Dave Liebman and Bobby Avey, ‘Vienna Dialogues’

Dave’s soprano is a snake charmer. Coaxing the serpent from his hiding is no mean task, and the crystal clear tone that Dave is so  easily capable of achieving will never persuade this venomous beast that the world outside is a worthy place to see through eyes considered by many to be evil but are at best frightened and constantly whistling in sweet, comforting darkness.

Thickening his voice to rasp, harmonics, screeches and overtones, condensing it into self-inflicted hiding of its own from within a plangent box, Dave persuades King Snake they are brothers and kin in seeking to look at a world of beauty without from within.

As long as you can hear your own hissing echo around you, says Dave to the charmed reptile, you’re safe in the myth of your own creation. You have indeed beaten the Lord at his own game so long long ago, and the Garden of Eden of classical music is yours to plunder until the end of time. Now come play.

Chopin, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, all that the paradise of long gone Vienna had to offer is back, alive and kicking as if a hundred years or maybe a thousand or perhaps a million hadn’t faded away at all. After all, oblivion is no more than a bad dream, won’t you please wake up and smell the thick, sweet, romantic Viennese venom you craved so much?

Bobby’s piano is a ramshackle cabin. You only hear it through cracks in the wooden walls the termites have been industriously erecting in between the still-standing bits of log. Nothing more than a dim shadow of this piano’s intentions can slip through these cracks, but this shadow has got to be the most splendidly colorful shadow you’ve ever heard, as three-dimensional as any tower of power. With dexterity that would make an octopus sit and sulk for hours, Bobby would make us believe this crumbling edifice contains the clarity of a crystal ball. As indeed it does, but to believe is all our fortune would allow us to do, for the time being…

As a follow up to ‘Manhattan Dialogues’, Dave Liebman explores the music of long lost Vienna and all that it inspired with the immense help of prodigious young pianist Bobby Avey. Dave does this the only way Dave knows how: from the inside out.

First cracking open some other Dave’s head and spilling out the apple strudel for a hungry, drooling audience: Dave Brubeck’s ‘In Your Own Sweet Way’ never sounded so cinnamon sweet and sophisticated. Chopin is next on the chopping block, or is it Jobim? ‘Anyone who knows Jobim knows Chopin’ claims Dave, and he would know.

The gallery goes dark. Where in New York would you hear these strangely displaced sounds? Upper East Side? Soho? Noho? Tribeca? Harlem? Brooklyn? Not even on Staten Island would you be able to catch such un-New York music (if you really believe such fairy tale lands as Staten Island actually exist..) – nocturnal expressionism at its thickest grind. Ancient resolutions, cobbled streets, Vienna. But is it really here, in New York, and how did it get here?

Apparently this music always existed here, but never outdoors: only within the minds and best intentions of New York’s wanderers, workers, shopkeepers, artists, cab drivers, musicians. Somewhere, somehow, these sounds were supposed to be lost in translation but here they are, in mortal flesh and incarnate blood.

‘Vienna is the Ground Zero of classical music’ is the first thing Dave tells us, and we can’t help but follow his gaze and see these sounds of a distinct waterline. Delineating a border between the quiet of a secluded, self-proclaimed, intimately private beach and the chaotic storm of a very public ocean, New York’s own Ground Zero at its most personal pain multiplies itself a thousand fold into a single, communal, anguished, diminished chord weeping its fate in unison.

Devil Debussy follows Dave to his own private playground. A carousel quickly spins out of control, swings try to fly beyond their leash only to reach the end of their trajectory and discover that the rope that bonds Dave and Bobby is too mighty and impressive to allow them any free mileage. Gravity pulls them back and fun swings them again until they’re too dizzy to realize they’ve been sitting completely still and it’s actually the universe that’s swinging back and forth around them. Around us. Have we been completely fooled or have we finally been taken in, are we finally inside Dave?

We must be. Bobby’s ‘From the Inside’ couldn’t have ringed so clear and true had we been out. A Magrittean street lamp inside our living room is a sure indication we are not dreaming. Heaven is our eternal reward..

Just before playing his original ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, Dave apologized for the unintentional Pink Floyd reference, but he never did apologize for the intentional one:

The lunatic is in my head.