WORT 89.9FM Madison
Interview on Mr. Chair on "Rhapsody in Blue"
and we're back with the final hour of music on Backport Serenade. My name is Peter Haney and I am delighted to welcome Ben Ferris once again into the W-O-R-T studio. Ben Ferris is a bassist with Mr. Chair and with his own octet and he is currently studying at the University of Wisconsin Madison for his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in bass performance. Ben, it's great to have you back. Always a pleasure to be at W-O-R-T, absolutely, thanks for having me. And so, Ben is here to talk about our collaboration between Mr. Chair and I believe the Madison Ballet, is that right? And so, what's going on Ben? Yeah, this all actually came together pretty much within the last couple months here. Chama League of the Madison Ballet was looking to choreograph Rhapsody in Blue George Gershwin's Masterpiece as it's referred to since it's the 100th year of that piece this year. It was written in 1924 and approached Jason Kutz, a pianist with Mr. Chair about performing the solo piano version. More famously known for being an orchestral version, but Gershwin himself actually did a solo piano version and a two piano version. And Jason was like, "Oh, I'd love to play with the ballet but I'd even more so loved to do it with my group, with my group, Mr. Chair, so that includes me on bass and Mike Koszewski on drums," and John Malik was down. He's opened for the reinterpretations and the re-imaginations. That's a lot of what he does with his choreography as well. So Jason, let me know and I got to work putting it together for a trio. Well, that's exciting. How did you go about that? A lot of different ways. I'm super familiar with the piece. It was a piece I loved as a kid, especially from Fantasia 2000. That came out when I was 10. But my folks also had a compilation CD called Great Performances. I couldn't find it. I got to look for it again. But the first track on that album was Leonard Bernstein doing Raphstein Blue with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. When I listened to that, a bunch as a kid really loved the piece and to prove how much I loved the piece when I finally was able to get a frog. I was dying to have a pet frog. I named that frog George Gershwin. Well, I hope the pet frog, I hope George Gershwin survived his time as her pet. So let's hear a little bit of Leonard Bernstein's Rhapsody in Blue. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] So with the piano trio, piano, bass and drums, how do you do that opening glissando, the slide up on the clarinet? Well, that was like one of my first thoughts. I was like, oh, man, maybe we should have a horn player because that line is so iconic, right? That big glissando. But I was like, no, forget that. And I play an electric upright bass. So it basically looks like this long stick. And I got this like four foot long string. I was like, no, I'm taking that glissando. So I do the opening glissando on my upright bass with the bow. [LAUGH] All right, with the bow. Absolutely. Okay. And so tell us more about how you adapted this and about what other sort of musical examples there have been so many different performances and remixes of Rhapsody in Blue. How did you go about, how did you and the trio go about arranging it for yourselves? And what were you listening to? [LAUGH] Absolutely. Yeah. It definitely is like a piece that a lot of people have looked at, a lot of people have done their own versions of. So I started from there, when I was thinking about doing the arrangement, and listened to a lot of the different versions and arrangements that have been done. I had copies of the full orchestral score, I had a copy of two different versions of piano reductions. And then also a copy of Ellington's score, really stray horns score his version for Big Band. And then drew on those from a starting point, the way I like to work with this group is not to do a ton of arranging and working with the piece. What I'll mostly do is I'll take what is already there, compose in the music, and kind of start to space it out between the different instruments, think of, okay, how do we orchestrate this with different instruments? Sometimes that's going bigger with some of the music we do, sometimes that's going from piano out, and then sometimes it's making things smaller, reducing things, so going from orchestra in. And this one was definitely orchestra in. And then once I've done that, I'll put some chords in, kind of make it more like how a jazz musician might look at a lead sheet so we can mess with it and improvise. And that's when, once we get it to that stage as a group, that's usually when we start to get together, play things, try things, and work that collaborative process, which, as a group of Mr. Chair, I think we've really honed in on our own thing over the past six, seven years of playing together, of original music and reimagined music. All right. Let's hear, we've got, you are kind enough to bring in a little bit of music, and we've got Ellington's version, and so let's hear a little bit of that before we move on. Now, of course, what immediately stands out about that one is the sort