lisa moore and don byron at lpr

I’ve written about enough shows I’ve seen at the West Village art cabaret Le Poisson Rouge that “@lpr” should probably just be a tag by now…last night, in sub-Arctic weather conditions (eleven degrees below zero, with punishing ice sheets of wind sweeping Broadway), I ventured back there to hear a joint concert by Lisa Moore, a New York-based Australian pianist who has worked with a number of new music ensembles, including Bang On A Can, and Don Byron, a clarinetist, saxophonist, jazz bandleader, and composer.

Lisa was playing selections from an EP she has just recorded for Bang On A Can’s Canteloupe label, called Seven, which you can find right here. On it, she runs through a series of seven gnarly, jazz-inflected modernist piano etudes that Byron wrote for her. They are called “etudes,” or “studies,” rather than just “pieces” because each one of the seven seems intently focused on one obscure technique or another, honing in on a single isolated musical gesture in hopes of imprinting it forever into the player’s muscle memory. A lot of etudes make for rocky listening experiences for this reason; they can be like standing outside a practice hall and listening to someone maniacally run up and down warmup scales, or they can be like hearing someone obsessively repeat the same mantra to themselves a hundred times over.

Byron’s etudes, though, besides being incredibly difficult, are also fiendishly playful, and there’s not a whole lot that is “studious” about his piano studies for Lisa. The “techniques” the etudes seem concerned with mostly deal with syncopation, or off-beat accents, taken to fearsome extremes. “Piano Etude No. 3″ has Lisa reciting singsongy “la-la-la” rhythms in disorienting contrast to the hard, stuttering rhythm her hands are pounding out on the keys. The rhythms are maddeningly close together, spaced at odd, irregular intervals, and watching her navigate such a minefield in person is transfixing. Think of the old “pat your head, rub your tummy” analogy; this is a little bit more more like patting your head, rubbing your tummy, and writing the Magna Carta in cursive with a fountain pen you have gripped in your toes while reciting the alphabet backwards simultaneously. Impressive stuff, and it makes for surprisingly gripping listening; it’s not just a tightrope walk to gawk at. “Piano Etude No. 6,” meanwhile, is a barrelhouse piano drinker’s melody that keeps tippling over and spilling dissonant tone clusters all around, producing a gorgeous, Ives-ian hall of echoes.

On the second half, Don Byron came out with a fantastic jazz quartet and ran through a set of tunes that I couldn’t begin to identify given my near-total jazz blindness, but made a stop-off for a flat-out stunning and hilarious cover of Hank Williams “Lovesick Blues,” extravagant yodeling included. Byron is the kind of guy who is a musical encyclopedia, but who also wears his knowledge and familiarity lightly, refusing to indulge in the kind of “look at me! I’m a music encyclopedia!” parlor tricks that you might expect from, say, Wyclef. (I’m singing a country song! In a Jamaican patois! Here’s some Caribbean steel drums and Southern-rap 808s beneath it! I AM A POLYGLOT.) It’s all very natural, and it made for a fresh, joyful concert experience.

Anyway, in case you missed the link, here’s the EP again:
Lisa Moore
Seven: Music By Don Byron