Nu Deco Ensemble tests the boundaries of classical music with reggaeton, Daft Punk suite, more
January 26, 2016
The house lights the night of The Nu Deco Ensemble’s second performance, earlier this month, in Miami were provided by nature. Not far from the still waters of Biscayne Bay, only disturbed by a small group of passing manatees, at the historic Deering Estate, the musicians of the 24 piece chamber orchestra settled into position, as the sun came down. As night fell and the mosquitoes retired for the night, the large, brightly lit stage exploded with the sounds of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.”
But there was something else going on with the piece, too. It has a salsa swing to it, featuring a percussive element that’s far from Bach. After the piece, conductor Jacomo Bairos reveals the piece’s title: “Tocatta Y Fuga en Re Menor,” and it was arranged with a Latin flair by composer Sam Hyken. Bairos and Hyken are the masterminds behind the Nu Deco Ensemble, a 2014 Knight Arts Challenge winner just beginning its first season of performances. As they explained after the show, Hyken and Bairos are not content to recycle the classics. They are here to push against expectations and limitations of classical chamber music on various levels. Besides reinventing classics by Bach and others, their repertoire also includes adapting the electronic dance music of Daft Punk and the disco-rock of LCD Soundsystem. They are also on a mission to support new works by living composers, including the work of Japan’s Andy Akiho, who was represented that night with “Ki’lro,” an angular yet entrancing piece of music.
Hyken and Bairos wear the badge of “Miami’s 21st Century Chamber Orchestra” with pride and an excited pioneering spirit. The two complete each other’s thoughts but also talk over one another to explain the Nu Deco Ensemble’s mission. The two first loosely crossed paths while pursuing undergrad degrees at Julliard. Bairos was senior to Hyken, but he knew of him. They really got to know each other, however, in Singapore while auditioning for the city’s symphony. They were both hired the same day in 2004. Both brass players (Bairos played tuba and Hyken trumpet), they got on famously.
That was also where the idea to make something new happened. “Just two young Americans having a ball over in Asia,” says Bairos, “and we had similar musical tastes. We had similar ideas of what an orchestra’s gonna be in the future and started brainstorming then about everything we wanted to do.”
Both also tapped into personal connections to South Florida. Bairos grew up in Homestead. Though he conducts several city orchestras across the U.S., including San Diego, Atlanta and St. Louis, his attachment to South Florida is indelible. Hyken, meanwhile, was born in New York and grew up in New Jersey, but he moved to Miami 10 years ago. He graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. The musicians in the ensemble are all classically trained and hail from the most prestigious organizations in South Florida. Some are New World Symphony fellows, others are professors at UM’s Frost School of Music and some also play in the Florida Grand Opera.
To note what makes the group different from other chamber orchestras begins with the fact that there are only one of each instrument (save for clarinet) as opposed to a formal set up of a chamber orchestra, which has pairs of instruments. There’s also electric bass and guitars and a drum kit. Bairos also conducts the group like a rock star gesticulating to an arena. 
It’s unintentional, he assures. “I don’t know. Sometimes I try not to,” he admits. “Sometimes it gets a little out of control. Tonight I’m a little tired, so my body was probably flailing even more… I feel like the music is coming through, and I just try to feel it and express it. Sometimes it’s funny,” he adds, and Hyken joins him in amused laughter.
Nothing about Nu Deco is traditional, and almost every element is about breaking formal rules. Asked if they are committing a purist sacrilege by giving Bizet a Reggaeton feel (“Refried Farandole”), Hyken says, “I think everyone has their own point of view on that. We can only be true to our own art. That’s how I feel.”
“The funny thing is,” adds Bairos, “I’ve connected to [Hyken’s] music literally all over the world, basically, from San Diego to Charlotte, and you know what? People clap like crazy, so I think we’re on to something. There could be some purists out there who don’t appreciate the fact that we’re taking an old piece of music and reinventing it, but you know what? We’re all about making sure that the future of classical music is alive.”
