It's a huge shame that there is basically no discussion in the blogosphere of my favorite currently-active ensemble, The Claudia Quintet. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the group about 4 years ago through my teacher and friend Joey Sellers, who is a friend of Claudia's leader and composer, John Hollenbeck. Since then, I've noticed the curious fact that serious musicians with a passion for new music have almost all heard of them, but very few others have. The group has won awards across the nation but doesn't even have a website (Hollenbeck's personal one covers it, sort of). The Claudia Quintet is a new music group led by composer and percussionist John Hollenbeck. You'll sometimes find it categorized as "jazz," but this is only because Hollenbeck and several other members are noted jazz players. The music itself is firmly outside any genre, so much so that "beyond category" is sort of the default buzzword to describe the group. To my ear, particularly heavy influences include West African folk music, hip-hop, drum 'n' bass, free jazz, and minimalist classical music, but there's plenty of original content, as well.
To give you an idea of what this sounds like, check out these youtube clips, the two halves of the same piece.
and the second half:
This more or less exemplifies the sound, although the variety of material they present, even within a single album, is also impressive.
The Claudia Quintet is one of the few groups active today (besides friends of mine) that really gets me excited about music. It's influenced a lot of what I know about my own musical aesthetics, particularly because I find it very accessible despite the fact that it can be pretty challenging. This I know from conversations with other musicians. Analyzing why I took to such "out" music so easily has been very instructive. Here's a few of the things I found; I'll talk about them in relation to the clips above:
An interesting harmonic and melodic vocabulary: As you can tell, harmonically and melodically it's like nothing else. It's very far from a pop tradition, a jazz tradition (whether old and functional or new and modal), or any folk tradition that I know of. Some of it comes from modern classical music, because Hollenbeck is a trained classical composer from Eastman School of Music, but it's pretty unique even within that. However, as wonderful as this is, many groups have developed unique melo-harmonic palettes, so my attraction to this music in particular must be elsewhere.
The sound or timbre of the group, which is lovely. The instrumentation choice of clarinet or tenor sax, vibes, accordion, bass, and percussion was crucial. Each of the instruments blends with the others in a wonderful and, more importantly, unique way. Hollenbeck uses this to his advantage by reorchestrating melodies and ostinatos, getting far more mileage out of them than most other composers. Listen to the initial flurry that Matt Moran, the vibes player, plays in the beginning of the song. This is reorchestrated into the accordion, then later accordion and vibes together, and later accordion, vibes, and clarinet. These guys are all top musicians, as well, so they have unique and great sounds individually.
It grooves really hard. Hollenbeck is one of the sickest drummers alive, and Drew Gress, the bassist, has one of the fullest sounds and deepest pockets ever on the acoustic bass. When they team up on a groove, watch out. This piece has several cool ones. For example, the opening one is interesting in a typically polystylistic way; it sounds like a cross between a hip-hop groove and a West African ensemble, with the tight kick and snare drums hinting at backbeats in a duple meter and the bell hinting at an African 12/8 thing.
Compositional integrity. By this, I mean the development of ideas: that nothing is written which doesn't proceed from the preceding material. This is something that is really important to me as a writer and something of which Hollenbeck is a master. This piece, for example, is largely constructed around the initial flurry or cascade of notes I mentioned above. The reorchestration of that flurry gives it its first new dimension. When that's been exhausted, he changes the notes of the figure, suggesting the figure is textural, not harmonic. Just when that's been exhausted , he changes those flurries into a series of chordal hits that the band solos over (at 2:30 in Part 2), giving the initial cascades a harmonic, not textural, function. What's crucial to me is that all of these processes are audible. Though audible development is by no means the only way to go, it's something that I enjoy hearing in music and usually strive for in my own work.
I've had the pleasure of meeting the band twice: at a clinic at a local community college where I was first introduced to them, and at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2005. I also brought Hollenbeck to do a clinic at USC this past fall (2008) and had the chance to hang a bit then. He is a gentle and intelligent person, and his attitude towards music is inspiring to me as his writing. As a matter of fact, I know some that aren't fans of his music who are inspired by hearing him talk. He is a true musician, interested in playing and writing music he likes. He is not interested in business or marketing, not interested in how his music is categorized or not categorized, and not interested in making a lot of money from it. He is curious and educated about music, and although his music, including that of the Claudia Quintet, sometimes sounds very complex, in the end he is only about the sound and whether he likes it. If that's the sort of attitude that results in music like The Claudia Quintet's, then that's something all artists can learn from.
