Terry Riley - New York Times Nov. 9

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/arts/music/10bang.html?hp

November 10, 2008
Music Review Bang on a Can All-Stars
Strange Dreams, Channeled Into Music
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
Le Poisson Rouge, the West Village club that opened in the summer, has fast become one of the city’s main alternative spaces for classical music events, with many presented by the Wordless Music series, an inventive venture that programs rock, classical and indie music together.
On Saturday a well-attended concert there by the Bang on a Can All-Stars — the genre-blurring group that meshes elements of jazz, rock, classical and world music — fell into the classical camp. But were it not for the music on the musicians’ stands, you might at times have assumed it was an impromptu jam session by the sextet of clarinet, cello, keyboards, electric guitar, bass and percussion.
It was hard to believe, for example, that Lukas Ligeti’s “Glamour Girl” was a fully notated work (it is), with freewheeling clarinet riffs, electric guitar tunes, rock drumming and jazzy interludes. The work also reflects Mr. Ligeti’s interest in African drumming and minimalism.
“Give it up for Nancarrow,” Evan Ziporyn, the All-Stars’ clarinetist, said before the group performed his arrangement of four of Conlon Nancarrow’s early Studies for Player Piano, based on American idioms like jazz and boogie-woogie. Mr. Ziporyn’s effective arrangements mimicked Nancarrow’s overlapping rhythms, assigning different patterns to the various instruments.
The concert concluded with the premiere of Terry Riley’s “Autodreamographical Tales,” inspired by a dream diary Mr. Riley kept in 1987. He set those dreams to music with electronic noises, melodies and strange sounds that Bang on a Can recently commissioned him to orchestrate.
Mr. Riley was storyteller, pianist and singer in his work, which at almost an hour felt like an extremely long dream. He spoke about meeting a dwarf named Ping, arriving at a concert that never took place, experiencing a miracle while walking through an old church, watching a sari shop in India being transformed into a bar and asking a hippie in Asia to roll him a joint.
These dreamscapes were accompanied by a score that at times seemed like a jam session, with wailing guitar riffs, Mr. Ziporyn whistling, the pianist speaking in Chinese, jazzy interludes, Indian raga, bluesy keyboards solos, birds chirping and New Age music. “What a long, strange trip it’s been” would be an equally apt title for the work.