San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Kahane responds to troubled times in new song cycle
In 2016, in the wake of the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House, the composer, singer and songwriter Gabriel Kahane undertook a two-week train tour of the United States, talking to the people he met and hoping to understand how the country had gone so wrong. The album that resulted, 2018’s “Book of Travelers,” was a compact masterpiece of empathy and shared experience.
Now Kahane, who is big on using art to understand the world, has produced a sequel. Or at least a bookend.
“Magnificent Bird,” a gorgeous, intimate collection of 10 musical snapshots that Nonesuch released on Friday, March 25, also represents a reckoning of sorts. The difference is that Kahane wrote, performed and recorded these songs without ever leaving his house. It was October 2020, and there was a pandemic abroad in the land. No one who had any choice in the matter was setting foot outside their own homes.
Like “Book of Travelers” with its train passengers, “Magnificent Bird” — which Kahane is scheduled to perform live at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall on May 11 — grew out of a selfimposed assignment: Write a song a day for a month, in order to take what the creator calls “an aural brain scan” of where he was during that troubled period.
“I had finished fulfilling some concert pieces,” Kahane told me over the phone from his home in Portland, Ore., “and I found myself trying to distill the enormity of the moment into a single song. And I was failing miserably.”
The song-a-day regimen, he said, was designed to counter his “Jonathan Franzen-esque urge to write the Great American Novel in song.” Instead, he gave himself permission to capture small, fleeting domestic moments — the brewing of a morning cup of coffee, a dream suffused with parental anxiety and guilt, a catch-up phone call with elderly family friends.
Yet beneath and behind these comfortably routine moments, like lurid wallpaper in a family Polaroid, there’s a shimmering aura of dread. Climate-driven catastrophe, political dysfunction, the social isolation of the COVID era — all of these and more weigh on Kahane’s mind, and on that of his listener.
That’s not to say that “Magnificent Bird,” which includes 10 of the 31 songs to emerge from the experiment, is especially angstridden. At least not in a way that exceeds the ambient emotional temperature of 2022. Kahane’s lyrics sparkle with an incisive blend of sentiment and clarity, and he matches them with music that pushes more restlessly than ever against the constraints of the song form.
The term “singer-songwriter” is an uncomfortable fit for Kahane’s creative profile, especially since his output includes fully notated orchestral and chamber music. He holds the position of creative chair with the Oregon Symphony, and his piano concerto “Heirloom” — which he wrote for his father, the pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane — was premiered in September by the Kansas City Symphony.
Yet he embraces the designation. “One of the pleasures of being a songwriter,” he said, “is simultaneously having a respect for the form, and then trying to drag it as far away from itself as possible — while still having it feel recognizably not formless.”
Kahane tackles that challenge by marrying the conventions of traditional pop songs (end rhymes, repeated choruses, crisp four-line verses) with a harmonic and rhythmic language that consistently defies expectations. In previous collections, such as “Book of Travelers” or its luminous predecessor “The Ambassador” (2014), the results often sound like a crosscut between Randy Newman and Robert Schumann.
With “Magnificent Bird,” the classical avatar who comes most readily to mind is no longer Schumann, with his straightforward tonalities and rich-hued expressive ironies, but the Expressionist composer Alban Berg. The songs have become shorter than ever — rarely more than three minutes — and the melodic phrases bulge and swell in unpredictable places to accommodate the irregularities of the verse.
The other notable musical shift with this collection is that it involves other musical collaborators. Kahane’s piano and guitar are still paramount, along with the blend of husky baritone and high, sweet-toned falsetto that constitutes his vocal thumbprint.
But the songs were recorded, remotely, with an array of instrumentalists that include Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto (one of San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Collaborative Partners), the gifted American clarinetist Anthony McGill and Grammynominated flutist Nathalie Joachim.
“With ‘Book of Travelers,’ it was just piano and voice, and I felt I’d found the simplest expression of who I am. I could have continued to do that. But I didn’t want to,” Kahane said. “I’d been alone for a really long time. So this was an excuse to call up some of my more elusive friends and say, ‘Hey, can we have a conversation about the song? And do you want to play on it?’ ”
In some ways, “Magnificent Bird” is reminiscent of “Inside,” the superb 2021 Netflix special in which comedian and songwriter Bo Burnham captured the insanity and despair of COVID isolation. In both works, the four walls that surround the creator become both an implacable obstacle and a creative spur, and the artwork that results is glistening and magical.