Grego Edwards
Gapplegate Music Review
April 2012

That modern improvised music for two pianos is a rarity partially has to do with logistics. It's not all that easy to find two good instruments and it takes some doing to combine that with two players who are both on-hand and game at the same time as the pianos. That's perhaps too facile an answer but in the economics of improvised music practical considerations are not unimportant.

Be that as it may the teaming of Connie Crothers and David Arner was an inspired idea that has led to some beautifully musical results. And to have their interactions available on four full CDs in the box set Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos (Rogue Art 0037) is not only revelatory of just how inventive the two are, it is a musical project that brings a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction to the persistently attentive listener.

One of my first important jazz experiences was when I found a copy of an album that contained "Tonk," the two-piano duet between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The fullness of melodic and harmonic possibilities realized on that three-minute 78 still has resonance in my mind as a high point of that era. And in many ways what Ms. Crothers and Mr. Arner do on the sides at hand are a sort of blossoming of possibilities latent in "Tonk."

To be sure, I do not mean to suggest that the music hearkens back to an earlier period. It does not. However both Connie and David are players that have thoroughly immersed themselves in the history of the music, pianistic and otherwise, and do invoke the essence of jazz pianism as they launch into stratospheric flights of invention.

This is thoroughly spontaneous music, free if you will, and avant. There are at times dense clusters of pitches less centered in a tonal-pivot point than they are all-embracing of the full 12-tones available; other times there are passages that suggest tonalities as a visual artist may sketch out a representation, only to thicken the image with elements outside the central core to eventually transform the original representation into something else altogether.

So too the two pianists open the music to total, spontaneous possibility, sometimes by initially referencing a tonal cell as an artist would sketch a figure. Sometimes there are endlessly modulating lines that race ahead in perpetual re-creation. At all times Ms. Crothers and Mr. Arner interact beautifully, each complementing the other so fully it becomes difficult much of the time to separate out each part, to sort out who is playing what. And surely that was their objective from the outset--the two create freely derived two-piano music, more than a music for two separate musical personalities.

This is not a cutting contest, surely. It is an immersion in the creation of a body of spontaneously dense four-hand musical discourse. The results at times have perhaps as much relation to the two-piano music of Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky in the original recording of Stockhausen's Mantra as they do to "Tonk." In other words this is an improvised kind of new music as much as it is a personal, real-time compendium of avant jazz. In other words it creates a place where the music is free to develop unconstrained by the limitations of any particular style camp.

And in the process we gain four volumes of very advanced pianistic creation. I will not attempt to analyse or describe fully the music here because it is in its unfolding and its perpetual capacity to surprise with unabashed candor that the music is meant to be heard. At least that is my take on it. And in the process all that Connie Crothers and David Arner are and have been musically comes into play.

There is never a sense of indirection or lack of purpose just as there are no second takes. Each suite unfolds in its own way with a sense of surety and direction rather remarkable for something completely spontaneous. This of course has to do with the synchronous rapport and musically sympatico outlook shared by the two artists. They have, can and will do other sorts of things with their music. But for this long moment in 2011 they have succeeded in creating a two-way simultaneous dialog that impressively forges a language uniquely suited to the moment. In the process they scale some high precipices with the surety of two that routinely take their music to very advanced places. Surely by combining their reaching upwards into a two-piano twosome they get to places quite rarified and bracingly ahead of the pack.

The music sustains an inspired attainment for something like four hours. And it does so in ways that provide the attentive listener with endless musical terrain to explore and re-explore with great pleasure and satisfaction. It is one of the finest improvisational solo-pianistic moments we have experienced in recorded form to date, to my mind. Do not let this one slip by. It will repay your attention with an enthralling sublimity.

Peter Aaron
Chronogram
July 2012

David Arner's association, with pianist Connie Crothers, has proven incredibly fruitful. In May 2009 the pair recorded nearly four hours of music at Bard’s Fisher Center, which is newly out on French label RogueArt as the four-CD box set Spontaneous Suites for Two Pianos. As one might expect, it’s a lot to take in. A pristinely captured epic—or Homeric, perhaps, given Arner’s mythological interests—experience, the album boasts 11 extended, completely improvised pieces, most of which have been titled for their distinct segments (“Suite II: The Metropolis,” for example, comprises the bustling “City Rhapsody,” the tranquil “Night Through Dawn,” and the rising “In the Midst”). A document of two artists who share an uncanny telepathy, Spontaneous Suites is a modern landmark, the sound of two amazing-unto-themselves universes existing as their glittering constellations overlap. 

Brian Morton
Point of Departure
July 2012

The first of the collection’s nine suites is “Avian Homage,” which seems to involve some unplanned concentration on Dolphyish intervals, but also perhaps reflects some listening to Messiaen. “A Musician’s Story” doesn’t have any obvious narrative logic. It’s flowing, circumstantial music, not so much call-and-response as parallel journeying...“The Metropolis” suggests a more obviously pictorial approach...What emerges...is a sequence whose logic is musical rather than programmatic, and so all the more evocative for that. Like the city, the visual ‘scape is coded in so many different ways that each return to the music yields a different aural itinerary. The two players get comfortable with each other’s biorhythms and sense of space. It’s exuberant...

“Arcana,” “Apparitions” and “Three Worlds” complete the cycle of nine suites, and by this stage it’s hard to get used to the idea that this is all spontaneously made rather than organized and in some measure pre-set. What has happened is that the two musicians have constructed a vivid, one-use-only musical language, a singleton rhetoric for duo playing that is entirely self-sustaining. Such a thing ought to be, if not forbidding, then at least exclusive, but there is real and deep pleasure in hearing two musicians of this caliber talking through the arcanae and technical matter of their craft.  Revelatory music.

Ken Waxman
thewholenote.com
November 2012

This mixture of delicacy and strength is expanded to its pianistic limits on Spontaneous Suite for Two Pianos, Rogueart R0G-037 These four CDs capture an entire recording session beginning with the evocative acceleration from feathery chording to anvil-like kinetic pressure on CD1, track 1, and conclude with key-clipping near player-piano continuum on CD4, track 7. Anyone who follow dual keyboardist like Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia or Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson will be staggered by the work here. Completely improvised, the nine interlocking suites expose almost all variations of what can be extracted from 176 keys. Technical wizardry plus jazz inflections are apparent in the playing of Connie Crothers and David Arner, yet focussed reductionism as well as spontaneity is also on tap. Piano guru Lennie Tristano’s most accomplished student, New York-based Crothers has recorded with jazzmen like drummer Max Roach. Up-state New York’s Arner is associated with choreographers such as Meredith Monk. Playing side-by-side with layered chords, palindromes or in counterpoint, the two evoke many aspects of piano literature while creating their own. For instance “The Hoofer” which bounces and taps as a terpsichorean fantasia is followed by “Blues and the Moving Image”. Despite low-pitched glissandi, this blues is polyrhythmic, depending on a dusting of high-frequency tremolo to provide the necessary emotion. “The Reckoning” is meditative and linear, while “Density 88X2” moves from jocular patterns to blunt syncopation. An extended sequence like “City Rhapsody” may unroll staccatissimo with soundboard rumbles and ringing cadenzas in equal measures, but it never unravels or loses connectivity. Overall the real connections this duo exhibits is with their own histories. Basso notes on “Swing Migration” and “Fool” both unearth Tristanto-like themes among the cumulative cascades and pitch-sliding vibrations.