Produced by the irreverent, imaginative, and highly eccentric collective of extraordinary composers known as Bang on a Can, the festival has become one of the most exciting events on the contemporary music scene. We have followed Long Play since its very beginning, when it was first staged as a marathon at the World Trade Center, and our curiosity to discover something new and surprising in the ever-changing American music landscape has kept us engaged. Year after year, that curiosity has been rewarded – even through the difficult post-Covid period.
The festival has expanded significantly in the culturally stimulating district of Downtown Brooklyn, which has developed around the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), now an increasingly vital center for the performing arts. BAM rivals – and at times surpasses – certain prestigious Manhattan institutions. But this is not a matter of “decentralization.” Brooklyn has always had an unshakable pride, even when measured against its “twin city” across the East River, linked by the famous bridge and others. The three founders of Bang on a Can – Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, and David Lang – are well aware of Brooklyn’s identity and, bolstered by their prominence, have been able to gather resources and energy to bring together the best of avant-garde circles for concerts in venues and theaters of various sizes. They have created a smaller but no less vibrant version of Big Ears, the phantasmagorical festival in Knoxville. Their focus, however, is on contemporary music and jazz, avoiding the pop, rock, and folk digressions that belong to the Tennessee event.
This year, in three days at the beginning of May, more than fifty concerts were presented across a dozen locations – a considerable increase over previous editions. Perhaps inevitably, given the composers at the helm, minimalism in its most diverse forms remained central. But it was the deviations from that stylistic core that produced the most striking and culturally advanced moments of the entire festival. At the forefront of this heterogeneity were jazz musicians such as Henry Threadgill, Bill Frisell, Mary Halvorson, Thomas Fujiwara, and Tomeka Reid, who once again showed that the creative and formal gap between contemporary classical music and jazz has narrowed to the point of disappearing altogether. This has been true since the festival’s inception, but it is even more evident today. In this latest edition, one instrument in particular stood out: the electric guitar. It revealed a new vitality in a dimension enriched by this stylistic cross-pollination.
Paradoxically, two composers with radically different styles gave the guitar a central role in their new works: Henry Threadgill and Michael Gordon. Threadgill once again proved himself to be a musician free of preconceptions, always in search of renewal and experimentation. His new project, Listen Ship, is stylistically unclassifiable – and it would be wrong to call it jazz. That, in fact, is its strength, as evidenced by the music itself: complex pieces with intertwining instrumental lines at the outer edge of technical possibility, filled with a spasmodic tension that leaves the listener breathless for nearly an hour. The guitarists chosen were among the finest active today: Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki, Brandon Ross, and Gregg Belisle-Chi. They were joined by electric bassists Jerome Harris and Stomu Takeishi and pianists Maya Keren and Rahul Carlberg. There was no drum kit, and Threadgill conducted. The project was recorded in the studio the day after its premiere at the Roulette Theater. It is destined to be another milestone in Threadgill’s career, though it will undoubtedly create divisions and factions – such is the fate of masterpieces.
The sense of bewilderment and tension created by Listen Ship left the audience so shaken that it hindered their appreciation of the next concert by trumpeter Peter Evans’s band. Despite featuring excellent musicians – including vibraphonist Joel Ross, bassist Nick Joz, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey – their music sounded too bound to the idioms of free jazz, like a Village club performance from 1965. After Threadgill had propelled us into the future, there was no room for a return to the past.
Michael Gordon’s Amplified, a work for electric guitars presented by the Dither quartet at the BRIC Theater, marked another peak. As expected, the repetitive style typical of minimalism dominated, and though far removed from Threadgill, its rigorously structured phrasing and carefully organized textures produced a hallucinatory atmosphere that was neither abrasive nor hypnotic. This work departed from compositional approaches associated with German rock of the 1960s and ’70s, showing instead greater awareness and stripping away the incantatory excess of those years. Despite its apparent simplicity, it struck us as a work of great ingenuity – fascinating and perfectly aligned with current explorations of the electric guitar.
