Soundcheck

Canadian conductor and pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the incoming Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, is taking over two years earlier than initially planned. In this interview with John Schaefer for the Soundcheck Podcast, he outlines his plans to welcome more folks to the opera and to make sure that routine does not become the norm.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s intensity is fueled by his boundless energy and his understanding of the legacy and the history of the Metropolitan Opera. He's the first new Music Director in 42 years and yet is optimistic that the Met can present itself as the generator of and ultimately a place for the creation of new operas, but understands that the large space does not lend itself to experimentation. Due to his unique placement as Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra as well as his new role with the Metropolitan Opera, Yannick hopes to be able to shepherd new productions to life. He also plans to go out of the theatre, in collaborations with BAM (in Brooklyn) and the Public Theatre with the aim of welcoming more folks to the Opera.

Pointing out that opera is itself a unique combination of drama and music with ballet, theatre projections, and modern dance, Yannick Nézet-Séguin is eager to see more folks able to immerse themselves, and be challenged and nourished with stories and ideas in opera. He’d also like to let people in on the behind-the-scenes aspects as well as invite them into the glamour and magic of a performance.

He's also an omnivorous listener himself - with singers as his main focus. Yannick (yah-NEEK) is currently listening to Janelle Monáe, Canadian singer/songwriter Daniel Caesar, Frank Ocean, and neo-soul of the early 2000’s when not at work. He also dips back into classic singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. - Caryn Havlik

Grammy-nominated chanteuse Emily King went into the family business via a different route, that of an R&B-influenced singer-songwriter. (She’s the daughter of New York jazz vocalists who has moved to the Catskills.) Her latest record, Scenery, due in February of 2019 (on ATO Records), promises to be a clever mix of R&B, pop, and perhaps a little retro disco. A bicoastal preview tour brings Emily King and her band to our studio to perform some of her brand-new “retro-cinematic” tunes (NPR Music) before playing at the storied Apollo Theatre tonight. - Caryn Havlik

Watch the session via Facebook here:

Or via Youtube:

With screaming and blistering guitars, power-chord-like vocal harmonies (both clean and processed through an array of guitar pedals), and a rock-solid pummeling of drums, Brooklyn trio Upper Wilds, [Dan Friel (Parts & Labor), Zach Lehroff (Ex Models) and Jeff Ottenbacher], exploits all kinds of sonic textures for a cathartic, electric explosion of melodic and riff-driven noise-fuzz-pop.

Expect distortion-filled, high-intensity songs with the “raw hopeful energy of DIY spaces” (Thrill Jockey) about being the first earthlings in deep space, getting struck by lightning, and colonizing Mars when Upper Wilds plays in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Watch the session here: 

Mars by Upper Wilds

Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear has been around in some form since 2002, but since assembling their current quartet lineup in 2006 they’ve become one of indie rock’s biggest, most successful, and sometimes most psychedelic bands. They've also collaborated with contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly, Beach House's Victoria Legrand, the Acme String Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Choir. Grizzly Bear are also public radio fans, and played a set for New York Public Radio in June of 2018 at Brooklyn Bowl. Set list: 

The band Pond hails from Perth, the Western Australian city referred to “as the most remote city on earth.” They blend blissful and mind-bending psychedelic rock, with subversive strains of funk, synth-pop, falsetto, somehow both of the moment, and informed by the past. To illustrate, in a recent video, the band went shopping at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, and showed off their haul: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Young Thug, Tokyo Psychedelic music of the 1990’s, Tom Waits, Neil Young, 1980’s dub from Scientist, “uplifting doom and gloom” from Spiritualzed, along with Yoko Ono and Plastic Ono Band, psychedelic soul from D’Angelo, Jean Michel Jarre, William Oneyeabor, Cocteau Twins, a Prince candle, and Wu Tang boxers.

With their latest record, The Weather, they have achieved a synth-pop/guitar-psych balance in their West Australian self-reflective songs. Pond joins us in-studio to play some of these songs. - Caryn Havlik

Watch the session live here:

The cinematic Minnesota band Cloud Cult is a creative collective who continually celebrates life and love, and catharsis through music and multimedia performances, usually involving painting from stage, and lately, film. Cloud Cult’s emotive, melodic, orchestral indie rock is perfectly suited to the movies. Singer/instrumentalist Craig Minowa and his crew have scored shorts and documentary films, The Seeker, The Great Alone, and lately, Minowa has been working on a score for a National Geographic documentary on wolves (Pop Matters.)

They’re also independent musicians who are greening the music industry with environmentally-sound packaging, a geothermal-powered studio, and touring with net zero greenhouse gases. The studio is located on an organic farm. -Caryn Havlik

Watch the session here: 

Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch creates playful and carefully balanced works containing both space and riffs. There might be as much listening going on as there is playing, which points to a spiritual focus, trust, and discipline that comes from Bärtsch's avid practice of the Japanese martial art Aikido. In his electric group, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (after the freelance Japanese warriors who served no master), there is slow-building, ever-shifting, sensual groove reductionism.

