By Ariel Swartley on MON, NOV 9TH 2009, 3:10 P.M.
Geoff Gallegos, more frequently known as Double G, clearly enjoys a challenge. Last December, dressed in white tails, his black braids bouncing out rhythms on his shoulders, Gallegos stood on a conductor’s podium before eighty or more disparate musicians—among them a professional string quartet, a well-known jazz pianist, a cadre of legendary Afro-Cuban drum masters, and a blistering funk-rock guitarist—hoping to meld them into a cohesive whole.A saxophonist by training and a composer who cites both Charles Mingus and Dmitri Shostakovich as influences, Gallegos had an advantage: He was used to working with most of the people on stage. Arriving in Los Angeles thirteen years ago, Gallegos met a pool of other young musicians trained in both classical and popular disciplines who shared his interest in integrating sounds—turntable scratchings and cello melodies, say—usually kept far away from each other. The result was daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra, which Gallegos co-founded and leads. Hip Hop is, in a sense, a nation of conductors. A performer armed with a tone arm and a stack of records assembles a collage of phrases—a memorably funky bass line, James Brown’s trademark yelp—and ties them together with rhythm. Lyrics play similarly with whatever’s in the air: advertising jingles, campaign slogans, slang. daKAH’s expansive palette—orchestral strings, brass, and woodwinds, along with electric guitars, a dozen MCs and percussionists plus a turntable artist—allows Gallegos to sample live from a vast range of old and new sonorities. The intense physicality of the sound is ear-opening.
daKAH’s repertoire includes Gallegos’ “Unfinished Symphony,” whose movements pair jumpy urban lyrics with the shimmering brass-thick textures of Latin jazz to songs by hip-hop forebears like funk-rock-fusion prophet George Clinton, given new gravitas with orchestral fanfares. Gallegos has said the name means “one” in a Ghanaian language, but daKAHa’s sound is not some bland blend. Instead, the varied instruments and genres each have a turn at the mike, lifted and herded by the propulsive beat—and by Gallegos’s conducting. It’s different, he told an interviewer, from being a composer. “It’s more like being the captain of a ship...if it goes down, I’m going down with it.”
Late last fall, Gallegos conducted a preview of portions of his String Quartet No. 2, premiering at Montalvo this September. Watching him pound out the rhythm on his thigh, it was easy to imagine that the ship captain had picked up an oar. He began the composition while in residence as a Lucas Artist Fellow, inspired by the densely wooded trails and the sudden hilltop vistas of San Jose. If, as he noted, the sinuous lines and ecstatic harmonies of the first two movements invoke the acts of ascending the path and achieving the view, then the third seems to pause for a question. Constructed around one individual pitch which is defined and redefined by the intervals accompanying it, the movement is both a model of interdependence as Gallegos explained, and a portrait of the artist, shaping and shaped by his surroundings.
The Sonus Quartet who will perform the piece are graduates of conservatories and orchestras in Cleveland, Houston, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles. They used to “have a residency,” as cellist Vanessa Freeborn-Smith put it, at one of L.A.’s Irish pubs where their set list roamed from madrigals to Led Zeppelin. “It’s not the music, but how it’s presented that turns kids off,” she said—the formal posture expected of classical players and audiences, the quietly polite applause. Quartet players, too, are their own conductors. For last fall’s preview of the “Montalvo” quartet—a piece they were still learning—they relied on Gallegos’s beat. By the time of the performance, they won’t need him. “We’ll know the proper rhythm,” violist Neel Hammond said. They will have internalized it.
For Gallegos, the premier is another departure. It means staying on shore—no longer ship captain but ship builder—while his composition leaves the harbor. The hope is that of any composer, any artist: that out of a multiplicity of styles and influences, sampled, appreciated, and finally owned, there will emerge a honed and buoyant craft. It’s a hope states and nations share as well.
Posted in Ariel Swartley for AGENCY