Has violin, will play music of all genres
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Sometimes it seems as if there must be three or four women named Carla Kihlstedt running around the country. The strange thing is, each one is a violin virtuoso, though the various Kihlstedts are associated with wildly different musical settings.
The best known Carla is a founding member of the avant-chamber jazz combo Tin Hat (formerly known as Tin Hat Trio), an exquisitely calibrated quintet that released its fifth album, "The Sad Machinery of Spring," last month. It was inspired by the lyric, hallucinatory writing of the doomed Polish Jewish artist Bruno Schulz.
Another Kihlstedt plays five-string electric violin and sings in the outrageously inventive art-rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, which performs Wednesday at the Middle East Downstairs.
Her doppelganger returns to town later in the month as a singer-songwriter for a March 27 CRASHarts-produced concert at the Institute for Contemporary Art with 2 Foot Yard, an enthralling trio with cellist/vocalist Marika Hughes and percussionist/guitarist Shahzad Ismaily.
And then there's the Kihlstedt who will be premiering the double concerto that Lisa Bielawa has written for her and the acclaimed young violinist Colin Jacobsen as part of the composer's three-year residency with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
There's only one Carla Kihlstedt, of course, and it's the singular nature of her wide-ranging creative passions that makes her career appear so unlikely. She has the charisma of a rock star, the precision and intelligence of a world-class chamber violinist, and a gift for sustaining fruitful collaborations.
"From the outside I know my life looks entirely fractured," says Kihlstedt, 34, over lunch at a Berkeley restaurant, not far from her house in Oakland. "She's in a rock band. She's in a singer-songwriter thing, and a jazz band. It's hard to explain to people, but it all seems of a piece to me. It all seems relevant to each other, and very personal and coherent."
Raised in Lancaster, Pa., Kihlstedt studied at the Peabody and San Francisco conservatories and graduated from Oberlin. When she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994, she kept one foot in the classical world to help pay the bills while plunging into free improvisation with masters such as ROVA Saxophone Quartet's Larry Ochs, T.J. Kirk guitarist John Schott, and New Klezmer Trio clarinetist Ben Goldberg (now a member of Tin Hat).
She honed her vocal skills with Jewlia Eisenberg's bluesy Balkan rock band Charming Hostess at a time when the group also featured members of the radically theatrical art-rock band Idiot Flesh. When she ended up performing as a sideshow act at an Idiot Flesh concert (something involving operatic tango), the experience opened her eyes to the creative potential of a rock act.
"I was fresh out of conservatory and had done my best to leave behind the whole classical world," Kihlstedt says. "The thing I missed was the attention to detail that classical music affords you. Working on Bartok's string quartets, there's a level of detail and precision while still making incredibly visceral music that I really thrived on. When I heard Idiot Flesh that night, it just blew my mind. I realized that what I was missing existed in an incredibly powerful, amazingly performative, all-encompassing rock experience."
She went on to found Sleepytime with former Idiot Flesh members bassist Dan Rathbun and guitarist/vocalist Nils Frykdahl, and over the past decade the band has developed its own gothic mythology, borrowing elements from the Japanese modern dance form butoh, high modernist prose, obscure and possibly apocryphal religious tracts, and 19th-century carnival hokum. Performing in elaborate makeup and costumes (made by Kihlstedt), the quintet, which also features percussionist Matthias Bossi and vocalist Michael Mellender, expands its already vast sonic palette with a battery of found objects and handcrafted instruments.
At the same time that she was helping create the strange and unsettling world of Sleepytime, Kihlstedt decided to pursue a solo project with Hughes and Ismaily based on several dozen short songs she was writing. It was saxophonist Ochs who encouraged John Zorn to release 2 Foot Yard's self-named album as part of his Tzadik label's
"Carla's capable of going in any direction," Ochs says. "I've heard her play jazz with Duck Baker and Ben Goldberg, and her work with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum is brilliant, though that's more of a rock thing. Every context I can think of, she walks in, puts something down, and it's really exquisite. The first time I heard 2 Foot Yard, I immediately called up John and said 'You've got to put that out!' "
If there's one thread connecting the seemingly disparate worlds through which Kihlstedt moves, it's a zeal for the written word. From Tin Hat's engagement with Schulz to Sleepytime's investigation of James Joyce, her ensembles delve into literature both on- and offstage to such an extent that Kihlstedt often describes them as book clubs.
"We're such nerds," she says. "But it's really fun to have four or five people all thinking about the same texts and being able to discuss it on tour. We'll be singing passages from 'Finnegan's Wake' on the Sleepytime gigs. I just started it, but Nils has spent many years with that book."
Bielawa was inspired to compose "The Kafka Letters" for Kihlstedt after hearing 2 Foot Yard. In setting Kafka's correspondence to music, Bielawa conceived of the project as a vehicle for exploring the possibilities of Kihlstedt's extraordinary ability to perform intricate pieces simultaneously as a violinist and a vocalist.
"Those pieces are incredibly demanding, and they've allowed her to explore her own virtuosity in ways that she can use in her own music," Bielawa says. "Reviewers have said it was rash, because no one can play them except Carla. But how great is it that I live at the same time in history as this performer who can realize this? We've really influenced each other's musical direction."
The next chapter of their collaboration premieres in March 2008, when the Boston Modern Orchestra Project presents Bielawa's double concerto for Kihlstedt and Jacobson, which leaves plenty of time to get acquainted with all the other Carlas.
