Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2006 > October > 15 > Entry
Lucky Luciana and LAGQ Open Spivey Hall Season
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Los Angeles Guitar Quartet and vocalist Luciana Souza. Friday at Spivey Hall. www.spiveyhall.org.
In North America and Europe, music is usually segregated, by category. Whether it’s bowing to the public imagination or to corporate convenience, you find the lines drawn in record stores, iTunes, Grammy Awards and casual conversation. The separation between jazz and folk and pop and classical seems pretty clear cut.
And when these musicians try to bridge the divide, the result often feels more like insincere “crossover” rubbish than a true creative cross-pollination — especially when it involves classical music, which resists improvisation. (Indeed, artists who succeed are often pegged as trailblazers, an acknowledgement that the path is perilous for most.)
But Friday night at Spivey Hall’s season-opening concert, you’d have been crazy to talk about musical boundaries.
The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet — LAGQ to their friends — and Brazilian-American chanteuse Luciana Souza sailed with abandon around the globe, oblivious to genres and territorial disputes.
They began with “De Sabado Pra Domingunhos” by Hermeto Pascoal — Souza’s godfather, described as “the Frank Zappa of Brazil” in the program notes by LAGQ’s William Kanengiser — a rhythmically infectious and sultry tune.
Here Souza scatted in one meter — bah-bah-do-bao — while whisking another meter in a hand-held triangle. The four guitars filled out the harmonic space in driving counterpoint. It sounded at once unfathomably complicated and natural, earthy. It was, in essence, jazzy folk music with the easy appeal of pop and the rigor and extreme virtuosity of classical, all in the first song on the program.
For most of the night, they remained in the Latin American world, the hub of blurred traditions and bloodlines. The explosive brew of West African, Spanish, Portuguese, Afro-Cuban and pan-Caribbean rhythms and attitudes has a bracing effect: everything is welcome, nothing is uptight, and a good song is a good song.
Much of the music here was composed (or arranged) for the LAGQ — Kanengiser, John Dearman, Scott Tennant and, a new member, Matthew Greif, who replaces Andrew York, a noted composer and virtuoso who is seeking a higher-profile solo career.
Souza sang a duet with each of the four guitarists, including Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Triste” with Greif, a bossa-nova lament heavy on the improvisation and, with Dearman, a medley of tunes based on baião, a heart-tugging, syncopated Brazilian rhythm.
Souza can’t help but command your full attention when she sings. She was her radiant best in one of her own songs to Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet 49.” Her vocal style — soulful, pleading, “educated” and devoid of rawness and grit — doesn’t yield intense flashes of euphoria in the listener, but a slow-burning, glowing-embers warmth.
This concert, the second stop on a tour that culminates at Zankel Hall, the hipster venue Carnegie Hall’s basement, was an Atlanta reunion for the musicians. Although they all live on the West Coast, Souza was introduced to the LAGQ members a few years ago when they performed (and recorded) music by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
In tribute, Souza and Kanengiser offered Golijov’s “Lua Descolorida,” a spiritual, haunting meditation imbued with a universe of shadings and emotions.
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