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| November 5, 2002 | |||||
| It's
like that: Jam Master Jay Let's
talk about sex Rolling (the 20-sided die) with
Lil' Pocketknife Return
to a Savage Republic Chapter
two Uneasy
listening Punctum Correct
Techniques
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Chapter two After 20 years with Kronos Quartet, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud is excited to go it alone. By Derk RichardsonON THE "Images" page of her Web site (www.jjcello.org), you can click on a photograph of Joan Jeanrenaud straddling a life-size cello carved from ice. The shot captures Jeanrenaud at her May 2001 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts revival of Charlotte Moorman's 1972 "Ice Music for London" performance – arms bare down to elbow-length black gloves, right hand grasping the head of pitchfork. She has already snapped the neck off the cello, and her face is frozen in a fierce grimace as she stabs the farm implement's long tines into the midsection of the glassy replica of the instrument she played for 20 years in Kronos Quartet. The fearsome image starkly contrasts with those that linger from Jeanrenaud's tenure in one of the world's best-known chamber music ensembles. Kronos has long been known for its promotion of radical new music, its unprecedented collaborations with composers from all over the globe, and its dramatic departures from conventional classical music concert staging, lighting, and costuming. Still, one cannot conjure up a memory of Jeanrenaud ever looking so hell-bent on shattering the status quo. While the quartet took reputation-building liberties with repertoire and dress, Jeanrenaud, with her short blond hair, porcelain complexion, and long, lean limbs, always projected a cool sense of poise, even while playing the most intense and demanding passages. In person, the cellist evinces no pressing need for catharsis. Her demeanor is warm and gracious, her broad smile comes easily, and her voice still carries a hint of Southern drawl. Jeanrenaud grew up with two sisters on a farm outside Memphis, Tenn. She spent much of her childhood riding bicycles and ponies through the woods with her best friend. Today she lives in a century-old Victorian on a surprisingly capacious lot on the eastern slope of Bernal Heights. She shares the property, which includes a bountiful garden and a separate studio-residence in the rear, with visual artist Alessandro Moruzzi and two pony-size dogs. Behind a tall fence, the house feels like a semirural retreat from the urban bustle of San Francisco proper. The interior, remodeled with a thoroughly modern eye by previous owners, is open and airy; Moruzzi added further innovative architectural touches and customized shelves and cabinetry. The living room serves as Jeanrenaud's studio, her two cellos – one, a sleek electric model, the other made in Venice by Michael Deconet in 1750 – at the ready. If the circumstances of her life seem to strike a comfortable balance between old ways and new, Jeanrenaud likewise projects a sense of equanimity when she talks about her artistic career. "The best thing I ever did was join Kronos, and the next best thing I ever did was leave," she says. "I could never ever do what I'm doing now if I hadn't been in Kronos for 20 years, that's for sure." What Jeanrenaud has done is plunge into the teeming Bay Area world of performance art and improvisation. After spending nearly half of her life collaborating in a tight little ship with violinists David Harrington and John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt, Jeanrenaud chose to jump ship. Although Kronos had evolved significantly since she signed on as a 22-year-old in 1978 – moving from standard string quartet repertoire (Beethoven, Brahms) through 20th-century classical (Bartók, Shostakovich) to a staggering variety of commissioned works and premieres (John Adams, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Kevin Volans, Astor Piazzolla) – Jeanrenaud became restless. "Somehow I wanted more of a challenge," she says, "not to say that Kronos wasn't a challenge, but personally I needed or wanted more growth to be happening in my playing. I felt I knew how to do [what we were doing in Kronos] pretty well, and ultimately that disturbed me, because I felt like I wasn't stimulated enough to learn things I didn't know about. So when I left Kronos I wasn't really sure what I would do." Leaving Kronos meant giving up the security of a self-made institution that had grown its own management and staff, established itself on the international concert circuit, cultivated a favorable relationship with a sympathetic record label (Nonesuch), and garnered ample financial support from government agencies and private foundations. It also forced Jeanrenaud to plumb the depths of her own artistic motivation. Since taking up the cello at age 11, she had always been a member of an ensemble. As a teenager, she became principal cellist of the Memphis Youth Symphony and a string section player at the Stax studios (playing on an early '70s Rod Stewart album). She was a founding member of the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Indiana University and principal cellist with the Festival Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood. "I always enjoyed the social aspect of music," she says. "I never considered myself a soloist." One of Jeanrenaud's first post-Kronos appearances was a March 1999 performance of Volans's Cello Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland – her first solo with an orchestra in more than 25 years. She found her return to that format less than satisfying. "In order to take that path, I think you have to stay on it," she explains. "I couldn't jump back into that, and I didn't really want to, either. It became clear to me that this was not my thing." The experience provoked Jeanrenaud to take greater risks. That May she performed a series of solos and duets with choreographer-dancer Molissa Fenley at Theater Artaud. Then she accepted Rova Saxophone Quartet's invitation to appear at their Music on the Mountain concert that summer in an amphitheater on Mt. Tamalpais. It was her first foray into solo live improvisation, and she was on a program that also featured guitarist Fred