of steady beat behind the melody, right? And so how did you, how do you approach that? Do you pretty much have a steady rhythm going on, or do you speed up, slow down? How do you handle it? Yeah, sure. I just love that opening. I got to mention that Harry Carney on the baritone saxophone and talk about style. There's a band, the Ellington Orchestra, where everybody was bringing their thing to it. I absolutely love that. So back to your question, though. Since the three of us, me, Jason, and Mike, play so much Western European art music, we are used to that rubato tempo, changing tempos a lot, and ballet also lends itself well to that. It's a dance that doesn't necessarily need that real strict rhythm for their style of dance. So we're leaning into that. We certainly have aspects of groove and moments of groove in the composition, but lots of freedom too. And so as you were working, did you pretty much rehearse this on your own, or did you find yourself working with the dancers and getting input from the ballet folks as well? Yeah, no. Since it's been kind of a quick timeline to make this happen, we started collaborating really early. And we actually had the, sent the first half over to John Malique and Madison Ballet before we were even done with the, kind of figuring out the second half of the piece. And he gave us a lot of feedback in terms, well, he gave us some feedback on things that might work better with his imagination for the story, and some tempos as well. And so they were working with a recording of ours, I think really, really early in the choreography and the creation of this dance piece. And what's the story? I don't fully know the entirety of the story, but I'm still kind of working on that. But the main things that John Malique mentioned was this is such a piece that's so associated with New York City, so it's kind of in that vein. But he wanted to have, like in the Disney version, there's one character who's kind of the main character in the construction going through with his scooter and all that. In this version, John Malique was looking to have two characters. So yeah, I think you'll see that in the choreography that there's two folks interacting. And he also talked a lot about just the, like we think of New York as so bustling and everything always happening. But then there's also these moments where it's this giant city and it's three in the morning and there's really not a whole lot of things going on. And maybe the loneliness of being amongst so many people. Is this your first collaboration with the ballet group? It is. It is. Yes. It's being a blast. I think that the movement and the dance really adds a lot to the piece. It gives us feedback. We're going to be on stage with the dancers, which gives it a whole different energy and other aspect to our improvisation and the way that we shape our melodies and phrases is all we got a feedback loop going between the dancers and the musicians for sure. So once again, when and where is this happening? Yeah. It's going to be at the My Arts Starlight Theater, which is at 1055 East Mifflin Street. And that's all weekend. So Friday, September 27th through Sunday, September 29th. There's the Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights. There's a seven o'clock show. And then there's also matinees on Saturday and Sunday at two o'clock. So five chances to see it. And if neither of those work on Thursday, Mr. Chair will be doing almost like a little preview of the piece. We won't have the dancers with us, but we're playing over at Manchin Hill in Gorm this Thursday. And that's from 6.30 to 9. Manchin Hill, I don't think I was familiar with that venue. Yes. It's like a boutique hotel. It's a really beautiful old mansion that has been doing quite a few concerts and opening up their main floor for concerts. They have a bar. It's kind of like a house concert listening room vibe, great spot. Ben Ferris, what else should I be asking you? Maybe we look at one of the other versions of this piece that was inspiration for our arrangement. One of the thoughts that we didn't actually end up using was this idea of, hey, with rhapsody and blue, there's so much music that has to do with blue, right? Not just the blues, but people have been thinking about this color and reflecting on and writing music about this color for ages and ages. So that idea of maybe drawing in other pieces related to blue, we didn't actually end up doing that. We pretty much messed with the themes that Gershwin had, but Hiromi, the pianist Hiromi, does a beautiful, beautiful job of that pulling in coal train and the who in their version of rhapsody and blue that they call rhapsody in various shades of blue. Alright, well, let's go out with that one. Here is pianist Hiromi with rhapsody in various shades of blue, and Ben, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for coming in. Oh, thanks for having me. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
Interview with Ben Ferris, bassist of Mr. Chair on the jazz trio's participation in the Madison Ballet production of "Rhapsody in Blue." the interview aired on WORT, 89.9-FM, Madison on 9/24/2024. Image credit: Madison Ballet.