Terry Riley wanted to give us everything. The white-bearded 84-year-old composer-keyboardist and and his slacker-garbed guitarist son, Gyan, made sure we received all 12 notes, in as many octaves as possible, with as many colorations as they could conjure in 80 minutes.
The moods varied from brisk meditations to ecstatic explosions, all delivered with the precision of a man who has made the metronome his lifelong friend. If his melodies rang with a certain hippie-Buddhist tranquillity, Riley took care to keep them real with stretches of klezmerlike plaintiveness and judiciously spaced intrusions of dissonance, reminding us that he couldn't be pigeonholed as the Minimalist of old. But -- was that 30 perky seconds of his landmark 1964 "In C" that we heard halfway through?
Riley really got into his instruments. The first notes he played on the Fazioli 278 grand piano (whose length seemed to stretch for about half a block) were a dense rumble on the far bass end, massaging not just our ears but our entire bodies. And during an electronics-based segment, he employed an interface inside the cabinet to affect the timbres of the remarkably clear-toned strings, which he plucked in episodes of pure physical sensuality. Similarly, he was getting a charge out of the layered sounds he could draw from his Nord Stage 3 keyboard, on which he boogied Doors-style (his L.A. tribute?) or made exciting synthoid whoopie. On a couple of selections, Riley's unsingerly vocalizing served adequately to carry his Hendrixy poetry about beauty and the Divine.
Gyan picked his Les Paul in neat single-string complement to his father's lines. His percussive attack and jazzy tones sometimes felt superfluous, but more often he added welcome dimensions, especially when he resorted to his own rack of whooshing, echoing effects. These two filled a lot of space together.
We dug it, hardcore newmusical obsessives and casual culturati alike.
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PHOTO BY DEBI DOORZ.