Frith, one of the world's masters of the format. "I was really nervous," she admits. So when she went out on her limb, she made sure to choose one she knew would support her. In the glare of a hot day, Jeanrenaud sat alone onstage and performed a "structured improvisation" that involved a predetermined sequence of musical "areas" in which the cellist played whatever came to mind at the moment. Her jitters didn't show, and the sun-baked audience responded to Jeanrenaud's impressive maiden effort with a long and loud ovation. Classical players often have a difficult if not impossible time tearing themselves away from the page. Jeanrenaud, however, had studied improvisation at Indiana University with David Baker, a renowned teacher of extemporaneous techniques, and continued that pursuit in the Bay Area with the late jazz saxophone giant Joe Henderson and more recently with saxophonist Hal Stein. Her confidence in her command of the instrument bolstered her, as well. "A lot of people might get into improvisation without the same technical background," she says. "I think having a really strong classical background and then having that 20 years with Kronos is really an advantage. It gives me so much to draw upon." "There's so much versatility with the cello," she continues. "I learned from Kronos that the string instruments have a lot more potential for different sounds than you would think. Because of all the stuff we played and all the composers we worked with, I realized there's this vast repertoire of sounds that are available on the instrument, and I'm sure there are many more that I haven't yet discovered." Approaching the cello as a stand-alone instrument, Jeanrenaud can take greater liberties with its sonic possibilities, embracing and extrapolating them as "concrete musical ideas" in and of themselves, rather than as effects or ornamentation. She has also delved more deeply into electronics. "I feel much more challenged now working in this sort of arena," she says. "I knew nothing about it. It was hard for me in the beginning just to plug things in correctly. Slowly I'm starting to learn all that stuff. I feel like all the time I'm learning something new. That's what I like most about it. I had gotten to the point in Kronos where I was just kind of coasting." One can hear the fruits of Jeanrenaud's investigations on her first solo CD, Metamorphosis. She issued it herself last March and sells it at concerts and through her Web site; San Francisco's vaunted New Albion label has just released it for wider retail and radio distribution. The CD comprises six pieces for cello – overdubbed, looped, and interacting with electronics and computers. Three came from the pens of composers who had intimately worked with Kronos: Steve Mackey, Hamza El Din, and Philip Glass; one each by Karen Tanaka and Mark Grey; and another by Jeanrenaud. They all derive from an evening-length solo work Jeanrenaud developed while in residence at the Kahilu Theater in Hawaii and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Ranging in length from 5 to 17 minutes, the compositions exploit the full musical reach of the cello, paralleling the human vocal range from bass to soprano, with emphasis on the dark drones and gutsy resonances of the lower register. Jeanrenaud looks at Metamorphosis as a document of what she went through during her first two years away from Kronos. In the year and a half since she premiered the work in Minneapolis, she has stepped up her activity on all fronts. She has recorded and performed with Maybe Monday, the electronically enhanced improvising group with Frith, Rova's Larry Ochs, and koto player Miya Masaoka; performed music composed by Alvin Curran for choreographer Margaret Jenkins; debuted a working trio with Ochs and Masaoka in San Diego; and spent the past several months working on the concerts she is producing this weekend at the SomArts Theater. The new collaborations include AIR, a 20-minute music and video work developed with Moruzzi; Desert Boy on a Stick, composed by Bob Ostertag and inspired by "junk" artist Jim Magee (who will participate by reading some of the famously epic poemlike titles he gives to his sculptures); Mark Grey's Through the Sands of Time, and Cenk Ergun's Cello Peace. And as soon as these performances are done, Jeanrenaud will focus her attention on In Between, an ambitious project with graphic designer Tom Bonauro, to be staged next April. Although she often finds herself up to her neck in work she never had to do when she was one of a well-buttressed, four-member group – making and mailing press kits, contracting concert halls – Jeanrenaud says she has had no second thoughts about her departure from Kronos. "I'm really happy to be out in the audience listening to them," she says. "There's never once been a feeling of 'I wish I was up there onstage with them.' Not at all. I had no idea I would feel like that." She may never have looked at it this way before, but the group that gave her so much also obstructed her view of wider possibilities. "You're in Kronos and you think you know so much music and about so many composers," she explains, "then you step out of that and you realize how instead of being in this world over here, you're in this big world." In addition to being invited into projects by composers with prior Kronos affiliations – she is prominently featured as a soloist in the recording Rhymes with Silver: Music by Lou Harrison (New Albion) and Hamza El Din's The Wish (Sounds True) and recently began improvising with composer-keyboardist-vocalist Terry Riley – Jeanrenaud is nurturing a whole new range of artistic relationships. "With Kronos I traveled all over the world, but until now I never really felt connected to all these people in the Bay Area. I especially like that freedom of being able to make all my own decisions. You can get yourself into trouble with so much freedom, making yourself busier than you intend. But I'm so driven by these things I want to find out about and do, that one thing leads me to something else and I'm very happy to be doing it all." 'New Works for Cellist Joan Jeanrenaud' is performed Fri/8 and Sat/9, 8 p.m., SomArts Theater, 934 Brannan, S.F., $18, (415) 863-1414, ext. 401.
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| Design by Rhatia Carr |