Sammy Weissberg

Each of Sammy Weissberg’s disparate and ambitious musical projects has been the result oft he composer and multi-instrumentalist pushing himself just a little beyond what he is sure he can do. Over the last decade, Weissberg has moved beyond his background as a jazz and pop instrumentalist and arranger into the world of classical composition. Consisting of intimate worksfor guitar and woodwinds, film scores for chamber orchestra, and everything in between, his catalog of original pieces is full of lovingly arced melodies and striking chord progressions. At different points, his work channels the graceful and catchy instrumental themes of Antonín Dvořák and Sergei Prokofiev, the atomic rhythmic interplay of Igor Stravinsky, and the luxurious harmonic worlds of Claude Debussy and Nino Rota. Music for Strings and Brass, Weissberg’s newest release (and his debut for Dear Life Records), features two works that redefine the scope of his artistry: his commanding, impressionistic String Quartet No, 2 and a brass quintet that explores the poignant, voice-like expressivity of each of its instruments. In both contexts, Weissberg reveals himself to be a composer with boundless imagination, whose humanistic and immediate musical language requires no grand dramatic context to feel deeply emotionally resonant.

Weissberg’s pieces often start with a simple melody, often hummed in its elemental form on long bike rides and developed through murmured voice memos. While writing the two pieces on Music for String and Brass, he consciously pushed himself to develop these central themes more elaborately than ever before, incorporating techniques he has honed during his work arranging for songwriters (The Lemon Twins, Allegra Krieger, June McDoom, Frances Chang, and many more). In the string quartet, especially, Weissberg bats motifs back and forth between voices, with elements from each melody becoming stepping stones to surprising, transcendent mini-climaxes. Taking inspiration from late-Romantic and modernist composers, Weissberg speaks in a musical parlance that sometimes sounds beamed in from another era. Unfailingly, though, he channels these nostalgic points of reference into contemporary-sounding, acutely personal chamber works that feel impossible to misunderstand—elaborate and unpretentious, exceptional and timeless.

As much as anything he has released to date, String Quartet No. 2 showcases Weissberg’s tremendous versatility as a stylist, using an array of developmental techniques to give his pieces heft, tension, and understated beauty. Taking cues from exemplary string quartets of Debussy and Ravel, specifically, Weissberg’s restless motifs expand and contract, suggesting the emotional complexity and plot twists of a story that is not actually there. The first movement coalesces around a melody that sounds like a theme for a shadowy protagonist—a folk song from an uncharted country, juxtaposed with pizzicato speed trials, spectral trills, and destabilizing chromatic interruptions. In the second movement, this central melody is substituted for a more plaintive one, which the quartet’s inner voices carry out onto increasingly choppy waters, and transform into an unforgettable violin solo that pushes to the absolute outer limits of the instrument’s range (one of the record’s absolute highlights). Providing a more earthly point of contrast, the third movement is a traditional scherzo, with elements of dance, recalling tango composer Astor Piazzolla’s sensuous melodies. The final movement creates a sense of transcendence and give the piece symmetry. Weissberg reintroduces the opening theme before subsuming it into an exquisite, cascading collection of interlocking melodies to form one cosmic wave of sound. With this stunning quartet, Weissberg honors the formal trajectories of the great string quartets from the late Classical and Romantic eras—written in “sonata form,” with exposition, development, and recapitulation—filtering tradition through his own inviting and eccentric lens.

The spare and charming Brass Quintet isolates Weissberg’s rare gift for melody even more directly. His extended lyrical motifs reveal both his devotion to the progressive big-band sound of Duke Ellington and Gil Evans and to choral music. In fact, the movements were originally intended as vocal works; no words seemed to fit, but Weissberg still refers to the movements as “songs.” Certain sections sound like isolated backgrounds in a big-band chart, or, at other points, baroque-era chorales injected with 21st-century chords. Across its duration, more and more pop harmonies creep in, as well as hints of Aaron-Copland-esque Americana.

The combination results in dreamy moments—imagined memories of century-old anthems played by a ghostly hometown brass band. The quintet is a tremendously satisfying listen, following up the string quartet’s grand sweep with an unembellished showcase of his charming musicality. Weissberg is sometimes hesitant to discuss inspiration directly; however, he comes around to it by explaining that his favorite pieces of classical music are often ones that were written for a dramatic context, but that he has only experienced without the story (for instance, a Stravinsky ballet without the dance, Prokofiev incidental music without the play, and so on). He fell in love with these works during moments of private reflection: often, on long walks, experiencing their structural power through the literal feeling of departing and returning, beginning his return home when the record is exactly halfway through. This is the kind of music Weissberg endeavors to write: works that mirror the most basic instincts and architecture of day-to-day existence—the sense in which we are always coming and going from somewhere, searching for simple underlying patterns that give complex phenomena their rhyme or reason, and longing for that sense of buoyancy that propels us beyond the familiar. Music for Strings and Brass is the perfect introduction to the way that Sammy Weissberg processes life in sound, one that should rank among the most warm-spirited and single-minded instrumental releases of the year.

- Winston Cook Wilson 

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releases on DLR:

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DLR 070 - Music for Strings and Brass

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