“Also, some of the greatest composers did the same thing,” chimes in Hyken.
“Brahms with the Hyden variation, Liszt,” says Bairos.
“They made a symphonic metamorphosis, and there’s jazz,” Hyken continues. “There’s different elements of that. And Britten took Purcell and made it into all these crazy variations, so it’s happened in the ‘50s and the ‘40s and the ‘20s. It’s a continuation of a tradition.”
“Looking back informs the future,” notes Bairos. “Why it spawned the way it did informs what we do in the future. The most important thing is we speak to society today and make sure we’re preserving this great classical art, at the same time supporting these musicians but building a culture in Miami that’s savvy, that loves art and understands its value to the community.”
Further in their ethos to push forward while breaking the rules, is Hyken’s work in adapting electronic music for their small orchestra, something that has earned the Nu Deco Ensemble a lot of attention. Hyken says adapting the music is not as complex as one might assume. “When you’re dealing with electronics so much of that is sonic based,” he explains. “You’re trying to create a sonic type of sound that doesn’t exist with the acoustic instruments, so you have to do a version of that, but that kind of contemporary music, LCD, Daft Punk, it all has a beautiful counterpoint. There are lines that go back and forth. It’s almost like a minimalist type sound. It happens to translate very well to acoustic instruments. It gives it a new kind of life.”
Asked if either of these contemporary dance music groups are aware of what the Nu Deco Ensemble has done with its music, Hyken says, “I don’t think Daft Punk is. You never know these days with the Internet, but sources say that LCD may be aware because we had somebody who was at our last concert who has been in touch with them, and he said he shared it, but we don’t know for a fact.”
“Unofficially, we think maybe,” Bairos adds.
This week, the Nu Deco Ensemble is more focused on its upcoming collaboration with Miami’s renowned jazz, funk Afro-Cuban fusion group The Spam Allstars. “Spam Allstars is an iconic Miami band with an iconic Miami sound,” says Hyken. “Adding orchestral instruments to this creates a whole new world of possibilities and layer of richness. It’s a unique combination that is exciting, lush and sophisticated.”
Spam Allstars’ founder and turntable maestro, D.J. Le Spam (a.k.a. Andrew Yeomanson) offered a hint of what is in store at the North Beach Bandshell this Thursday night when his seven-piece band joins the 24 piece of Nu Deco on stage. “We are going to play four songs from our catalog, which Sam Hyken has created very exciting arrangements for,” says Yeomanson.
Yeomanson also says audiences should expect to see them perform a new piece called “Ibakan,” a collaboration with Hyken. It debuted at The New World Symphony as part of the orchestra’s annual lightshow/dance party hybrid “Pulse,” in November of last year.
Yeomanson says the rehearsals have been an amazing experience. “It’s thrilling for me to hear our stuff with these added textures and colors,” he says. “It opens up a whole new palette of sounds and range of emotions.”
For now, Nu Deco is only a live experience, but Bairos and Hyken have been hearing about requests for recordings. Though he clearly appreciates the interest, Bairos sighs about the added pressure, “Yeah, we have,” adding that it is indeed something they are considering for the future. “We want to take next summer and really decide what it is we really want to record first, what we want to put out there first. We’ve gotten some requests from some major artists here in town, and we’re just kind of waiting to see where all that falls. But we definitely want to put out an album that not only has living composers but some of [Hyken’s] arrangements, just our signature style.”
Though the future may see the release of a recording, for now the ensemble’s first season is packed with performance dates that include new suites based on the music of Jamiroquai and Radiohead, performances of music that range from the likes of Paul Hindemith to Paul Dooley and collaborations with more guest musicians including Brooklyn’s Project Trio and Japan’s Akiho. For all upcoming dates and tickets, visit, this link: www.nu-deco.org/seasonone.
The Nu Deco Ensemble and Spam Allstars perform this Thursday, Jan. 28, Sunday, Jan. 31 (it was postponed due to weather), at the North Beach Bandshell in North Miami Beach, Fla. The concert is presented in partnership with the Rhythm Foundation. Tickets for the event can be purchased here.
