Chicago, a cello capital?
Meet the local experimentalists reinventing the instrument
Ishmael Ali wears many musical hats: composer, guitarist (in the bands Je’raf and Errata) and co-founder of a recording space in North Lawndale. But it’s his most recent instrument — cello — that has become an all-out obsession. “I used to organize some concerts, and Fred Lonberg-Holm played on one of them. I was like, ‘Oh, you can make those sounds on a cello?’ ” Ali remembers, referring to the improvising cellist who was a cornerstone of Chicago’s experimental music scene for years.
(Lonberg-Holm has since relocated to upstate New York.)
“I haven’t been able to put it down since. And I might as well see how far I can go on it.”
Now, Ali is one of several artists exploring the cello’s expressive potential, seemingly converging on Chicago overnight. Some have more or less returned here after sojourns in other cities — like Tomeka Reid, long a stalwart of Chicago’s free jazz scene, and Helen Money, the stage name of rock musician Alison Chesley. Others are brand-new arrivals, like olula negre, a resident artist at the venue Elastic Arts who co-curates its AfriClassical Futures series.
Coincidence or not, Chicago’s influx of cellists hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“I feel like so many people have just been popping up. How did we go from three cellists to, like, 30?” Ali says.
Katinka Kleijn can affirm that impression. A cellist who plays in the Chicago Symphony and on the city’s improvised music circuits, she’s lived here since 1995 and remembers when Chicago’s cello improvisers more or less started and ended with her, Lonberg-Holm and Reid. Now, she enthuses about the city’s younger cello guard, many of whom she’s shared bills with.
“Everybody in the scene is remark
ing regularly, like, ‘Whoa, there are so many cellists here right now,’ ” she says. “But the cello really is a perfect instrument for improvising. You can be the bass, you can be the main voice, you can play chords, you can do pizzicato (plucking strings), you can play extended techniques … The instrument is wood and metal, so you can join the percussion too. If you think about it, there’s really nothing like it in an improvised or jazz setting.”
Kleijn regularly teams up with Lia Kohl, another cellist in the city who takes an expansive, performance-art-inspired approach to the instrument. (For an entrée to her all-over-the-map output, Kohl’s debut solo album “Too Small to be a Plain” and last year’s “Our Savings,” with clarinetist Zachary Good and percussionist Ryan Packard, are good starting points.) In 2019, Kleijn and Kohl staged their collaborative piece “Water on the Bridge,” a performance that saw them play, scrub and wade with 30 damaged or disrepaired cellos in the Eckhart Park Pool. I attended that performance; the spectacle was unforgettable, as was the strangled scream an audience member made when Kohl chucked the first cello into the pool.
That visceral reaction sums up what Chicago’s mad scientists of the cello are contending with. Despite the versatility Kleijn describes, the cello is mostly associated with Western classical music — a pigeonhole traditionally sidestepped, for whatever reason, by its violin and double bass siblings. One is taught to approach the instrument like a sacred object, not to be defiled by incorrect technique or “ugly” sounds.
Every cellist I spoke to — save Ali, who is self-taught — talked at length about unlearning the single-mindedness of classical music pedagogy, a process still ongoing for many of them.
“I feel like classical music needs you not to have a body. Bodies have limits, but I’ve had very few teachers account for that. By the time I finished my master’s, I had tendinitis in multiple places,” says olula negre, the Elastic Arts fellow and curator.
“Since then, my relationship with the instrument has changed — it had to if I wanted to keep playing. A big part of it was freeing myself from there being a right and a wrong way to play the instrument. The right way is the way that works for my body and accomplishes the sound or technique that I’m looking for.”
Reid, who entered the orbit of the South Side’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians after moving here two decades ago, similarly had her classical training tested in the free jazz scene.
“I was trying to learn standards and bass lines with my mentor, but nobody wanted to deal with tunes. If you were on a gig and tried to quote something, people wouldn’t musically ‘bomb’ you, meaning they would blast you out all the sudden. They really wanted you to create your own language,” Reid says.
“Even now, that’s ingrained in me, because I hadn’t tried to, like, memorize a bunch of licks. It’s an interesting vantage point, I think.”
A soon-to-be-graduate of Northwestern University’s doctoral program, composer and cellist Mathew Arrellin writes music in the same Western classical tradition he learned from an early age. But he says self-directed explorations on the instrument were the biggest inspirations for “Bifurcations” and “Apparitions,” the two 2018 solo cello pieces he recently recorded and released on his debut album, “Metasomatic.”
“Even then, I felt there was so much I didn’t know about the cello, so I started improvising to find something more personal to try. There was so much ground to explore: Like, what happens if I put my finger here and leave the other string open? Now, touching both strings? What about putting more pressure on the lower string than the upper string, then reversing that? I almost went through it like a researcher,” Arrellin remembers.
Chesley, the cellist who performs as Helen Money, also went through Northwestern’s exacting Bienen School of Music. But she felt she met her group of people among other rock musicians, outside the cloistered Evanston campus, and ultimately abandoned her degree to hit the road with alt-rocker Bob Mould (of Hüsker Dü and Sugar). Now, as a cello teacher who maintains a private studio and a class at Old Town School of Folk Music, Chesley says she tries to be mindful of how she teaches her students, who are mostly beginners.
“All the musicians I admire have a good sound. I feel like that’s where everything has to start,” Chesley says. “That’s what I try to teach my students. I don’t teach them how to play rock, and I don’t really teach how to improvise. But I do teach technique, and how to get a good sound on your instrument.”
So, give it a few years. Maybe even more inspired cellists will take up these artists’ mantle. One thing is certain: It’s something Reid, who moved here in 2000, would have never imagined.
“It was kind of lonely for a while, for sure,” she says. “It’s very cool that there’s a lot more string players in general, and especially more cello improvisers. I haven’t even met them all yet.”
Upcoming performances and albums
Ishmael Ali debuts his interactive composition “Archipelago” Sept. 9 at Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey Ave. #208; elasticarts.org
Helen Money plays a solo set 8:30 p.m. Sunday at Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave., $20, emptybottle.com, and releases “Trace” (Thrill Jockey) in January.
Katinka Kleijn performs with reedist Hunter Diamond and bassist Jason Roebke 8:30 p.m. July 28 at Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey Ave. #208, pay what you can, elasticarts.org
Lia Kohl performs Aug. 19 at Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave.; constellation-chicago.com; 7 p.m. Sept. 1 at Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave., pay what you can, comfortstationlogansquare.org; and releases “The Ceiling Reposes” (American Dreams) in spring 2023.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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