March 22-24: Celebrating Ran Blake’s 85th Birthday at NEC

NEC’s CI Department celebrates Chair Emeritus Ran Blake’s 85th birthday

Monday, March 22 – Wednesday, March 24

Portrait of Ran Blake: Celebrating 85 Years features concert with Blake, NEC faculty and students as well as interviews with music historian Robin D.G. Kelley and performer/educator Hankus Netsky

New England Conservatory’s Department of Contemporary Improvisation celebrates Chair Emeritus Ran Blake with Portrait of Ran Blake: Celebrating 85 Years including interviews and concert, Monday, March 22 – Wednesday, March 24, 2021.  

An internationally acclaimed performer, recording artist and MacArthur Fellow, Blake has been a pioneering teacher at NEC for more than 50 years. His teaching style emphasizes “the primacy of the ear,” an approach that values listening and promotes innovation and individuality. The Newest Sound Around, his 1962 RCA recording with vocalist Jeanne Lee, is an enduring classic, and he’s continued his groundbreaking work with vocalists including NEC alums Sara Serpa, Christine Correa and faculty member Dominique Eade. Blake also conceived the popular annual Film Noir concert series at NEC.

Streaming events include:

Monday, March 22, 7:30 p.m. EST – Interview: "Looking Back at Eighty-Five"

Renowned music historian Robin D.G. Kelley interviews Ran Blake about his life and musical legacy.  Aaron Hartley, producer/videographer.  For more information and to stream the event go to...

Tuesday, March 23, 7:30 p.m. EST – Interview: "Adding Spice"

Hankus Netsky and Ran Blake reflect on Ran's innovative approach to listening, teaching and performing. Aaron Hartley, producer/videographer. For more information and to stream the event go to...

Wednesday, March 24 at 7:30 p.m. EST – Concert featuring Blake, NEC Faculty and Students

The performance, pre-recorded at Jordan Hall, features Blake in performance with faculty members and students.  For program information and to stream the event go to...

Produced by CI Department Co-Chair Eden MacAdam-Somer, the March 24 concert features reinterpretations of Ran’s music along with original student compositions/improvisations created as the soundtrack to scenes from The Pawnbroker and Portrait of Jennie. Performers include current students Delfina Cheb-Terrab, Emily Mitchell, Joseph Van-Leeuwen, Shalun Li, Rihards Kolamis, Caleb Schmale, Lyra Montoya, Griffin Woodard, Matthew Shifrin, Grace Ward, and Lucy Little, along with the CI Chamber Ensemble, CI faculty members Eden MacAdam-Somer and Anthony Coleman, and a special solo set by Ran Blake.

ABOUT RAN BLAKE

In a career spanning nearly six decades, pianist/composer Ran Blake has created a unique niche in improvised music as an artist and educator. With a characteristic mix of spontaneous solos, modern classical tonalities, the great American blues and gospel traditions, and classic film noir themes, Blake’s singular sound has earned a dedicated following around the world. His musical legacy includes more than 40 albums on some of the world’s finest jazz labels, and more than 50 years as a groundbreaking educator at New England Conservatory, where he was the founding chair of the Contemporary Improvisation department (previously called Third Stream), from 1972 through 2005, and continues to teach full-time. His innovative teaching approach, known as "the primacy of the ear," emphasizes the listening process and long-term memory rather than sheet music.

 

Blake discovered film noir at age 11 when he first saw Robert Siodmak’s “The Spiral Staircase.” The genre, which Blake found “eerie, haunting, and unforgettable,” would leave an indelible mark on Blake’s art. The Pentecostal church music he discovered as a teenager also influenced his music. He and vocalist Jeanne Lee, a fellow Bard College student, formed a duo in the late 1950s, and in 1962 released RCA’s landmark recording The Newest Sound Around, which won the 1963 RCA Album First Prize in Germany and the 1980 Prix Billie Holiday and is included in the Académie du Jazz. That album was encouraged by Blake’s most significant mentor and champion, Gunther Schuller, who Blake met by chance at an Atlantic Records’ studio in 1959. Schuller invited Blake to study at the Lenox School of Jazz with luminaries including Oscar Peterson, Bill Russo, and others. Other teachers included Mary Lou Williams, Mal Waldron, Bill Evans, John Lewis, Max Roach, Oscar Peterson, and Stan Kenton.

 

In the late 1960s, Schuller invited Blake to join the faculty at New England Conservatory, where the two created the Third Stream Department, now known as the Contemporary Improvisation Department.

 

In 1988, Blake was recognized as a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. He has performed around the world, collaborating and recording with artists including George Russell, Steve Lacy, Rufus Reid, Jaki Byard, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Hill, Jimmy Giuffre, Houston Person, Ricky Ford, and Danilo Perez. Many of his acclaimed recordings are tributes to artists like Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Horace Silver, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington. Recent recordings include Ghost Tones: Portraits of George Russell (2015), Live at the Kitano with Sara Serpa (2015), Down Here Below: A Tribute to Abbey Lincoln with Christine Correa (2015), Chabrol Noir: A Tribute to Claude Chabrol with Ricky Ford (2016), Town and Country with Dominique Eade (2017), Streaming with Christine Correa (2018), and The Newest Sound You Never Heard: European Recordings 1966-67 (2019).

