On Tuesday evening, April 27th, I caught a surprise presentation by Alex Ross and Ethan Iverson at the Apple Store on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The two have been touring the country promoting Ross' book The Rest Is Noise, a history of 20th century music.
In the capacious and echoey cave of the Apple Store, Ross read excerpts (sometimes dramatically) and Iverson played examples of various 20th century musical innovations. I don't think I'd ever heard Schoenberg's atonalism and Jelly Roll Morton's ragtime on the same program before...
But wait, The Rest is Noise, which focuses on composes such as Webern, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Gershwin, is not about jazz! Well, actually, if you think of jazz' influences as extending beyond a certain lineage that started with New Orleans and Louis Armstrong, then in a way, it certainly is about jazz. Iverson, whose last album with The Bad Plus, For All I Care, featured music by Stravinsky, Ligeti, and even Milton Babbitt, is just one piece of evidence for that argument.
Two things I noticed:
- Hearing solo piano arrangements of Ligeti and Babbitt in the Apple store is fitting in a futuristic technology sort of way. Apple should consider pumping more integral serialism into its retail caves.
- iPads are really fun.
Image © Jacob Teichroew / About.com
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