Volume 23 Issue 3 - November 2017

FEATURE
Ben Stein On 17 th Century Jazz
A CONVERSATION
DAVID PERLMAN
The specific concert that sparked this conversation
takes place Sunday, November 19, 2017, in the Music
at Metropolitan concert series at Metropolitan United
Church, one of a cluster of major downtown religious
edifices that gave Toronto’s Church Street its name. The
Met United congregation will be celebrating its 200th
anniversary in 2018. This particular concert celebrates
music that goes back 200 years before that, but in an
intriguingly modern way.
Titled “Jazz Standards of the Seventeenth Century,” it promises
“ground basses, lute songs and madrigals sung and played
with the freedom, invention and unpredictability of modern club
performers” and is the brainchild of lutenist Ben Stein. Under the
rubric “Musicians on the Edge,” it features Stein on lutes along with
the Rezonance Baroque Ensemble (Rezan Onen-Lapointe, violin;
and Dave Podgorski, harpsichord), along with co-conspirators Emily
Klassen, soprano; Charles Davidson, tenor; and Erika Nielsen, cello.
A few days after our initial discussion, Stein got in touch, balking
at the idea being characterized as his “brainchild.” “I hope what I’ve
written doesn’t give the impression that this is a new thing I’ve come
up with. If anything, I’m late to the program. There are a good number
of [early music] groups building programs and ensembles around
improv – but they are European for the most part. There are a few
ensembles in the USA, and very little in Canada, which is why I’m
pushing for it. And while places like the RCM are starting to add these
elements, in my opinion they start too late. That was the key with the
Neapolitans and their antecedents – it was built into early training. …
Also we are being a bit liberal with the 17th century thing in the title;
we`ve got a few bits of 18th- and 16th-century rep as well. It`s more
about looking at the forms that musicians were aware of – ground
basses, dances – that you can find in different centuries, though they
evolved and changed during that time. …”
But let’s start at the beginning.
WN: So, how, why, when did you propose this idea to Pat Wright
[Patricia Wright, music director at Met United]?
BS: Last year I presented a concert called “The Mystery of the
Partimento” as part of the Music at Met series. It got a very good
response from audience members who didn’t know quite what
to expect, because no one knows what a partimento is. I didn’t
until recently, even though I’d been playing early music for a
number of years.
And what is it?
Essentially a bass line over which musicians were expected to
extemporize melodies. Partimenti were a central element of Italian
Baroque and galant music training, especially in the Neapolitan
conservatories that produced some of the most popular performers
and composers of that era. They resemble basso continuo accompaniment
lines, but they weren’t just for chord harmonization. You were
expected to use partimenti to create interesting melodies, and the
Italians were renowned for their mastery of this skill.
Seeing how much people enjoyed having classical extemporization
taking place before their eyes, I thought: if I was going to play a couple
of rock or jazz sets for a club gig, I’d pick music I Iiked, find some
musicians I was comfortable with and jam on the chord changes. Why
can’t I do the same with classical repertoire I enjoy, playing melodic
variations in a historically informed manner? So my colleagues and
I are going to treat songs and madrigals, as well as partimenti and
ground basses, as jumping-off points for improvisation, and no two
renditions will be the same from rehearsal to concert.
Patricia Wright regularly programs early music at concerts and
church services … The Rezonance Baroque Ensemble are actually Met’s
artists-in-residence this year, playing at church services throughout
the year, and also the featured ensemble for the Marg and Jim Norquay
Celebration Concert in April 2018 – I’ll be joining them and other
players for a collaboration/jam on Baroque concertos and sonatas. I’m
planning to play the Vivaldi Lute Concerto in D, improvising on the
the famous Adagio movement with the freedom of a player of the era.
I remember Jim Galloway, our long-time Jazz Notes columnist once
remarking, in a column significantly on the topic of how to listen
to jazz, saying (very loosely paraphrased), words to the effect of “If
you want to find the structure and the beat listen to the bass, not the
drums, It’s all built from that.” So when I saw this listing I immediately
thought “Aha, the man with the lutes, especially the theorbo,
must have had something central to do with this.” Is Renaissance/
Baroque continuo as backline the way the word is used in a jazz
context a far-fetched idea?
Jim was right! It really is “all about the bass.” Baroque and
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