In nature, an ecotone is a transitional space between one type of terrain and another—the place where the forest, say, opens to a field, often serving as home to an unusually wide range of species.
The Brooklyn-based new music duo eco|tonal makes its home in the musical space where contemporary classical music meets jazz, inspiring beguiling musical creations that at once embody and defy those labels.
eco|tonal performs Mythologies Tuesday, April 14 at 7 p.m. in the Green Room of the Short North’s Garden Theatre. The performance will feature the world premiere of Rob McClure’s our scars, unwound and works by eco|tonal members singing cellist and Columbus native Iva Casian-Lakoš and saxophonist and composer David Crowell. The concert is presented by the Johnstone Fund for New Music’s New Music at Short North Stage series.
eco|tonal’s distinctive blend of contemporary classical music and jazz is at once both of those things and something much more than the sum of its parts. The musicians unite acoustic performance with electronics, a classical feel for form with fearless improvisation in expansive musical explorations into novel musical spaces.
“David has a background in jazz and mine is classical, and I also have dabbled with Balkan folk music. But somehow we’ve met in the middle with improvisation,” said Casian-Lakoš.
By way of improvisation, the musicians of eco|tonal wander through liminal spaces where jazz and contemporary classical music become something else, carrying with them the raw materials of human experience and the world around them.
Mythologies showcases works inspired by Casian-Lakoš’ combined Croatian and Mexican backgrounds. The works foreground manifestations of those cultures in traditional Balkan musical ornamentation, contemporary instrumental techniques and improvisation, all couched in the otherworldly sounds of immersive ambient electronics.
In solace for the fifth sun, Casian-Lakoš explores the ancient Aztec Legend of the Five Suns. That cosmology holds that the current era, the era of the Fifth Sun, was preceded by four previous worlds brought to catastrophic ends.
“The work is about the cyclical nature of birth and death, rejuvenation,” Casian-Lakoš said. “A lot of mythologies come out of this cyclical nature of the world, and as humans we look for meaning in these mythologies.”
Cyclicity is embodied in musical metaphors of the tides of the sea in two works on Mythologies. David Crowell composed 2 Hours in Zadar for Casian-Lakoš, as a musical exploration of her ancestry in Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast. There, at the edge of the city of Zadar, Nikola Bašić’s architectural sea organ installation is built into the seashore. The incoming tides pour into chambers in the concrete structure and make sounds when the waters flow out.
Crowell’s electronics for 2 Hours in Zadar join audio samples of the sound of the sea organ with Casian-Lakoš’ live singing—to a text by her mother, Upper Arlington resident Nela Lakoš—and instrumental improvisations. They also mark a turning point in Crowell’s creative process.
“Zadar was kind of the beginning of me really exploring the use of electronics in a way that felt really personal,” Crowell said, “personal both to me as the musician and composer, but also to the musicians that are performing the music as well, because they hear themselves in the music as they’re performing on their own instruments.”
The sounds of the tides along the shore of Long Island were the inspiration for Casian-Lakoš’ pandemic-era Low Tide for singing cellist and saxophone. Amid the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, Casian-Lakoš says experiencing the regularity of the tides during her daily walks along the shore was reassuring.
“A lot of things were uncertain at the time, but I found that cycle of the tide so comforting. I knew when the tide was coming back and bringing this life-giving water back to all the little life forms that were left in the mud,” Casian-Lakoš said.
Crowell’s Mulatu offers a distinctly jazzy improvisational tribute to the Ethiopian jazz saxophonist Mulatu Astatqué. Beyond musical style and technique, the improvisatory spirit that infuses all of eco|tonal’s works is really the engine of the musicians’ way of bringing their works to life on stage. It’s also the ingredient that, in the presence of a living, can make magic happen.
“I always like to leave some things just a little unfinished sometimes,” Casian-Lakoš said, “where it’s like maybe with a little adrenaline in the performance, and when something’s a little gray we find some beauty in the unknown, and sometimes something completely new pops out.”
