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Hollis Taylor and Monica Huggett in Concert Lewis & Clark College, Agnes Flanagan Chapel 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, 796-0223 3 pm Sunday, Jan. 10 $15, students $5 Hollis Taylor, the spirited, freewheeling violinist whose genre-busting style dips into classical, country, folk and jazz, has recently been involved in two intriguing collaborations. One is a composition, a project that has had her working closely for more than a year with a man who has been dead for two and a half centuries. The other is a concert of that work and the one that inspired it, performed with one of the foremost baroque violinists of our time. The man is Johann Sebastian Bach, the most influential composer in the Western tradition. It is difficult to underestimate Bach's impact on our understanding of music: His individual works and the forms he pioneered have had a profound effect on the music of virtually every composer to come after him, including Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Reger, Schoenberg and Webern. Performers are constantly revisiting his oeuvre, often retooling pieces in the idioms of their times; consider the 1960s Swingle Singers or the '70s synthesizer player Walter (later Wendy) Carlos. Most recently, Yo-Yo Ma has turned the cello suites into a set of multi-media productions on CD-ROM. Not for nothing did National Public Radio's Performance Today inaugurate a two-year overview of the music of the millennium with Bach. Jazz musicians, from Fats Waller and Benny Goodman to Bud Powell, have also had an affinity for the 18th-century German. French pianist Jacques Loussier has virtually made a career of Bach transcriptions, having made and played trio arrangements of the keyboard works for four decades. Taylor points out some of the common ground between the Baroque--and especially Bach, its exemplar--and jazz: Both are generally played by small ensembles and use dance forms and lots of eighth notes. Both use vibrato as an ornament rather than as a matter of course, and both can be bombastic but rarely grandiose. Improvisation is a key ingredient; Bach himself was a legendary improviser both on violin and keyboard. Most important, Taylor says, is their kinesthetic component: "They swing." Not that Hollis Taylor should have the same influences as everyone else. She's as likely to find inspiration in Balkan polyrhythms and Hank Williams tunes as in the works of big-name composers. She has explored new sounds and genres for most of her career, especially ones that have some danceability. From a seat in the Oregon Symphony--where, then in her late teens, she was the youngest member--she moved on to old-time fiddling and then to jazz. During a three-year stint in Paris and Budapest, she played gigs in jazz clubs and foraged for folk music in compound meters, music that she then reworked à la Bartok into the brilliant Unsquare Dances (Twisted Fiddle), a disc of violin duos. At the same time, she embarked on the study of African drumming, which led her to a summer residency at Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. But however disparate her musical leanings, when she packed for her sabbatical, she put Bach's Partitas and Sonatas for Solo Violin at the top of her list, above insect repellent and mosquito netting. Under the Caribbean sun, one of those works, the Partita No. 1 in B minor, was to become fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms under the title Box Set. The centerpiece of this weekend's concert, it has the eight-part organization of the original and even the same harmonic structure. So closely has she hewn to Bach, she says, "You could play them at the same time and hear the same chords." In two movements she has retained all of the original notes but rhythmically restructured them; early on she discovered that, having stripped one portion free of all but its tones, she could hear in it the jazz standard "Lullaby in Birdland." Other movements involve harmonic augmentation, free improvisation and various other kinds of give and take between Taylor and Bach. In order to clearly demonstrate what she's done with the composition, Taylor wanted to present it with the original partita, and that's where the second collaboration comes in. She invited Monica Huggett, artistic director and conductor of the Portland Baroque Orchestra, to do the honors. Huggett is among the first rank of baroque musicians, and her 1997 recording of the complete Bach Sonatas and Partitas is definitive, one of the most exciting period releases in recent years. To Taylor's delight, Huggett accepted, making for a superb program; Huggett's performance alone will be well worth the price of admission. To end the concert on a light note, Taylor also composed a piece for the two violinists to play together, a dance suite called The Crawl Ball. Inspired by the bugs with which she shared her Caribbean home, its four movements are based on the tarantella (an old Neopolitan dance), the samba, the chachacha and the mambo. With its jazz structure and tropical rhythms, it's closer to Box Set than to Bach. Taylor says she's still got some improvements to make on her part, having made a concession to her illustrious colleague's lack of improvisational chops. "I gave her all my best licks," she says.
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