Asked what performances from the Uncertainty Music Series’ 10-year run came most memorably to mind, musician Anne Rhodes recalled one by Canadian duo Not The Wind Not The Flag. “They’re such flexible, unpredictable musicians. I think Brandon [Valdivia] can do five different beats with four different limbs, and as a duo they play off each other really well,” she said. “And for me this comes up over and over again with improvised music, but they’re people I’m really happy to see.”But she also remembered a performance by composer Brian Parks. “He did a 40-minute improvisation on virginal,” an instrument in the harpsichord family. “It was all overlapping polyrhythms … and most of the people there, because they were coming from Yale and used to a little bit more of a concert music setting, and a contemporary classical idiom, were super uncomfortable and some of them were actually really mad.” She chuckled. “And it was so good.”
That recollection happened in an interview on Tuesday with Rhodes and fellow musicians Carl Testa and Louis Guarino, Jr., on WNHH’s “Northern Remedy” as they talked about a decade of Uncertainty Music Series shows that took place at Never Ending Books, Audubon Strings, Firehouse 12, and other places around town. In celebration of Uncertainty Series’s run — which is now ending — Testa is giving it a two-day sendoff with back-to-back shows at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street.
Saturday, Sept. 23 will feature New York-based John Zorn protégé Jeremiah Cymerman and his clarinet quartet performing Cymerman’s work “Systema Munditotius.” New Haven improv stalwarts Anne Rhodes, Adam Matlock, and Chris Cretella will also perform a collaborative piece with Boston-based trumpet player Forbes Graham and New York-based bassist James Ilgenfritz. On Sunday, Sept. 24, Haitian electronic music artist Val-Inc will perform, as will Louis Guarino, Jr., Andria Nicodemou, Erica Dicker, Junko Fujiwara, and Testa.
Saturday’s show starts at 8:30 p.m. Sunday’s show starts at 7:30 p.m. Thanks to an online fundraiser last month, both shows are free.
Testa started the Uncertainty Music Series in September 2007, shortly after moving to New Haven from Middletown with fellow musician (and spouse) Rhodes. They had heard about Firehouse 12 as a home for improvised music, and they’d heard about the New Haven Improvisers Collective. “I thought, okay, Firehouse 12, New Haven Improvisers Collective … there are things happening in New Haven.”
They also knew about New Haven’s jazz pedigree, which Guarino had been a part of as a younger musician, getting into the clubs on Dixwell and Winchester and downtown. “You could go in the afternoon and play, and come back at night and hear different bands, and then there were after-hours places, and jazz was everywhere,” Guarino said. “We were like family, the people that came out to listen and play. Everybody knew everybody. It was safe. It was a great time.”
Testa found that elements of that remained in 2007. There were musicians who wanted to play improvised music, and they and non-players formed an audience who wanted to hear it. Though “there wasn’t the kind of casual, developmental performance series that I had come up with” in Chicago, Testa said, “where it was just people getting together, presenting what they were interested, and having a chance to perform original music. So I wanted to do something that was regular, that people could count on.”
He found out about Never Ending Books on State Street as a place to perform through Bob Gorry at the New Haven Improvisers Collective. “I describe it as a donation center and community space,” Testa said. “It’s mostly for people to have group meetings, performances, readings, talks.”
It’s also a room where music tends to sound unaccountably good. “I wouldn’t normally say, ‘give me a fairly small room that’s a little bit long and has carpeting,” Rhodes said. “But I’ve sung in there with and without a mic, a capella and with instruments and it’s not too live, it’s not too dead … you can hear everything. You can hear yourself.”
The first Uncertainty Music Series show was billed as duo computer music with solo soprano saxophone. The next featured a duo of bass clarinet and electronics, as well as a trio composed of viola, tenor saxophone, and accordion.
“It was a really great environment for trying things out. Firehouse 12 was bringing in the bigger name national and international experimental jazz people, and NHIC was a local group focusing on improv,” said Rhodes. The new series “gave Carl an opportunity to cast a wider net in terms of genre, and to bring in regional musicians who ight not otherwise have a place or a series to present their music in New Haven, while also including a lot of local musicians and giving local musicians a chance to work with the regional musicians…. You were really performing, but it was also casual, low-key, and really friendly.”
Testa said that it took a while for the series to build, but within four or five years, it was well established. Out-of-town acts contacted him asking to play it, and he could invite acts he admired from out of the blue to grace Uncertainty’s stage. He was rewarded with a steady audience and an article in the New York Times in 2011. “There were a lot of musicians doing different things, a lot of people coming out,” Testa said. “I was able to organize more shows in different venues, so it wasn’t only at Never Ending, but places all across town.”
But Testa never intended for the series to run forever. He took stock five years in and figured he’d do it for another five years. This year he took stock again and decided it was time to end. The musical landscape of New Haven has changed for improvised music — for the better. Firehouse 12 is going strong as a musical venue. More musicians have moved to town. New places to play improvised music have emerged. In a sense the appetite is bigger than ever, and Testa is as much a part of it as ever.
Thanks to Guarino, who started bringing recording equipment to Uncertainty shows early in its run, there are hours and hours of music to revisit. But Testa can also remember a night in 2016 when he played bass with Susana Santos Silva on trumpet, Chris Cretella on guitar, and Trevor Saint on percussion.
“It was one of those times where all of the pieces seemed to fall into place,” he said. “When I’m listening to it it’s one of those moments where the instruments really start to blend in an interesting way, and you start to hear the music happening. Like, ‘oh there’s an idea — ”
“A collective idea,” Guarino said.
“Yeah, a collective idea appears and manifests, and you can see it, and it develops,” Testa said. On Saturday, that could happen all over again at Firehouse 12. And then, in the near future, all over town.
The Uncertainty Music Series Two-Day Farewell Festival happens at Firehouse 12, 45 Crown St., on Sept. 23 and Sept. 24. Click here for more information. Click below to listen to the full interview with Carl Testa, Anne Rhodes, and Louis Guarino, Jr.