DAVID ARNER

piano and harpsichord

An Invocation of Hermes Twice Revealed

David Arner (piano, harpsichord)

Namely, a cryptic improvisational score based on a chorale for the Earthling (implied but not revealed) for solo piano once and then for harpsichord  exploring yet also re-contextualizing in the manner of Hermetic mythos the synchronicities, spontaneities and evolutions inherent or otherwise informed by both the inevitabilities of the circumstances and the whim of the trickster.

(Or to put it differently, two performances of the same piece that won’t sound the same, separated by an intermission.)

EMPAC

The Curtis R. Priam Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

8th St. & College Ave., Troy NY, 12180

8:00 pm

Admission Free   Parking Free

This performance is sponsored by IEar Presents, part of the ARTS Department at Rensselaer

Evelyn’s Cafe at EMPAC will be open prior to this performance for lite fare.

The Vision Festival’s Evolving Voice/Evolving Music
String Things

3 sets

7:30  Rosie Hertlein Trio
Rosie Hertlein – violin, voice
David Arner – piano
Dave Taylor – trombone

8:45   Macroscopia
Daniel Carter – sax
Claire de Brunner – bassoon
Ken Silverman – guitar
Tom Zlabinger – bass

10:00   Juan Pablo Carletti Trio
Michael Attias – alto & bari sax
Daniel Levin – cello
Juan Pablo Carletti – percussion

Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center
107 Suffolk Street
New York, NY 10002
$11 for one set.  Stay for the whole night for $22.  Student and senior discounts available.
http://www.visionfestival.org/schedule/evolving-voice

Pianist David Arner is a musical voice that does not fit easily into the various schools of improvisation that are widely influential among the free school of players.  He’s managed to forge a path that does not cross directly the Cecil Taylors, the Paul Bleys, the Keith Jarretts, or the Bill Evans influenced players.  Not that he has ignored these stylistic landmarks.  Clearly not.  But he chooses to go his own way.

You can hear that quite readily in the 2007 recording Out/In the Open (Not Two 812-2).  It’s a trio date with the formidable alliance of Arner with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Jay Rosen, all key institutional-foundational figures in the creative improvisational music of the present era.  The album’s hour-long program features four collective improvisations, an Arner composition (“Intensities”) and a standard (“My Romance”).

There is remarkable piano trio interplay throughout. Rosen listens creatively to what Maestros Bisio and Arner are doing and gives out with the coloristic energy washes that he does so well; Bisio is alive with noteful counter improvisations to Arner’s forward-pressing expressions; and David unleashes the full spectrum of the music he hears, which engages the jazz tradition, the expressive intensities of the avant, the expanded harmonic, melodic and textural potentialities of the piano and the musical ideas he has in abundance.

It’s a documentary testament to what these three imaginative players can achieve in the space of a single session.  And it’s a sterling example of Arner pianism at its best.

Highly recommended.

Gapplegate Music Review

5:oo pm, Saturday, October 1, 2011

David Arner’s

Bell Dream

For 18 audience members (plus Arner)  playing various bells following simple instructions.

Scored for 4 small brass bells, 4 medium brass bells, large shepard’s bell, 6 bell strings, 33-bell sleigh bells, 5-bell sleigh bells and glass bell.

Michael Bisio

Porgy/Bess Act 1 is the first of 2 CDs of the David Arner Trio recorded by CIMP in October 2007, recorded in a single afternoon. Very satisfying session. Act 2 will be released in the near future. This session focused on my re-arrangements and deconstructions of the Porgy/Bess material that I have been performing over the years in one form or another. The score was partially written, partially very free. I am playing my own 1968 Steinway. Jay Rosen used his hand-made solid wood drum kit with skin heads, plus a full array of gongs and bells. Michael Bisio as always played his 18th Century Italian bass without amplification. As with all CIMP recordings, there is no editing or post-production mixing.

Available The GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (Woodstock NY), OBLONG BOOKS (Rhinebeck & Millerton NY), JACK’S RHYTHMS (New Paltz, NY)  or at this site. For more info and audio samples, click here.

Jay Rosen

The David Arner Trio, with me on piano, Michael Bisio on bass and Jay Rosen on drums, recorded Out/In the Open on the afternoon of December 28th, 2007. There are 4 collective improvisations, one standard (“My Romance”), and a trio version on my own “Intensities,” first performed as a solo piano spontaneous composition in December 2003 (which can be heard on my CD, Live from the Center). The collective improvisations were completely spontaneous. There was no planning or discussion necessary. For everything this trio does, we stay in the moment, always open to each other’s input.  “Magical… a most enchanting disc… one of this year’s best piano trio offerings.” (Downtown Music Gallery)

Available The GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (Woodstock NY), OBLONG BOOKS (Rhinebeck & Millerton NY), JACK’S RHYTHMS (New Paltz, NY)  or at this site.  For more info and audio samples, click here.

January 12, 2006

Attending this first concert of 2006 was an easy choice for me to make. It was the very idea of the duo performance of David Arner on piano and Michael Bisio on string bass that took me the distance from where I write here to where I could hear them. And the music transcended the miles I traveled.

Arner chooses his musical syntax from an encyclopedic knowledge of the capacity of the keyboard. Bisio rewards the listener with a soft and dedicated approach to the bass strings. Every sound that the two make is simple. It is in the interaction that those same sounds can promote a blended complexity. It is in the interaction of an orientation to detail, which is paramount to Arner’s precise address to his instrument, with Bisio’s tender and broad strokes that can paint a complete musical picture. A wedding of opposites.