The duo concert by Frisell and Halvorson, dedicated to Johnny Smith – the legendary mainstream jazz guitarist active since the 1940s who died in 2013 – offered a more relaxed, pleasantly retro experience. Today’s masters, Bill Frisell and Mary Halvorson, followed Smith’s example with elegant phrasing, subtle attention to chordal nuance, and sensitivity to resonance, alongside their obvious technical brilliance. Their performance reconnected us to the intrinsic values of jazz, reminding us of their enduring importance.
The two centerpiece concerts of minimalism, however, left a sour taste. One was predictable: Max Richter’s sold-out event at BAM. He conducted The Blue Notebooks (a “classic” from more than twenty years ago) and In a Landscape (a new work from 2024). Richter is widely celebrated and often presented as the heir to minimalism’s most obvious lineage, but to us he remains overrated. The audience was ecstatic and tickets had sold out well in advance, confirming the event’s success. Yet despite its formal rigor, the music felt hollow, as evanescent as bubbles in mineral water rather than the depth of vintage champagne. The American Contemporary Music Ensemble played flawlessly, but neither piece left a lasting impression. Richter, with his characteristically Teutonic austerity (though he has lived in the UK all his life), tried to lighten things with ironic remarks to the American audience. Ultimately, he came across as a composer of graceful but soporific musical postcards.
The concert dedicated to Terry Riley’s 90th birthday, which he will celebrate on June 24, fared only slightly better. Expectations were high for new arrangements of A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C, two landmark works in minimalism and late 20th-century music. It was inevitable that the Pioneer Theater would sell out. The performance featured the Bang on a Can All-Stars with numerous guests, including jazz flute legend Nicole Mitchell, conducted by Riley’s son, guitarist Gyan Riley. Yet the results were uneven. A Rainbow in Curved Air was weighed down by rock-band sonorities it did not need, while In C was mistreated, reduced to something like a jam session of aging hippies reunited after decades. It was tedious, making one regret other recent reinterpretations. Riley’s music of the 1960s exemplifies great formal rigor, its precise interweaving of repeated notes evolving masterfully to give depth to intricate structures. Disturbing that rigor only unravels the fabric, leaving it limp and frayed.
Gyan Riley, no stranger to reinterpreting his father’s music, is likely the main author of this revision, though the band itself was made up of impeccable musicians. We found more genuine enjoyment in the revived Pyramids and their ramshackle, funky jazz, clearly indebted to Sun Ra’s Arkestra and sharing its folkloric, psychedelic stage costumes. In this case, we were witnessing elderly musicians chasing youthful exhilaration – but with undeniable verve.
Long Play also featured outstanding concerts of modern and contemporary music. Among them: Adam Tendler’s beautiful interpretation of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes; a series of pieces by Iannis Xenakis performed by Ensemble Offspring; and Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 19 for one hundred tubas, performed outdoors in Fort Greene Park. This was an unrepeatable performance, exuberant in its dispersiveness, with the tubists spread throughout the park creating visual and auditory disorientation. This may have detracted from the music’s complexity, but it encouraged curiosity and lent a festive air to a festival that can sometimes take itself too seriously.
Other gems came from the three Bang on a Can founders themselves. Julia Wolfe presented one of her most celebrated works, Cruel Sister, for strings alone; David Lang’s Darker, for strings and voices, reached sublime heights; and Michael Gordon confirmed his inventiveness with Amplified. The Lorelei Ensemble of women’s voices sang with the perfection of a Gregorian choir, while Tomeka Reid and her quartet with Mary Halvorson delivered the festival’s most fascinating statement of pure contemporary jazz.
Long Play may astonish, bore, or provoke difficult questions about contemporary music, but it is unquestionably indispensable. For anyone visiting New York in May who seeks more than Greenwich Village strolls or Empire State Building views, it is an event not to be missed.