All photos are courtesy Southern Land Films / Monica McGivern. They were taken on the night of “Water Music” at the Deering Estate. Photo of Spam Allstars is courtesy of the band.
Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison talk about their Miami Beach city symphony El Sol Caliente — An Indie Ethos exclusive
January 30, 2015
Courtesy Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives
It’s been 12 years since Bill Morrison came to Miami and blew the minds of a nearly packed house with Decasia in a large screening room at the Hyatt Regency in Downtown Miami as part of the Rewind/Fast Forward Festival. The 70-minute film was made up of clips from movies from the early 20th century printed on nitrate film that had succumbed to a state of decay as the nitrate began breaking down. Morrison went around the world looking for destroyed movies to bring back to life without any intention to restore them (they were beyond help) but to recontextualize them, rot intact.
With music provided by avant-garde composer Michael Gordon, Morrison strung the images together. It opens with a whirling dervish somewhere in Istanbul, spinning slowly to the metallic circular hiss of what may be a lightly scraped cymbal. The film builds from there, featuring waves crashing on rocks and globules of bubbled, corroded film seemingly overlaid on the image and a boxer jabbing at a strip of undulating celluloid. As the image itself comes apart, something new arises, as Gordon’s music pulses between a call and response of droning piano and tapped xylophones, the cymbal still hissing along. The movie builds with a pastiche of images as diverse as the patterns of decay Morrison found on the films, with Gordon’s music building repetitively, growing higher and louder as more instruments pile into the mix offering layers of harmony and counter melody.
The 2003 film has become legendary in the experimental film world and was registered at the Library of Congress in 2013 as one of the supreme examples of American cinema aesthetics, alongside Pulp Fiction and Mary Poppins. Morrison has continued to work with Gordon and has never stopped experimenting with film in decay, but he also shoots his own footage. Below you will find two fine examples of their work since Decasia, both of which were featured during a retrospective at the Miami Jewish Film Festival a few days ago (Bill Morrison and Michael Gordon to discuss and present their avant-garde films at Miami Jewish Film Festival). The first, “Light Is Calling” (2004) is a short that follows a similar construction to Decasia. Gordon first provided the music, a slow and sad violin solo to the soft pulse of a bell recorded backward as unrecognizable ambient hums pile up and melt away. Morrison culled images from a damaged print of The Bells (1926) by James Young to create an enthralling experience of sound and vision:
The next short is something completely different. Morrison handed cinematography duties to his cat in “Gene Takes a Drink” (2012), as the feline explored their garden. The perspective of grass and flowers and a fish pond via this “cat cam” is a revelation. Gordon’s playful music, though it sounds electronic, actually features cello, piano, guitar, double bass, clarinet, and percussion. The footage is sped up a bit to the music, adding another layer of new perspective, and then Morrison starts playing with filters on the image for yet another abstract layer, raising the film to another realm of transcendentalism by calling attention to the beauty of new perspective.
I point all this out to hopefully prepare you for tonight’s world premiere at the New World Symphony of El Sol Caliente, a near 30-minute “city symphony” by Morrison and Gordon dedicated to Miami Beach. As they usually work, Gordon first provided the music and Morrison cut his footage to it. “It’s typical of two other city pieces that we’ve done,” says Morrison, speaking from his home in New York. “Gotham being about New York and Dystopia being about Los Angeles, and it sort of comes from a tradition of city symphonies with Berlin: Symphony of a Great City or Manhatta.”
You can find a great overview of what a City Symphony is by reading this article (City Symphony Primer: 3 Essential Films to Watch Now), where you can stream Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand‘s Manhatta (1921) and the more epic Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) by Walter Ruttman. “We’re sort of resurrecting that for the 21st Century,” notes Morrison, “but really drawing on 20th century archival imagery and then sort of as a refrain at the end, adding original, contemporary footage.”
