I really, really hate it when my arsenal of comparisons, parallels, antecedents and influences doesn’t work. It is one of my chief means, as a reviewer, of giving my audience a handle, an entrée, so to speak, into something that may be new and more or less foreign to their experience. (It also is a way that I organize my thoughts about the subject, particularly with music, which can be a pretty difficult thing to translate into words. Chalk it up to my theater background, playing “Charades” at parties: “Sounds like. . . .”) Imagine my discomfiture when faced with Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Concert Program.
I’m hard put to decide whether their music sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard before, or like everything I’ve ever heard before. I can hear the barest hints of all sorts of things, from swing to serial minimalism, but only just hints: a passage that might have been, once, a traditional English ballad, a phrase that recalls a Vaughan Williams pastorale, a selection that might have derived from a dream of a Copland rendering of an American folk song, a rhythmic structure that could have come from Bali by way of almost anywhere. I could just call it “new age” and let it go at that, but I think the music deserves more consideration: it is, when all is said and done, good stuff.
The late Simon Jeffes, who founded the group in 1972, said “the random, chance element in life is terribly vital. If through fear we allow the repression of spontaneous and unpredictable actions and events in order to make life ‘safer,’ the creativity that arises naturally from the hurly-burly of human life could be destroyed and lost.” That is an attitude with which I can sympathize: I treasure the happenstance. And there is, in this concert, a great deal that is unpredictable and, more important, refreshing.
Perhaps more germane to this album, and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s music as a whole, is not a discussion of the music itself, but what it grew from. By Jeffes’ own account, it grew from a dream, about a place named the Penguin Cafe, a place that was a home, a home, as Jeffes saw it, “before our parents’ home,” where the players could come together and play for the moment. Jeffes thought of “cafe” in the sense of a meeting place, and that seems particularly apt, listening to the music that the orchestra has created. While there is something particularly English about the sound of this group, there is nothing particularly English about the music itself, except perhaps for what has been called its “whimsical eccentricity.”
And, when all is said and done, there is something terribly elusive about this music, perhaps the only possible result of its chance elements, its spontaneity, its careful lack of formal rigor (which is not to imply any lack of coherence or subtlety, at all). There are pieces in this concert, recorded in 1994, that bring on a delighted grin, and there are pieces to dream on. It’s music that was made for one purpose: to enjoy, to find for us a place where we can be brought out of ourselves for a while.
Not a bad thing at all.
(Zopf Limited/Windham Hill Records, 1995)
The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, in spite of its eccentricity, does have a Web site, at Penguin Cafe. There is also an unofficial site at Iceforce.
