ADAMCZYK: The melodic quirks of Kenmore

By Ed Adamczyk
The Tonawanda News

April 11, 2008 12:06 am

— It’s one of the regular joys of after-winter out here, that feeling of happy surprise when you round a corner and find something you didn’t expect. I don’t refer to incidents that involve police cars with flashing lights, or things that leave you shaking your head. I mean the stuff that’ll remind you, later in the day, that someone, maybe you, had a really good time in Kenmore today.
Turn the corner, and a pony is being off-loaded from a small trailer for a child’s backyard birthday party. Walk down Delaware Road and find a 16-piece jazz band, incongruously crowded into a small parking lot and going full blast. Weird amateur sporting events, with basketballs and hockey sticks and rules created on the spot, occupy the residential streets when traffic is not around.
And if you like watching men in tool belts, we’ve got plenty of those.
So it’s not that big a stretch to drop everything on a Sunday afternoon to stroll into a church, where a string quartet concert was about to break out.
If you’re not a fan of classical music but occasionally wonder what you’re missing, start here. The string quartet involves four instruments, all playing simultaneously and for the duration of the piece (no breaks for drum solos in this package). The challenge, for the composer, is to use only these four musicians to harmoniously carry his or her ideas. No trumpet blasts, no percussion, and no one takes a break. For a refugee from rock music, it’s practically a familiar exercise in listening --- keeping track of only four instruments. They blend and then separate, then blend again, almost like jazz. This is classical music without the baggage.
A small but dedicated audience awaited the concert in the Church of the Advent on Delaware Road, a cross-section of ages, races and degrees of wardrobe, to hear the work of local composer Odel Northington. He spends most of his energy as a jazz bassist, but a project for Buffalo State College has turned him into a writer of classical music. This is the debut of two of his works, originally scored for a jazz ensemble but reconfigured for string quartet.
One thing Northington brought with him, while temporarily transplanting jazz to classical in a Kenmore church, is the deliciously artless introduction. The jazz world in notorious for clumsy between-songs conversation, as though the performers save all their timing for the music, not the talk. He’d been involved in a traffic accident, earlier in the day, and it showed in his shaky patter.
He presented the ensemble, gifted students from around the world and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester — Dan Parrish, violin; Chris Pagliaro, violin; Candy Amato, viola; and Su Yuon Lee, cello. Dressed in black and seated immediately before the altar of this remarkably beautiful church, the quartet looked perfectly composed amid the limestone, marble and intricate woodwork.
And they were off, cruising to two short works by Northington with the ostentatious titles “Etude No. 5 in G Minor” and “Prelude in G Minor”, the latter, according to the program notes, originally written as a piece for a documentary film. Each was a jazz-inflected, relatively uncomplicated exercise in composing and performing, and each a pleasure to hear. For the listener, a string quartet tends to be adequately straightforward to understand and enjoy, and complex enough to maintain one’s attention.
The final piece was a denser, moodier work by Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, an example of how deeply four people with musical instruments can mine a piece of sheet music for emotion and passion. It also served to demonstrate how far the young Northington can travel as a composer.
In 25 minutes it was over. The audience applause thundered through the big church, and the crowd moved to the building’s massive kitchen area for the obligatory reception, hosted by church pastor Reverend Terry Bull (himself a trombonist in local big bands). We all conversed idly while we drank coffee and nibbled on cheese squares, and offered more applause when the quartet came through the door. When the composer arrived, we dropped our plates to clap and cheer wildly. Northington made his way through the crowd and accepted our congratulations. Everyone got a hug and a handshake; hugging and handshakes seem an obligatory part of the music business.
I later walked through the big oak door of the church and into the Sunday afternoon sunshine, ready for the next errand and feeling remarkably refreshed. String quartets are a little like blues bands: The works are relatively simple, yet incredibly rich and evocative. A dose of this was exactly what I needed.
Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears Fridays in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.

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