The concert took place in an informal setting in the Hudson Valley. As the music was about to begin, Arner was poised over the sounding board of a grand piano. Bisio stood in the space shaped by the curve of the piano, his fingers ready to engage the strings at the neck of the bass.

The sound commenced. It spread out invisibly in small, quiet motion. Both players were plucking and tapping their own strings in a conversation with one another, cementing the space as the groundwork for the upcoming dynamic. The two carefully picked where they intersected. It was like foreplay before they thrust their coherence and persistence and dove into the place where the vibrations of the strings merged, ringing and full.

Arner moved his fingers to the keyboard as Bisio charted out a dreamy, beautiful melody. A quickly captivating rhythmic content crossed through the terrifically stringent and abstracted sound constructions and eventually took over. The power of the rhythm was not inconsistent with the endlessly repeated cascades of notes on the piano complemented by slow grooves on the bass, thumbed and plucked over the strings.

The drive and climb to the next configuration of time was all that mattered. To be so ensconced in the activity at hand was all that mattered. The poetry of the musician’s becoming one with the instrumental interplay was all that mattered.

Chordal shifts in the piano aligned with snaps of the strings on the bass. The bass notes were squeezed and pushed and eventually met the bow. The piano music transformed into a drone for a while. Bisio bowed adamant, large, classical gestures which were pitted against exquisitely small detailed ones on the piano. Arner’s fingers evoked grandeur with a tact completely different from that of Bisio. They both produced resonating tones unparalleled for the rest of night. The potency of the resonance overcame anything that could follow. The sound seemed electronic; the two instruments had reached the same tonal arena: as the sound became larger, so was influenced its largeness. The sound surrounded itself. No drama: only indeterminate determinacy. Arner flickered with his little finger in the treble seeming to signal the sight of the end of this road. Bisio applied force on his bow, vibrating one string after the other. Arner came back to center with careful placement of his fingers and his foot on the pedal. The pitch on the bass ascended. Bisio scraped a high finishing note.

After an arresting statement of virtuosity, calmness bathed the audience. The musicians took a deep breath.

Arner introduced the next piece with a tuneful basis. From there, with the rhythm an underlying constant, he worked to map out his process. Bisio entered slowly with a relaxed pizzicato. Midst the lacey pianistic structure made of chords, trills and atonal clusters, Bisio strummed, played staccato and snapped the bass strings. Then Arner stamped out double-handed marching phrases permitting himself to charge into a group of changes that seesawed between chords and fluid swirls and landed into a set of phases. Bisio spread himself to correspond sweepingly with the rapidity with which Arner traveled dryly and then coloristically over the piano. With one finger wagging over the strings constantly, Bisio fell into a nearly Spanish guitar type fluttering’he was echoing Arner’s playfulness. The musicians were consumed in the rhythm that had developed. And once again, a groove overwhelmed the gathering of the senses. The music was joyous. Each player spoke to one another unremittingly. The atmosphere the music expired was one of captivation and immersion. Bisio grunted with the pulse. Arner repeated one series of tumbling notes after the other. The bass exuded tightness, yet that tightness was paradoxically supple and elastic.

After passing through a hiatus or two, in relation to Arner’s gradual slowing of pace in the treble, Bisio played with the edge of his bow, instead of its width, to pull away from depth of the sonority for a bit. Then he applied the bow’s broadside again to submerge into rich, embracing tones. Bisio rounded out the sharpness of Arner’s retracing of thematic phrasing. A deconstruction of the tune ended the second piece.

The last piece of the set began with a Bisio solo. His bow moved to me and away from me. The series of tones he played interlocked into a velvet fabric of energy so smooth that the distance between the bowing and the coincidental fingering was undetectable. His large strokes mapped a seemingly endless journey to a distinct melodic line in which a low to high pitch movement introduced a synchronicity with the piano as it returned to the soundscape. Bisio goes nowhere except where he is at any one point. How he stretches the boundaries of his instrument is through his state of aural mind. How that transfer matches with Arner’s pianistic intelligence is one reason the musicians could so easily converge. Even in the silence, even in the blossoming of “Angel Eyes”, I had the jitters. I counted the pulse the whole time.

Someone once wrote that music has to have meaning and, further, that music meaning itself is nonsensical. I disagree. Music may have meaning and music that means itself is music that is being explored for how its form can become its content. Music that means itself is music that has been crafted and honed to the quintessence that each individual musician can identify. The quintessence arises out of a strange simultaneity of involvement and detachment. At this concert was manifested that quintessence, times two.

Concert Review by: Lyn Horton

Read Lyn Horton’s review on jazzreview.com

But the players know, and that includes everyone from Miles David to Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington to Count Basie, and at least a handful of Woodstockers. First among the local players is David Arner, whose commanding technique and orchestral palette place him in a category of one when it comes to pianism. A long time student of Dwike Mitchell’s, I thought I’d let Arner speak about his mentor.

“Well, Dwike is the quiet genius in jazz,” says Arner. “For five years or so, I soaked it up from him- the profound rhythms and absolutely kaleidoscopic harmonies! The harmonies will astound you, but the rhythm is really unique. That’s why Dizzy went out of his way to do concerts and a few recordings with Mitchell-Ruff. The rhythms are rhythms of elation, of unbounded joy, and you can hear it so well without any drums in the mix.”

Yes, the harmony will astound you. It will astound you this Saturday, July 10th [1993], when Music in the Mountains presents the Dwike Mitchell-Willie Ruff Duo in a double bill at SUNY New Paltz, a children’s concert in the afternoon and a regular gig in the evening.

And it astounded me over 20 years ago when I caught Dwike Mitchell solo at the Carlyle Hotel in New York…

Joe Giardullo, Woodstock Times (NY), July 8 1993