On Wednesday, April 5 at 8:00 p.m. at Brooklyn's Roulette, the Curated by Meredith Monk concert series presents the always surprising composer PHIL KLINE-best known for his Zippo Songs and Unsilent Night-in an evening entitled Not OK.
Not OK offers a collection of old and new music that features the premiere of the title piece, a collaboration with filmmaker (and guitarist)
Jim Jarmusch. This marks the first time that Kline and Jarmusch have performed together in New York in 35 years. They have been friends since elementary school in Akron, Ohio and followed similar paths for a while, attending Columbia University together, taking poetry classes with
Kenneth Koch and
David Shapiro, and forming the post-punk band The Del-Byzanteens. They are currently collaborating on a music theater spectacle about the Serbo-Croatian electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla.
In Not OK, Kline and Jarmusch will play electric guitars with percussionist-extraordinaire David Cossin, all surrounded by a chorus of electronic drones and pulses emanating from laptops and Kline's signature boomboxes (24 of them to be exact). Jarmusch will also project turn-of-the-century Thomas Edison footage of New York City.
Kline says the new work "harkens back to my electronic tone poems, but with more ornery elements of freedom" and that it is in the spirit of "the unpredictable, the impenetrable, and the last five minutes of a Who concert."
While well known for his love of electronic elements, Kline has also made an impression with his mastery of songwriting and found text. The evening will feature a group of Kline's recent songs, performed by the radiant mezzo-soprano
Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (formerly of Anonymous 4) along with pianist Kathleen Supové, a new-music force of nature. They will be joined by David Cossin and violist Eva Gerard for the world premiere of Vienna's Place from the work-in-progress I Am
Joan Crawford, a song cycle based on dialog from
Joan Crawford films. In addition,
Clementine Kline will perform her father's song Men, based on the words of Kierkegaard, which was originally performed by the
Brooklyn Youth Chorus at BAM in 2009 as part of choreographer Wally Cardona's evening-length Really Real.
Kline and Cossin will perform a section from another new work, Drone Diary, for electronics, electric guitar, and percussion. And Supové will perform Embers, the 2nd movement from Kline's 2009 piano sonata The Long Winter.
The series Curated by
Meredith Monk features performers selected by Monk who are following his or her own path, asking questions, finding places that fall between the cracks of genres or categories.
(Photos by Lovis Ostenrik.)
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