Chamber Jazz: Cubist But Not Square

(first published in The Cincinnati Post Feb. 17, 1992)

The Cincinnati Chamber Music Society, which brought you bluegrass last fall with the Modern Mandolin Quartet, dips into jazz tonight with the world premiere of Joel Hoffman's "Cubist Blues."

The 8 p.m. concert at Corbett Auditorium features the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio - pianist David Golub, violinist Mark Kaplan and cellist Colin Carr. Not your usual jazz combo, but all the more reason to take notice.

The Chamber Music Society, bastion of Mozart and Beethoven, is trying to move into this century (before it passes on) by including at least a standard 20th-century work on each of its programs, said Chamber Music Society president Richard Allen. This means Bartok and Shostakovich among the Brahms and Schubert. Yes, even Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Rebecca Clarke.

Tonight's concert will include Haydn's Trio in C Major, Brahms' Trio in B Major and "Cubist Blues," vintage 1992.

"Most of it will sound like bebop and swing-era jazz as seen through the eyes of a classically trained musician and heard through the medium of a classical piano trio," said Hoffman, a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

As for the "cubist" tag, "I mean that literally," he said. "Just as the cubist painters took representational images and projected them from different angles - presenting their inner essence by reorienting their surfaces and planes - I've done that in a musical sense with the blues."

In one of the movements Hoffman takes two 12-bar blues patterns and runs them in different keys at different speeds, he said: "Like you sometimes see in films or television where you have separate story lines going on and you cut from one to the other."

Hoffman, who has just been named new-music adviser of the Buffalo Philharmonic, hopes some of Cincinnati's jazz fans will come to the concert: "The piece truly is all about jazz, and I would love to see some people come who wouldn't normally go to a concert like this."

Tickets are $14 at the door.