, which meant that Armitage had to do without decor, and which may have led her to overemphasize theatrics. Amplification added a complication. The sound stage was too loud for vocal subtleties and too flat for careful instrumental and electronic music balance. Still, Schoenberg would not be Schoenberg without obstacles to have triumphantly overcome. He changed music in Vienna and Berlin. He thrived in L.A. as composer, teacher and inspiration, fitting in as he needed to. He remained true to his (12-tone) school but also, when it pleased him, went rogue. Schoenberg even wrote a terrific MGM-style Hollywood Bowl fanfare that for no good reason never gets played. Could 'Schoenberg in Hollywood' be a wake-up call? Shockingly, Schoenberg remains starless on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Los Angeles Times
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Is there a Los Angeles musical style?
The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once defined American music as music written by Americans. There is no arguing with that. Less obvious, however, is figuring out what, if anything, describes L.A. music. Los Angeles is the home of film music. The two most influential classical composers of the first half of the 20th century, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, lived here. (In Stravinsky's case, the Russian composer spent more of his life in L.A. than in any other city.) The composer with the most radical influence on the second half of the 20th century, John Cage, was born and grew up here. Ferreting out L.A.'s bearing on jazz and the many, many aspects of popular music, as well as world music, is a lifetime's effort. Yet these seeming incongruities of musical life are what fascinate the most. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, for instance, flirted, if futilely, with writing Hollywood film scores. The money was a lure. The possibility of reaching the masses, irresistible. Picture Schoenberg, in 1935, in the office of Hollywood's prevailing film producer, Irving Thalberg, offering untenable requirements to score MGM's feature film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's 'The Good Earth.' Picture the composer, considered by many the instigator of the most daunting music of all time, asking for $50,000 (more than $1.1 million today adjusted for inflation) and full control of the movie's sound, including having the actors recite their lines to his rhythms and suggested pitches. Picture, again, eight decades later and 3,000 miles away, the head of the Opera of the Future project in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ultra-futuristic Media Lab, mulling over an idea for an opera based on that remarkable Thalberg incident as a way to examine the profound implications of art and entertainment had Schoenberg been given the green light. A new production of Tod Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood,' which had its premiere in Boston seven years ago, finally reaches L.A. on Sunday afternoon for the first of four performances by the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music at the Nimoy. Those very names — Schoenberg, who taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944, Alpert and Leonard Nimoy — couldn't better illustrate the marvelous fantasy of L.A. musical juxtapositions. Also Sunday at First Lutheran Church of Venice, the Hear Now Music Festival concludes its 2025 season of three concerts. This festival is L.A.'s most dedicated resource for surveying local music. Over the last 14 years, it has featured more than 200 composers, from the most famous to the most obscure, from academia and from Hollywood, be they John Williams, an electronic wizard at CalArts or a kid fiddling away with a guitar in the garage. The idea of artistic place and physical place are at the heart of Hear Now. If L.A. music is anything, it is a music that challenges the notions of borders. The festival came about because its co-founder, composer Hugh Levick — who divides his time between France, Spain and Venice Beach — said the music that his L.A. colleagues were writing was easier to hear being performed abroad than in venues here. Composers in L.A. are far-flung. Looking at universities alone, UCLA, USC, CalArts, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, Pomona College and the Cal State campuses in Northridge, Long Beach and Fullerton are all centers of musical activity that have had widespread influence. The seeds of Minimalism, the most prominent style of late 20th century music as propagated most famously by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, can be traced to Los Angeles City College in the 1950s. That's where La Monte Young — while studying with, and finding encouragement from, pianist Leonard Stein (who had been Schoenberg's assistant) — began to consider what would happen if he radically slowed everything down. I sat down with Levick recently to discover what he had learned from the festival. Having coffee at a Santa Monica cafe, we were near a cottage where Cage had lived in the early 1930s, when he found his first music job. It was as an assistant to pioneering animator Oskar Fischinger, who came into artistic conflict with Walt Disney over 'Fantasia.' Cage didn't last long, falling asleep on the job and dropping a lighted cigarette on flammable celluloid. Levick has probably encountered a greater variety of composers in this part of the world than anyone else. The way Hear Now works is that any composer can submit scores, so I asked the obvious questions. Could he detect any commonality, as one might in, say, Paris or Berlin? Is there West Coast and East Coast music as there once seemed to be? Does L.A. have its own sound or maybe laid-back sensibility? 'Not really,' Levick said. 'There are people whom you could vaguely put together stylistically. They may have obvious influences, but mostly they have gone their own way. What is a little different about the West Coast and the East Coast is there is a certain fluidity and flexibility here and certain rigidity on the East Coast.' When asked what has surprised him over the years, Levick pointed to the fact that although John Williams, John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès and Andrew Norman may attract audiences, curiosity also drives crowds. Of this year's festival, which features works by 28 composers, I've previously encountered only four. Even Levick was surprised by the great many submissions from composers he didn't know. Yet that turns out to be a draw. At this year's festival, the first two programs were sold out. I attended the first at 2220 Arts + Archives in March devoted to often arcane electro-acoustic music, and it attracted a diverse and enthusiastic audience taking pleasure in not knowing what to expect. No two works were remotely the same. If Levick shies away from generalization, he too is a composer not easily pinned down. He started out as a fiction writer who, while living in Paris, chanced upon avant-garde jazz and took up the saxophone. That led him naturally to classical avant-garde. The concert Sunday will feature his latest work, 'The Song of Prophet X,' for speaker/singer and piano quartet, a similar configuration that Schoenberg used in his antiwar 'Ode to Napoleon,' We cannot escape Schoenberg. This season has seen widespread celebration of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Last year, on April 30, Hear Now ended its festival with a large-scale concert given at the UCLA music department's Schoenberg Hall and featuring the UCLA Philharmonia conducted by Neal Stulberg, the same forces tackling Machover's 'Schoenberg in Hollywood.' The campus was on edge from news of a violent attack on a Palestinian protest that day just across from Schoenberg Hall. Hear Now, nevertheless, went on as scheduled. The concert was not a political statement, the music had nothing to do with protest movements. Even so, the symbolism of the occasion was impossible to ignore. Schoenberg, who had fled Nazi Germany, wrote scores of protest music such as 'Ode to Napoleon' and 'Survivor From Warsaw.' He also dallied with Hollywood. Schoenberg might ultimately be seen as the great juxtaposition. Leonard Stein and John Cage were in Schoenberg's UCLA classes. Film composers David Raksin ('Laura') and Leonard Rosenman ('East of Eden') studied with Schoenberg. Both Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman brought up Schoenberg when I interviewed them, and it was their world of progressive jazz that led Hugh Levick to Hear Now. Could we then define L.A. music as simply be music of, and open to, juxtapositions?
