Despite the few glitches (or miscalculations), the musical sequences were exquisitely timed, shifting subtly with the dramatic beats on the screen, stopping cold at blackouts. When Nazerman berated a mentally ill regular "customer" (Juano Hernández), Aaron Gelb's high, fanciful bass clarinet notes floated out of the man's mouth. Anthony Coleman played a tinkling "prepared" piano solo of Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig's ghetto song "S'Brent" ("It's Burning") to the complaints of a bedridden old man. And various ensembles offered variations on Nazerman's remembered scene — a pastoral with his family on the day the Nazis arrive. Versions of post-bop composer Herbie Nichols's "House Party Starting" recurred — as sextet, with forthright wordless vocals by Sara Jarosz, and in a second-act duet between flutist Amir Milstein and percussionist Jerry Leake.
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The strength of these pieces in concert was indicative of rigorous preparation. Violinists Sandy Cameron and Wayne Shen with pianist Amie Chen played the pastoral-memory scene (as "Memories Under the Trees") with a mixture of lyricism and impressionistic harmonies — was it Debussy? Ravel? (It was, in fact, Shen told me in an e-mail, a mostly improvised piece based on the Jones score, with allusions to Bach and the Berg violin concerto.) But this was not pastiche — Chen's closing solo, with its swooping lines and dramatic dynamic shifts, was the bravura finale to an integrated whole. A vocal/trombone duet not listed in the program was drawn from Shostakovich.Given all the superlative performances — the long list of standouts included James Merenda's alto-sax solo, Hankus Netsky's NEC Jewish Music Ensemble, Eleni Odoni singing Haitian composer Frantz Casseus's "Merci bon Dieu" — it hardly mattered that Blake himself did not perform. He, director Aaron Hartley, and the NEC crew gave us the sort of one-of-a-kind experience that few arts organizations outside of a school have the resources to pull off. As a free concert, no less. Yes, the show was exasperating at times, but also indelible. I'd look forward to a CD.
Argentine singer/composer Sofia Rei Koutsovitis is part of a long line of South and Central American musicians who have enriched the Boston music scene with a pan-American style that fuses varied folkloric traditions with American jazz. Koutsovitis was at the Regattabar on November 10 — visiting from New York, where she's lived since 2005, after getting a master's at NEC — celebrating the release of Sube Azul (World Village/Harmonia Mundi).
This is a more focused disc than her impressive, broad-ranging debut, 2006's self-released Ojala, with its extended arrangements. Here she mostly sticks with folk-song forms and dance rhythms in a relatively spare setting, but with plenty of room for solo improvisation and the occasional cello, saxophone, or trombone. But her voice — dark, athletic, with a mournful catch — is the center of attention. At the Regattabar, her band sported an all-star cast of Boston–New York players: pianist Leo Genovese, bassist Jorge Roeder (a key partner in producing the new album), percussionists Jorge Pérez-Albela and Tupac Mantilla, and guitarist Eric Kurimski.
