Surfing on the Musical Cutting Edge in Ojai

Music Director and Flutist Claire Chase Takes Charge of the 79th Ojai Music Festival, with a Starry Cast Including Pianist Craig Taborn and Pulitzer-Winning Drummer Susie Ibarra

Ojai Music Festival at the Libbey Bowl | Credit: Annelies van der Vegt

Music Director and Flutist Claire Chase | Credit: Courtesy

Several factors go into making the Ojai Music Festival (OMF) one of the shiniest crown jewels of the cultural calendar in the 805. For one, the long Ojai weekend — with the 79th annual edition running from June 5-8 this year — attracts attention and talent on an international scale.

For another thing, the festival is both reliably adventurous and forward-thinking with its contemporary-music-leaning agenda, while also changing up the program each year, with the musical chair inspiration of having a new music director each time around. OMF’s legacy is built on the strength of its music director list, which includes Stravinsky, Copland, a few years of leadership by the cerebral dynamo Pierre Boulez, John Adams, and more.

In just the last few years, programming reins were taken over by Adams, the American Modern Opera Company collective, a populist year with Rihannon Giddens at the head, and last year’s event led by open-eared Mozart specialist Mitsuko Uchida.

This year, the spotlight goes to a familiar performing artist in Ojai, flutist and general charismatic trailblazer Claire Chase. Chase is a phenom on the contemporary scene, winner of an Avery Fisher Prize and MacArthur Fellowship and collaborator with many important composers and performers (and composer-performers). She is also the founder of the ambitious 24-year Density 2036 project, named after Edgard Varèse’s landmark flute work and aimed at vastly expanding repertoire for the flute.

No, Mozart won’t be in the Ojai Fest houses of the Libbey Bowl or other satellite locations this year, but there will be a bounty of premieres, of the world, U.S., and West Coast type. The general instrumental scale leans more toward chamber music this year, but the program is anything but lean in quantity or sense of adventure.

The upcoming Chase menu holds great promise for tilling new soil and ushering in new musical forces. The enticing list of newcomers to OMF includes important voices on the New York and global scene, who happen to work well across classical and jazz lines. Exciting prospects await with the arrival of stellar pianists Craig Taborn and Cory Smythe, drummer-composer Susie Ibarra (a recent Pulitzer Prize recipient), and contemporary string quartet sensation, the JACK Quartet (which bedazzled a Hahn Hall audience in December, to the tune of its Modern Medieval project, also coming to Ojai).

JACK Quartet | Credit: Shervin Lainez
Cory Smythe | Credit: Caitlin Ochs
Percussionist Susie Ibarra | Credit: Courtesy

Ojai now officially has a track record for booking artists on the brink of the Pulitzer Prize. Giddens won hers briefly before heading to Ojai, and Ibarra’s prize just arrived in May, for her piece Sky Islands, described as “a musical call to action that draws attention to the Earth’s biodiversity, changing climate, and global community practices.” Its ecological theme ties in with Chase’s own conceptual agenda for the program, tied in with nature and the “common themes of rebirth, reimagination, and rewilding.”

More broadly, Chase says that, in developing the weekend’s program, she was “inspired by the author Donna Haraway’s invitation to encounter one another in unexpected combinations and collaborations in what she calls ‘oddkin’ — a term for our deep and unruly interdependence. What a beautiful description of the messy and miraculous experience of making music in the 21st century.”

Between Thursday night’s opening concert at Libbey Bowl, centered around Marcos Balter’s Chase-designated Pan (commissioned for her Density 2036 project) and the late Sunday afternoon finale concert, called Pulsefield, with world premieres by Tania León and 90-year-old minimalist patriarch Terry Riley, a dense thicket of music takes over the idyllic setting of Ojai.

Primetime concert slots are always special. Friday’s program, The Holy Liftoff, is so named for Riley’s piece, and the program includes music of Sofia Gubaidulina and Julius Eastman, while Saturday night belongs to How Forests Think, named for Liza Lim’s piece, and a program also including Gubaidulina and JS Bach (a rare pre-20th-century item on this year’s menu).

Ibarra will perform at the Ojai Meadows Preserve on Saturday at 8 a.m. (the 8 a.m. concerts are often well worth getting up early for) and give the West Coast premiere of her prized Sky Islands on Sunday morning at the Libbey.

Taborn, one of the most creative and expansively gifted pianists on the “jazz into avant-garde/new music” landscape, will appear in an improvised piano duet with the similarly hybrid-talented Smythe. Taborn, who possesses a unique skill in weaving fluidly between “inside” and “outside” musical approaches, has shown his acumen in an improv-driven piano duo context as heard with his acclaimed duet with Vijay Iyer (listen to the 2019 album The Transitory Poemshere). Iyer famously gave a jazz and “world music” spin to the festival during his stint as director in 2017.

In an interview I did with Taborn before that album’s release, he spoke about the exciting but vulnerable endeavor of improvising, especially with two pianists. “The biggest danger for all improvising of that sort is that in the attempt to figure out what one is doing, once you determine, ‘Oh, this is what we’re doing,’ you almost start to fall behind the process of improvisation. It’s really dangerous to say, ‘Okay, this is it! Okay, so we’re done?’” he laughed. “You also have to ask to invite an interrogation and a development. That’s what’s great about improvisation. From the outside, people seem to wonder, ‘Oh, there are two pianos. How do you negotiate that?’ But it’s really about negotiating two pianists,” he laughs. “That’s the real key factor.”

Taborn is again in focus for his chamber piece Busy Griefs and Endangered Charms (also penned for Density 2036) in its West Coast premiere, in the Greenberg Center of the Ojai Valley School on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Also in the weekend’s mix are music-related films screened at the remodeled Ojai Playhouse — 32 Sounds and Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, celebrating the influential minimalist composer whose own music is yet another subplot of the weekend.

And did we mention the idyllic setting that is Ojai? No small part of the charm of this nearly 80-year-old tradition is the somehow harmonious blend of scenic natural splendor and music that soothes and challenges, without resorting to crowd-pleasing appeasements. Expect the unexpected, get down to some deep listening, and soak in the setting.

For more information and the complete schedule for the Ojai Music Festival, June 5-8, see ojaifestival.org.