 

Blake continues to evolve his noir language on the piano and remains active in teaching, recording, touring, and writing. A recent DownBeat review said, “Ran Blake is so hip it hurts…a pianist who can make you laugh at his dry humor one second and wring a tear the next.”

 

NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation program addresses the unique needs of musicians seeking to move beyond traditional boundaries. The department brings together an extremely diverse group of the world’s finest young artists in a setting where they can truly grow as a community of composers, performers, and improvisers. With an emphasis on ear training, technique, conceptual ideas, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a wide range of improvisational traditions, the CI program is uniquely positioned to produce the complete 21st century global musician. Founded in 1972 by Gunther Schuller and Ran Blake, the department is “a thriving hub of musical exploration,” (Jeremy Goodwin, Boston Globe).

Ran Blake / Kresten Osgood - The Dorothy Wallace Suite (ILK MUSIC 2017)

This is the much awaited duo album of Danish drum innovator Kresten Osgood and American piano genius Ran Blake. more than 40 years of age divide them, but they meet in a contemporary expression. The Dorothy Wallace Suite is a suite composed especially for this project by Ran Blake and is a heartfelt tribute to the great Dorothy Wallace who was a patron of the arts in Boston and played a vital part in Ran Blake´s art. This is only the second time in the entire Ran Blake discography where he plays duo with drums. The suite is recorded in Brookline on a piano of Ran Blake´s choice.

1 Symphony in Green  04:44

2 Vera Fuller  01:59

3 Ricky Ford at Logan  02:04

4 Bruni  01:49

5 The Carriage house  02:04

6 Brick in the Driveway  01:31

7 Ricks Room  03:10

8 The Demise of Rick Wallace  02:15

9 Ran´s Account  01:44

10 Eileen´s Account  02:05

11 The Door To The Forbidden Room  00:54

12 The Library at Midnight  01:16

13 Pannonica  02:26

14 Mood Indigo  04:32

15 Who  03:00

16 Dancing in the Dark  02:17

17 Never Can Say Goodbye 02:03

Dominique Eade & Ran Blake's Town and Country (June 9, 2017 SUNNYSIDE RECORDS)

Vocalist Dominique Eade and pianist Ran Blake take a stark, mesmerizing journey through the American folk tradition on their second duo collaboration

Town and Country, out June 9 on Sunnyside, offers unique takes on Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, traditional folk tunes, gospel classics and more

 "With her clear and radiant but forcefully grounded voice, Eade investigates the songs like a diamond cutter, taking time to highlight their unique harmonic facets while never losing sight of their emotional meaning. Blake's spare, elegant backing illuminates her in a wintry light, with occasional dissonant shivers." - Lloyd Sachs, Jazz Press

"[A] triumphant performance that is refreshingly original, extraordinarily imaginative, brimming with ineffable confidence, shows a boldness that knows no limit, and seems to deliver itself from a source of happiness dispossessed of any particular reason." - C.J. Bond, JazMuzic.com

Plainspoken but poetic, timely and timeless, poignant yet pointed: the American folk song tradition has a long history of confronting specific injustices while embracing a universal humanity. On the starkly moving Town and Country (out June 9 on Sunnyside), vocalist Dominique Eade and pianist Ran Blake take the long view of our own tumultuous moment in history with a wide-ranging collection of folk tunes that examine the travails of Americans from Main Street to the mountains.

With the varied repertoire on Town and Country, Eade and Blake - long-time colleagues both on the stage and as educators at Boston's New England Conservatory - present a broad notion of folk song that's as diverse as the nation itself. There are the expected classic tunes and country ballads, the ill-fated coalminers, the tragic romantics grasping out their last breaths, the cries of faith and determination sent heavenward. But in the agile imaginations of these two inventive artists, who share a love for skewing the traditional through a modernist lens, the folk idea is broad enough to include film noir laments and TV-scaled road songs, moonlit love and Third Stream austerity.

"During the election season I was thinking a lot about the planet," Eade explains. "Usually Ran and I draw material from the Great American Songbook because we both have a love for that, but in this case I really wanted to say something different. Many of these folk songs deal with things like the prison system and poverty and wealth disparity, different parts of our country coming through this music. The nature of folk music is that there's a lot of history in the words, but that history felt very relevant to making a statement in and of our time."