With newfound freedom and flexibility, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, now a quartet, meditates on repeating patterns, or “Moduls” as he dubs his works, in what he describes as “Zen-funk” and “ritual groove.” Those repeating patterns have also earned the label “minimalist”, but the quartet wanders freely between funk, jazz, new music, or Japanese ritual music. Pianist Bärtsch, reedsman Sha, bassist Thomy Jordi, and drummer Kaspar Rast play at all kinds of accents and subtle syncopations, shifting downbeats, interlocking rhythms, and hypnotic motifs which slowly evolve and build to dramatic effect.

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin perform music from their latest, Awase (a term from Aikido which means “moving together, coming together”), in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Watch the session here:

Arthur Moon is the moniker of composer/singer/multi-instrumentalist Lora-Faye Åshuvud. As Arthur Moon, she is the anchor who has gathered collaborators- including Cale Hawkins (Quincy Jones, Bilal, Wyclef Jean) and Martin D. Fowler (a composer for This American Life) and other folks. They trade demos and build on musical perspectives, which she then arranges and composes by way of experimentation and improvisation. The result is dazzling music that feels beautiful, affecting, and strange.

Arthur Moon’s electronic experimental pop takes advantage of all available sonic space, teasing around all kinds of textures and timbres: here a fat-bottomed synth bass, there some minimal sampled percussion, perhaps a sneaky guitar effect to connect them, all dancing around swooping vocal lines, combined with vocoder action – in something of a multi-layered collaborative musical collage. Yet, the grand thing is that this assemblage of electronic pop never feels heavy, or over-crowded, or falls into any traps of formulaic synth pop, rather – it’s what Åshuvud calls “incorrect music” and it as perplexing as it is marvelous. Arthur Moon - Lora-Faye Åshuvud and her collaborators - join us in-studio to play some of these new tunes. - Caryn Havlik

In the mid-20th century, pianist Oscar Levant (1906 –1972) was a pre-digital version of a social media star – a ubiquitous, witty presence on American TV and radio, and films. He was also a bestselling author, radio game show panelist, and a talk show host. As a concert pianist, his Gershwin performances, especially a 1945 version of the “Rhapsody in Blue”, were the best-selling classical records in America. But, Levant was a troubled figure off-camera and out of the limelight. He’s the subject of a mammoth eight-volume box set called Rhapsody in Blue: The Extraordinary Life of Oscar Levant, which features never-before-heard recordings and an essay by Michael Feinstein, perhaps our leading curator of the American songbook.

Michael Feinstein joins John Schaefer to present “hors d’oeuvres” from both his personal archives and the box set, everything from Gershwin, to J.S. Bach, to Levant’s own compositions and trippy songs with subversive dissonances. Feinstein also tells tales from Oscar Levant’s career, full of admiration for his acerbic wit and his many fascination with the way he could be taken seriously as both a classical pianist and a film star. Despite debilitating eccentricities and addictions, and the loss of coordination in his hands, Levant was able to regularly appear as a game show panelist on TV shows, publish as an author and host a talk show. Feinstein concludes by saying that there is likely five or six more hours of these never-before-heard recordings of acerbic comedian and real-life piano prodigy Oscar Levant.  -Caryn Havlik

In the mid-20th century, pianist Oscar Levant (1906 –1972) was a pre-digital version of a social media star – a ubiquitous, witty presence on American TV and radio, and films. He was also a bestselling author, radio game show panelist, and a talk show host. As a concert pianist, his Gershwin performances, especially a 1945 version of the “Rhapsody in Blue”, were the best-selling classical records in America. But, Levant was a troubled figure off-camera and out of the limelight. He’s the subject of a mammoth eight-volume box set called Rhapsody in Blue: The Extraordinary Life of Oscar Levant, which features never-before-heard recordings and an essay by Michael Feinstein, perhaps our leading curator of the American songbook.

Michael Feinstein joins John Schaefer to present “hors d’oeuvres” from both his personal archives and the box set, everything from Gershwin, to J.S. Bach, to Levant’s own compositions and trippy songs with subversive dissonances. Feinstein also tells tales from Oscar Levant’s career, full of admiration for his acerbic wit and his many fascination with the way he could be taken seriously as both a classical pianist and a film star. Despite debilitating eccentricities and addictions, and the loss of coordination in his hands, Levant was able to regularly appear as a game show panelist on TV shows, publish as an author and host a talk show. Feinstein concludes by saying that there is likely five or six more hours of these never-before-heard recordings of acerbic comedian and real-life piano prodigy Oscar Levant.  -Caryn Havlik