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Not Your Ordinary Marching Band By Vivien Schweitzer | The New York Times [Link] | 8.5.10
A casual observer at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening might have wondered what on earth was going on when a large, eclectic crowd made a frenzied dash across 65th Street, following a ragtag band of musicians who had careened across the road like deranged pied pipers. The moblike scene occurred during a performance by the rambunctious Asphalt Orchestra, an avant-garde 12-piece marching band presented here by Lincoln Center Out of Doors. This quirky ensemble, the brainchild of Bang on a Can, marches to an iconoclastic beat, eschewing typical brass-band fare for funky arrangements and inventive new works. The event began in a comparatively sedate fashion, with the audience seated on the steps in front of Alice Tully Hall, as the ensemble entered from 65th Street and paraded up and down the triangular staircase on the corner of the plaza. The musicians stopped in front of the hall for their first work, “Carlton,” by Stew and Heidi Rodewald. Listeners stayed seated despite the toe-tapping rhythms and ear-catching tunes. At a few points the band shouted out the letters of the song title. There was an element of performance art throughout the approximately 30-minute show. The musicians played with virtuosic flair while twisting, turning and executing moves choreographed by Susan Marshall and Mark DeChiazza, no easy feat when dealing with complex metric shifts and carrying bulky percussion and brass instruments as large as a sousaphone. The performance art aspect seemed particularly vivid during the premiere of Yoko Ono’s “Opus 81,” when the trumpeter Stephanie Richards, dressed in shorts and boots, stood alone in Lincoln Center Plaza’s reflecting pool playing a mournful solo. Her colleagues gathered at the edges of the pool, their insistent motifs underpinning Ms. Richards’s elegiac solo. The action shifted to the grove of trees nearby for the premiere of “Two Ships,” by David Byrne and Annie Clark (who is known as St. Vincent), and Ms. Richards’s arrangement of the sultry “Wild About My Daddy,” by the Laneville-Johnson Union Brass Band. Some members of the large, appreciative crowd that followed the Asphalt players as they moved through the plaza swayed to the irresistible beats in the lively arrangement of Thomas Mapfumo’s “Ngoma Yekwedu,” by Alex Hamlin, the band’s soprano saxophonist. The musicians snaked over to the fountain for their final piece, an arrangement by Peter Hess (the group’s tenor saxophonist) of Frank Zappa’s “Zomby Woof.” Patrons waiting for a Mostly Mozart concert to begin at Avery Fisher Hall leaned over the balcony to enjoy a vigorous rendition of the arrangement, with slapstick musical touches, rapidly shifting time signatures and wailing trumpet solos that echoed through the plaza. |