The material here ranges from Bob Dylan's scathing attack on consumer culture, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" to "Give My Love to Rose," Johnny Cash's bitter ode to those abandoned by the prison system; Charles Ives' poetic portrait of "Thoreau," the founding father of the New England Transcendentalists, to a pair of shadow-shrouded nursery rhymes ("Lullaby" and "Pretty Fly") from Charles Laughton's children-in-peril noir classic The Night of the Hunter; the English lynching protest "The Easter Tree," which presages Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit," to the gospel plea of "Elijah Rock," best known from Mahalia Jackson's unforgettable rendition.

All these songs are unified and transformed by Eade and Blake's stunning treatments, which render them all with unvarnished lyrical force combined with strikingly unique harmonies, unpredictable phrasing and evocative atmospheres. Though Town and Country is only the duo's second recording together - following Whirlpool from 2011 - it reveals a singular, focused chemistry forged over decades of playing together.

The two met in 1978 when Eade arrived in Boston to study at Berklee - until she heard Blake, then the chair of the Contemporary Improvisation Department (known at the time as the Third Stream Department) at New England Conservatory where he's still on faculty. The encounter proved life-changing for the young singer. "Ran's solo playing seemed to me like an inevitable extension of Thelonious Monk, who I adored," Eade recalls. "That's when I decided to switch and study at NEC."

Blake was equally impressed with Eade's expansive talents. "Dominique is one of our great singers, composers and teachers," he says. "Her range is fabulous and her ears pick up amazing subtleties. Her repertoire ranges from Stan Kenton to coal miner songs to English folk songs, and she has a keen sense of pulse with bebop scat, political protest, and the forgotten standards. It felt so natural performing with her."

Gunther Schuller, then president of NEC, founded the school's Jazz Studies Department in 1967 and invited Ran to chair the new Third Stream Department two years later, passing the great composer's teachings regarding the merger between classical and jazz on to students like Eade. The duo pays tribute to Blake's, and by extension Eade's, mentor on "Gunther," which is an improvisation on a 12-tone row composed by Schuller. Blake takes solo turns with "Moti" and the two versions of "Harvest at Massachusetts General Hospital," representing his distinctly acute harmonic approach.

Much of the repertoire was suggested by Eade, who began her life in music as a singer-songwriter, only shifting her focus to jazz in her early college years at Vassar. "I was looking for a way to connect the music that I was performing in high school to modern jazz, which I was quickly falling I love with," she says. "Everything changed when I heard Miles Davis' Nefertiti for the first time, or whatever the other soundtracks to my college years: Keith Jarrett's Belonging, or Roland Kirk's Rip, Rig and Panic. It's a tall order to meld that with all the other things I was into, but I guess that's why I'm still at it."

Blake made key additions to the program, however: the two Night of the Hunter songs continue his long-running dedication to film noir (his department at NEC presents an annual live soundtrack to a noir film), the three "moon" standards ("Moonlight in Vermont," "Moon River" and "Moonglow," the latter paired with the theme from Picnic, in which it appears) were his suggestion, as was the Dylan song, its verbal avalanche given a tour de force performance brimming with urgency and righteous anger.


"This music feels like a journey through different parts of U.S. history and geography," Eade says. "I felt more like Ran and I were a couple of vagabonds rummaging through a shared history, both of our own and of wherever we happened to be in the world."

www.dominiqueeade.com

www.ranblake.com

Ran Blake - Chabrol Noir (2016)

Label: Impulse

Source: Les Dernières News du Jazz

Après l’hommage sublime que Ran Blake avait rendu il y a deux ans à la chanteuse Chris Connor, le pianiste américain nous revient aujourd’hui avec une autre dédicace, celle au cinéma de Claude Chabrol.
Intitulé « Chabrol Noir », c’est logiquement du côté de la force obscure du cinéaste que le pianiste va puiser son inspiration. Moins en marchant sur les traces de Pierre Jansen que sur le propre terrain du pianiste américain. Véritable maître de l’improvisation et du suspens, Ran Blake y tourne autour de cette musique avec des airs de story teller inspiré et introspectif. Car le jeu de Ran Blake qui se situe entre le silence et résonances, a toujours su ménager ses effets et provoquer l’attente.
Que la note grave du fond du clavier résonne lentement et c’est aussitôt un chapelet de triolets venu du haut du piano qui vient aussitôt alléger le propos, comme un personnage insouciant se promenant au milieu des ténèbres.
Ran Blake est un pianiste inquiet et soucieux. Tourmenté aussi. Et l’évocation de Chabrol s’écoute alors ici comme une sorte d’invocation de son fantôme, comme une lecture poétique personnelle et très sombre de l’oeuvre du cinéaste.
Ricky Ford avec le son de son ténor âpre et puissant vient sur quelques morceaux raconter une autre histoire Chabrolienne d’une manière plus Ellingtonienne.
Album envoutant comme le sont toujours les albums du pianiste, « Chabrol noir » est une magnifique oeuvre d’appropriation à la limite de l’intime, au coeur d’un processus créatif dense, et toujours émouvant.
Jean-Marc Gelin

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