Dana Lyn: A Point On a Slow Curve
In a Circle Records

No appreciation of violinist Dana Lyn's A Point On a Slow Curve is complete without knowing about the inspirations for the project, Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929-89) and her work, The Rose (1958-66). She toiled on the painting in her apartment for years until a 1965 eviction resulted in the piece, which eventually grew into a one foot-thick monument weighing a ton, being moved to The Pasadena Museum of Art, where its indefatigable creator continued to work on it until the museum's curator insisted she stop. After being exhibited in 1969, The Rose ended up sealed and in storage at the San Francisco Institute of Art until 1995, when excavation and restoration again made it available it for public viewing (it appeared as part of the DeFeo retrospective presented by the Whitney Museum in 2013). The years-spanning experience came to be described by the artist as, naturally, “a point on a slow curve.”

Captivated by DeFeo's saga, the Brooklyn-based Lyn created a nine-movement tapestry whose parts cohere into a genre-defying homage to the intrepid artistic spirit. As she herself acknowledges, the piece ultimately revealed itself to be more about her own artistic journey when parallels between the projects grew obvious. Just as DeFeo gave herself obsessively to her creation, Lyn took eight years to bring her own to fruition, and the fervency of her commitment is evident in the writing, arrangements, and performances. It didn't come easy, however: Lyn made two separate attempts to record the music she'd written but ended up dissatisfied with the results and rejected both.

Realizing that the material she was creating required musicians who would be as comfortable improvising freely as reading notated charts, she expanded the ensemble to eleven members. Joining her on violin are cellist Hank Roberts, bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, clarinetist Mike McGinnis, bassist Gary Wang, drummer Noel Brennan, and singers Danielle Buonaiuto (soprano), Catherine Hedberg (alto), Elizabeth Merrill (alto), and Madeline Healey (soprano). While the ensemble is large, its sound is often strikingly intimate, a quality that has as much to do with the arrangements as anything else. Lyn's careful not to overload a track with too much detail and is circumspect about selecting which elements will appear and when.

Though it was named after an early series by DeFeo, the title of the opening movement, “Mountain Climbing,” also conveys the sense of a massive project being undertaken, and with staircase-like ascents delivered in counterpoint, the brooding material, replete with a twelve-tone theme, conveys the idea in musical terms too. Lyn's thoughtful handling of arrangement reveals itself at this early juncture, with sections allocated to different instrumental groupings and particular textures, vocal and instrumental, highlighted. The contrasts in timbre between vibes, strings, and woodwinds are also exploited effectively, and Lyn, a generous host, isn't averse to granting her partners ample solo spots. Schoenbeck, for instance, introduces “Dingbats” unaccompanied, after which the others join in for a freewheeling treatment that sees the music alternating between composed and improv episodes. In a similar move, Brennan introduces “Welcome to Painterland” with a drum solo, the piece titled after the apartment building DeFeo shared with five other painters.

Lyn directly addresses the creation of DeFeo's The Rose across three movements, each of which includes a percussive motif intended to suggest the artist working at her painting to create ridges from the paint layers. Of the three, it's perhaps “White Rose” that's most striking for glissando effects (presumably) generated by strings and vibes, though the suave swing of “The Rose” proves memorable also. Elsewhere, “Daytime Atheist” tickles the ear for featuring a delicate vocal performance by the four singers; even more touching is their subdued voicings of Latin liturgical text for the closing movement, “Coda: The Removal,” its title a reference to the removal of the painting from DeFeo's apartment.

March 2022