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Weegee
1996

clarinet doubling bass clarinet
alto saxophone
trumpet
piano
percussion 
  bass drum, glockenspiel, ride cymbal, small splash cymbal, suspended cymbal,
  sizzle cymbal, snare drum, 2 tom-toms, triangle, vibraphone, woodblock
cello

duration 20' 

first performance:
Collage, cond. David Hoose
C. Walsh Theater, Boston / November 17, 1996

RECORDING—first performance:


SCORE
In the Street
At a Jazz Club in Harlem
Murder Victim
A Winter Night's Fire, 1947
Easter Sunday in Harlem, 1940
Alan Downs Killed his Wife / Cop Killer, 1939
Killed in a Car Crash
Dead Man in a Restaurant
Summer on Lower East Side, 1947

PROGRAM NOTE
'Weegee' was the professional name of Arthur Fellig, a news photographer of New York night life—high and low—of the 1930s and 1940s. His black and white photographs often present grisly crime and accident scenes but with great formal beauty and an underlying compassion. This work takes a musical look at ten of Weegee's photographs in nine movements, played attacca, using music that sometimes references the era and location but seeks also to make sonic companions to the images.

The ensemble is a hybrid jazz quintet with an extra instrument—clarinet—and with cello 
substituting for bass.
1.In the Street

2.At a Jazz Club in Harlem
3.Murder Victim

4.A Winter Night's Fire, 1947
5.Easter Sunday in Harlem, 1940

6.Alan Downs Killed his Wife / Cop Killer, 1939

7.Killed in a Car Crash
  

8.Dead Man in a Restaurant
 

9.Summer on Lower East Side, 1947


REVIEWS
Weegee was both handsomely performed and handsomely received. . . Vores seems not only to have found the right grit-and-glamor, “urban” music tone to go with each photograph, but to have sensed exactly how long we should be looking at it. How elegant, right, yet surprising it all was. And how lucky we in Boston are to have this wonderfully inventive composer among us.
Richard Buell • The Boston Globe

•
Andy Vores’s Weegee left me with some of the strongest positive impressions. . . His music is refreshingly direct and forceful. I identify him as a spiritual brother of other NuClassix composers, many of the Composers in Red Sneakers, and other members of cooperatives following in their wake, composers coming up in the 1980s for whom the quality and art-value of jazz was a given rather than something that had to be earned. . . Vores directly referred to jazz in At a Jazz Club in Harlem with what he calls “ersatz bebop,” and he glanced at it again in Dead Man in a Restaurant with some voicings that suggested Henry Mancini’s TV scores, but these passing references didn’t distort the overall drama of the music. The scoring, especially for percussionist Matthew Sharrock, was consistently evocative. Explosions from the traps suggested off-camera violence; lugubrious mutterings from bass clarinet and cello were ship noises and commentary from bystanders; glittering glockenspiel effects were aural sparks, snow, fire hydrant spray; bowed vibraphone tiles added ethereal shimmer to solitude; a joky cakewalk brought out the parody in an Easter parade in Harlem.
Steve Elman • The Arts Fuse  full review