quête:dickie landry

Dickie Landry & Lawrence Weiner's Having Been Built on Sand was conceived as a vinyl edition and released by the Rüdiger Schöttle gallery in Munich with sleeve design by Weiner. The piece consists of eight untitled tracks. Lawrence Weiner, Tina Girouard, and Britta Le Va recite text with Dickie Landry’s woodwinds, all recorded in the natural reverb of Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, a former mission and chapel in Lower Manhattan. Layering Girouard in English, Le Va in German, and Weiner in English and German blocks of related or physically proximal texts repeat, invert, and intersect with Landry’s music as a constant. The layers of text and sound have meanings that fluctuate in complexity and scope, and like much of Weiner’s work, beyond mere facts.

The first piece is a trio for Landry’s keening tenor, repeating winnowed but breathy lines that contrast with and buoy Le Va’s clear, husky phrases, building in intensity as Weiner, in English, offers statements that are caught just off mic. The third cut adds Girouard, and one can hear woven parallels in the two women’s voices, cadences, and pitches, with Weiner’s cutting inflection dancing amid them. Landry’s bass clarinet is rich in its warble, full and gentle with woody footfalls that demarcate shapes through the chorus. Vocal rhythmic cycles, wordless in nature, are the energy that courses through the fourth song, urgent and sweaty as Weiner recites statements of political position in the Middle Ages, Le Va declaiming alongside in German. On soprano saxophone for the fifth tune, Landry pierces and darts in a bright manner in a private dialogue with himself, echoing Steve Lacy as female voices nearly bury one

4 Cuts Placed In "A First Quarter", the companion piece to Solos, is the sonic result of a collaboration with artist Lawrence Weiner. As Landry remembers, “I was working for Keith Sonnier at Castelli Gallery and met Lawrence. He asked ‘can you make a video for me?’ So we did "To and Fro..." At some point he was working on "A First Quarter" (1973) and wanted me to do the music. I said ‘I already have the music.’ He said ‘what do you mean?’ I had recorded several pieces with Kurt Munkcasi and walked around the set playing the music on a boom box.”

The set features one solo each by Landry and contrabassist Rusty Gilder, a duo for the tenor saxophones of Landry and Richard Peck, and an ensemble piece for Landry, Peck, Gilder, trumpeter Robert Prado, and drummer David Lee, Jr. Starting the record off is “Requiem for Some,” inspired by Gil Evans’ long, placid tones. The anchor is Lee’s dry cymbal attack and fancy footwork, dancing around overlapping and recombining horns, chords held just shy of splintering. “4th Register” is a grainy delayed solo tenor piece, presaging “Kitchen Solos” from Fifteen Saxophones by several years. “Piece for So” was, according to Landry, “a chance to give Rusty a solo”. Mostly known as an ensemble bassist, Gilder bounced between Lafayette, Charlotte, and New York, leaving a slim recorded legacy. Here, he stretches out for twelve minutes and change – with keen upper register detail and meaty up-tempo walk, he could have been mentioned in the same breath as players like Dave Holland and Barre Phillips. The closing “Duo Vivace” finds Landry and Peck sparring on tenors, the latter holding a melodic line while Landry leans into explosive glossolalia, until both become birds in flight.

Broadway in Soho to perform a wholly improvised concert. This ensemble’s solos spring from collective improvisations and a tumultuous backbeat, loosely inspired by the creations of Coltrane, Coleman, Albert Ayler, and their brethren. The de facto leader was Richard “Dickie” Landry, a saxophonist and keyboardist who joined composer Philip Glass’s group in 1969. Landry had become a fixture in downtown New York’s loft and art scenes at the close of the 1960s, after he high-tailed it by car from Louisiana to the Lower East Side and auspiciously encountered Ornette Coleman at the Village Gate the night of his arrival.

For this concert, fellow Glass reedists Jon Smith and Richard Peck joined in, alongside Rusty Gilder and Robert Prado, both doubling on bass (upright and electric) and trumpet. The drum chair was occupied by New Orleans firecracker David Lee, Jr., who brought alto saxophonist Alan Braufman along for the session (Braufman was the only non-Louisiana player in the band). The ensemble stretched

out in the gallery for several hours in a configuration reflecting those that took place at Landry’s Chinatown loft, documented in photos by artists Tina Girouard and Suzanne Harris that adorn the inside of the original gatefold album jacket. Recorded live by Glass’ sound engineer Kurt Munkacsi, the album was released as a double LP on Chatham Square, the small imprint Landry and Glass co-ran, in a stark greyscale cover and simply titled Solos. The order of the players’ improvisations was laid out on the album inner labels, though unsurprisingly there’s a fair amount of blend. At the end of the day Solos is beyond category, a rousing exploration of instrumentation, rhythm, and life.

Philip Glass, the great American composer, was already in his mid-30s before his first album appeared, and then only because he produced the double LP himself. Music With Changing Parts was the inaugural release on his own Chatham Square imprint in 1971.

At this point, Einstein on the Beach, Glass' first opera, was still five years away. Yet in Changing Parts, one can already hear much of his vocabulary in full bloom: the buoyant arpeggios, the melding of electronic and acoustic instruments, the elongated drones of human voice, the primary emphasis on pulse (an interest he shared with fellow composer Steve Reich) and the ecstatic potential inherent in repetition.

The album features the original Philip Glass Ensemble – the composer himself, along with Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Art Murphy, Steve Chambers and Robert Prado – playing Farfisa organs and woodwinds as well as Barbara Benary on electric violin.

As Glass describes in his memoir Words Without Music, he secured a $500 interest-free loan for the recordings' initial release from the Hebrew Free Loan Society – an organization intended to help immigrants from the Old World upon arrival in the US. Though Glass was merely the grandson of immigrants, the venture wasn't far off the society's charter as Changing Parts helped usher in a new world of sound that would become known as Minimalism.

Chatham Square went on to release albums by other composers in Glass' circle, including Gibson and Landry. The label was named after the Manhattan intersection where Landry had a studio and the ensemble rehearsed.

Born in Baltimore in 1937, Glass first moved to New York to attend Juilliard at just nineteen, having already graduated from the University of Chicago. A staple of the Downtown scene, he can perhaps be appreciated as akin to the likes of sculptor Richard Serra or filmmaker Jim Jarmusch: mavericks who became major cultural figures entirely on their own terms.

This first-time vinyl reissue reproduces the original side-breaks and gatefold sleeve.

Lost PHILIP GLASS Recordings from 1975 - ORTF
The newly discovered and unreleased concert from 1975 recorded by the Philip Glass
Sextet at La Maison de la Radio, Paris.
The sextet is composed of Philip Glass, Jon Gibson, Dickie Landry, Michael Riesman, Joan
La Barbara and Richard Peck.
Music in Twelve Parts is a set of twelve pieces written between 1971 and 1974. This
performance in France includes part 1, 2, 3, 11 and 12 on a double LP.
Also included a very rare Philip Glass interview from 1974 in his NYC loft during the
rehearsals of this piece, produced for the French radio by Daniel Caux - musicologist and
co-founder of Shandar Records.
A never before released -Philip GLASS (1975) live recordings, released in partnership with
the National Audiovisual Institute - INA.
"A new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room
has suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view." - A. Porter