Year of the Long Pinch

Unforgettable jazz and classical moments of 2014

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If you love jazz and classical music and you live in the Lansing area, you only needed six words in your vocabulary to describe this year’s schedule: “Pinch me. I must be dreaming.”

A relentless run of top-drawer musical experiences, most of them related in some way to the stellar MSU College of Music, made 2014 the Year of the Long Pinch.

What American city gets to have two jazz festivals? Call on us, Professor Rodney Whitaker. For jazz lovers, summer 2014 began with the biggest and best Summer Solstice Jazz Festival yet, with Whitaker as artistic director. (He’s also the jazz studies director at MSU and a world-renowned bassist, for those of you who are living under a rock.) From ultra-nerdy-cool guest vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant to canny trombonist Michael Dease’s big band to a wild Sun Ra tribute from the Planet D Nonet, the variety and quality of the music jumped in as many directions as a bagful of cats.

Not to be outdone, Lansing’s own JazzFest in August dropped the other shoe-be-do with a blissful Saturday night love-fest in the middle of Turner Street, beginning with organist Jim Alfredson’s soulful tribute to Big John Patton and ending with an ecstatic set by Detroit soul-jazz trio RYZ. Even the avant-garde, the least often heard species of jazz in these parts, had its day. At JazzFest Friday night, recording engineer Glenn Brown assembled a wild supergroup, Intergalactic Spiral, that dared to throw Whitaker and Alfredson together with electronics and two guitarists and make up a whole evening of music on the spot. You can catch it sometime on WKAR’s “Backstage Pass” show — if they dare to air it.

It’s hopeless to chronicle all the jazz that went down this year in Greater Lansing this year. MSU student big bands blossomed in expansive concerts with topdrawer guest artists, including bassist Christian McBride in October and trombonist Robin Eubanks in December. On Sept. 22, the MSU Professors of Jazz, with new members Randy Napoleon on guitar and Xavier Davis on piano, kicked off the school year with a blazing set of fresh arrangements and tunes. Favorite memory: saxman Diego Rivera shamelessly grinning from the stage at his wife and new baby daughter in the back row, then pivoting to blow another ferocious solo.

For chamber music lovers, the MSU schedule was filled with faculty recitals and special events that never quit. Among the revelations of the year was an extraordinary March 19 recital of delicate, haunting music by Armenian composer Vache Sharafyan at the newly renovated Fairchild Theatre. With the composer himself in the house, a slew of top faculty musicians poured themselves heart and soul into Sharafyan’s achingly beautiful and mel ancholy music, with two world premieres on the program. And that was just a fraction of cellist Suren Bagratuni’s overflowing Cello Plus chamber festival.

The Lansing Symphony, under maestro Timothy Muffitt, hit a lot of high notes this year, including cellist David Requiro’s gritty, devastating take on Dmitri Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto on Jan. 11. Tchaikovsky lovers were treated to two of the Russian master’s biggest and greatest symphonies: the Fifth, performed by the Lansing Symphony in September, followed two months later by the clamorous Fourth, performed by no less an authority than the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra with its legendary hard-as-nails maestro, Pavel Kogan, at the Wharton Center. The splendors of that night required an extra hard pinch, especially after violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg used all of her mad musical skills and passionate body language to make Bruch’s Violin Concerto sound as if it were illegal to perform.

Muffitt and the LSO delivered magisterial readings of Brahms’ Fourth in April and Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony in October and brought in a series of revelatory young guest artists, including pianist Colton Peltier in October. But for my money, it took a home-grown soloist, longtime LSO principal trombonist Ava Ordman, to administer the ultimate “pinch me” moment of the year, at April’s “Copland & Bernstein” concert. In one of the most out-there works the LSO may ever program, Ordman and the orchestra shuddered, squirmed and sang through an elemental 1976 concerto by Donald Erb, complete with multiphonics, didgeridoo sounds, barking and a climactic scream.

Oh, I hear you, Ava. It hurt so good.

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