Classical: So Percussion founder Doug Perkins moves to Chicago
One of the highlights of the 2012 classical season was August’s performance of the John Luther Adams percussion piece Inuksuit, which took place all over the Pritzker Pavilion grounds despite steady rain. Percussionist Doug Perkins masterminded the concert (as well as a New York performance in February), and it was an auspicious sign for him: he’d just moved with his family to suburban Glenview, where his wife works as a doctor, to begin an open-ended residency with Eighth Blackbird at the University of Chicago.
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Perkins will take over for Eighth Blackbird’s Matthew Duvall at all the group’s U. of C. events, but neither he nor the group has any local performances scheduled for the near future. On Tuesday, though, he’s releasing his first solo recording, Simple Songs (New Focus), a stunning collection of recent music that includes commissions from Beau Sievers and ICE member Nathan Davis. Some pieces, including Davis’s “Simple Songs of Birth and Return” and Tristan Perich’s “Momentary Expanse,” incorporate electronics; compositions by David Lang and Michael Gordon use dizzyingly complex polymetric patterns. Perkins also has a healthy sense of fun, skipping the usual dry liner notes in favor of a comic by cartoonist Matthew Guerrieri. “I almost never read those booklets, and I sure can’t remember one that was fun or memorable,” says Perkins. The booklet in Simple Songs explains the works via a time-traveling “Drummer Person” who schools a group of Ottoman janissaries besieging a city—he brings peace with the motto “Percussion not plunder!”
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And there will be overdubs and added instrumentation to round it out? I’m going to do some extra work to it, just to make it sound the best it possibly can. You’re not going to hear the audience. There’s not going to be stage banter, like on Kiss’s Alive! I want to experience something different. I don’t have money to record in a recording studio, so what’s the next best thing?
Ono played a few times at the Empty Bottle, where Cave guitarist Cooper Crain was working as an engineer; he approached the band about recording an album. “We always liked what he did with our sound,” Michael says. “So we decided to give it a shot.” The group cut Albino in one 12-hour session at Minbal last spring—and started recording a follow-up with Crain this past weekend.