So you can expect images Morrison shot himself of Miami Beach as well as old footage he discovered. Though Morrison calls himself an “interloper” in Miami Beach, he has set his aim to present a version of the city outsiders would not expect. “You know, Miami Beach, at least the way it’s been portrayed throughout history, has been as a vacation land,” he says, “so it’s been a struggle to find imagery that isn’t about tourism, but it has any interesting portrait of the 20th century in that you have a lot of footage of the 1926 hurricane, you have the troops coming in and G.I.s taking over the Miami Beach hotels in the ‘40s for training, and then a lot of those guys end up coming back from the war and settling there, so it is an interesting cultural melting pot.”
He spent a lot of time in Miami and Miami Beach and offered a preview of some of the images he has assembled. “I walked through Art Basel with a GoPro on my chest,” 
he says, referring to the Miami Beach-based international art festival that unfolds inside and around the Miami Beach Convention Center. “I got some nice scenes of people going up to a photo booth and posing.”
He also went outdoors, riding a bike with a Go-Pro camera on its handlebars and shot footage from the shore, which will provide a key element in the film. “There was a couple of full moon shots,” he notes. “I got a couple of full moonrises and sunrises over the ocean, and also I had a small drone camera, so I got some footage of the beach and the waves from a different perspective, so that footage I used to create chapters and a way in and out of the archival stuff.”
Morrison says he gathered lots of footage from various locations, including the Miami-based Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, which happened to have been the main sponsor of the Rewind/Fast Forward Festival that brought Decasia to Miami all those years ago. “With the archival stuff,” Morrison explains, “I hit the Library of Congress for nitrate 35 millimeter to see what I could find on Miami Beach, and that was an interesting project. Then, with the new film stuff, a lot of it came from the Fox Movitone Archive at the University of South Carolina and then more locally the Louis Wolfson Archive … They are now located in a beautiful new facility at Miami Dade College, so I was working closely with them to come up with home movie footage, and some of that’s been really, really awesome.”
It is fitting that Gordon provided the glue to the images via his music for El Sol Caliente, which translates from Spanish to “the hot sun.” He has intimate knowledge of Miami Beach. 
“My family moved there from Central America when I was almost 8 years old,” says Gordon, speaking via phone from Amsterdam, where he was visiting for a concert, “and I went to [Miami] Beach High, so I feel like I’m from Miami Beach, and this is kind of a wild, trippy thing to be doing, actually, going back to my town, working with the New World Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas, especially on this piece.”
When asked about his memory growing up on Miami Beach, Gordon recalls an experience distinct to those who have lived a long time in the area: the weather. “I was talking to Bill and of course, he’s drawing on a lot of historical images of Miami Beach, but when I was thinking back to growing up in the area, all the time I spent there, the thing that influenced my thinking was kind of seeing this little, tiny strip of land, surrounded by this huge bay and then this large ocean and the crashing of the waves and the stillness of the waves and those sudden huge storms that happen every afternoon at 4 o’clock or something and then how it clears and how hot it becomes. It’s really more a feeling for the land and the climate and the forces of weather.”
Considering the weather, there is something even more ominous about the territory of Miami Beach, for, as with Decasia, a profound subtext arises in the juxtaposition of the film and music in El Sol Caliente. As some might be aware, scientists have warned it will not take long before sea-level rise erases Miami Beach (check out the graphic in this article). This was not lost on both the filmmaker and composer. Morrison says, “Though I don’t make an explicit reference to it, there’s also this overriding it: it’s a very fragile barrier island on a continental peninsula, all of which is at risk with rising ocean waters, so there is this sense that none of this is permanent.”
On Friday, January 30, and Saturday, January 31, the New World Symphony will present the world premiere of El Sol Caliente, a tribute to Miami Beach celebrating the city’s centennial by Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison as part of its “New Works” program. Tomorrow night is already sold out, but there will be a free, live “Wallcast” on the front of the NWS building for park-goers. For more information, visit nws.com.
Independent Ethos 