concert review: Third Coast Percussion

SFCV publishes its weekly "push" to subscribers on Tuesdays, so reviews of concerts over the weekend have to be turned in in time to be edited and published then. Reviews of weekday concerts are usually handled in the course of the week, but for whatever scheduling reasons, this review of a Wednesday concert, which I turned in Friday morning, didn't appear until this next Tuesday.

I'd seen Third Coast Percussion perform before, but this was the first time I was reviewing them. I felt rather like I was skating on the edge trying to describe the individual character of these pieces. Listened to on one set of preconceptions, they all sound alike, almost indistinguishable. But by another, closer listening, they reveal vast stylistic differences, mostly in their treatment of how the players' rhythms relate to each other, and that's what I was trying to command the language necessary to describe.

I was also a little flummoxed on describing the style of the composer Jlin, who has no classical training at all, working in forms of popular music that are completely foreign territory to me. The program notes said her sound "is rooted in Chicago's iconic footwork style," which sounds as if the reader is supposed to know what that is. But I'd never heard of it. Looking it up, I find it derives from something called house music. I don't know what that is, either.

I'm always ready to use technical stylistic terms like Impressionism and atonal music in my reviews, even though some of my readers may have no idea what those sound like. I know what they are. But I'm not going to employ terms that mean nothing to me as if I know them equally well, and I'm not going to write something like "whatever that is" in a professional review.

I was accordingly driven back to generalities. All these unknown things seem to be dance music typically played in clubs, so that's what I wrote that Jlin's background was in. It was the editor who put in "a style called 'footwork'", which communicates the "whatever that is" attitude without saying so explicitly.