Kaufman Music Center Kick-Off Event and ETHEL Review -

As we walk up to the Kaufman Music Center a cheerful queue lines up for free popcorn from a food truck purposely parked in front of the entrance way. Grabbing the popcorn flavor of their choice, the crowd ambles in to mingle in the downstairs lobby. Most seem to be neighborhood people. Many have small children in tow, presumably current or prospective students of The Kaufman Music Center. Toddlers play with balloons. Cheerful staff members hold court at lit tables, chatting up prospective students and hoped-for ticket buyers for the recently announced new season concerts.

We are directed to an upstairs lobby where we mill to hear students of the adult school perform jazz standards and not-so-standards. There are dancers and tables overflowing with chocolate bars that some are pouring into their tote bags.

It’s free, it’s fun, it’s community drawn together by music

The performances continue downstairs. A fresh-faced chorus seeming to be of high school age conscientiously files in. They sound angelic. Congenial award winning violinist Curtis Stewart— teacher in residence at Kaufman Music Center— explains how he has created some Paganini style riffs of pop classics and then scrunches his face to break into a solo rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Beautiful.

Kaufman Music Center Begins Its Official Season with ETHEL

Following the Open House, the intimate feel performance hall at the Kaufman Music Center Merkin Hall welcomed a return of the Ethel string quartet with their long-time friend and flutist Allison Loggins-Hull. John Schaefer, host and producer of WNYC’s showcase of new music, New Sounds, entered through large side panel doors to introduce the performers and to conduct short interviews with Loggins-Hull and/or cellist Dorothy Lawson. These short interviews feel more like relaxed chitchats where we learn, for example, that Loggins-Hull had been an administrative intern for Ethel years ago.

In this reviewer’s opinion, it is the diversity of the works that most enlivened the listening experience. We hear soft tones seeming to rise like swirling water into chaos (Terraria, 2022 by Sam Wu). The quartet becomes its own background singers, a la-la chorus we didn’t expect (The Reconciliation Suite, 2022, Migiwa (Miggy) Miyajima). We feel a gentle ocean’s waves give way to roiling lava, as the Hawaiian landscape is sonically explored (we began this quilt there, 2021, Leilehua Lanzilotti). Paradoxically, when we expect something tender from a work titled Pillowtalk (2022, Xaviar Music), we instead get the feeling of a morning’s espresso pot boiling over on the stove. The finale contributed by Allison Loggins-Hull that lends the program its title of Persist, joins the spate of works done by other artists where later generations are saluting their African-American forbears tackling the challenges of The Great Migration, such as the recently debuted work by African Bush Women. Loggins-Hull’s use of electronic sampling to add a percussive element reminds us of how new music knows no boundaries.