{"id":116865,"date":"2017-10-19T13:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T17:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116865"},"modified":"2017-10-19T15:29:10","modified_gmt":"2017-10-19T19:29:10","slug":"bing-ruth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/bing-ruth\/","title":{"rendered":"Bing & Ruth and Amy & David"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

David Moore of Bing & Ruth.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/b>New York has felt like a second home since my parents first took me there as a teen in the early eighties. I grew up in rural coastal North Carolina, but the Mets became my team in 1979 when we got cable TV, and WOR carried 162 Mets games. On that first trip, I made my way alone to Paragon Sporting Goods in Union Square to buy Mizuno baseball cleats. Over the past twenty years, I\u2019ve made more than 150 trips to the city while researching the photographer W. Eugene Smith. I now know a lot about arcane matters, like the history of Manhattan\u2019s wholesale flower market, Long John Nebel\u2019s overnight radio talk show, and underground angles on the midcentury jazz and drug scenes in places like Staten Island.<\/p>\n

The city feels further away from me today, and it\u2019s literally true. I moved earlier this year with my family to Bloomington, Indiana. Our house in Durham was 480 miles from Grand Central; from Bloomington, it\u2019s 760. For nearly three decades I\u2019ve listened to late-night sports radio on fifty-thousand-watt WFAN through a transistor beside my bed. Now I have to use a stream, which doesn\u2019t feel the same; the conversation on WFAN isn\u2019t quite the vernacular it used to be either.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the pall of Trump is wide and heavy, even in cities he lost by forty points. In August, I drove four hours, from Bloomington to Chicago, to hear the improvisations of the Eric Revis Quartet, and each time I looked down the Chicago River and saw the six-story letters spelling TRUMP<\/small> on the side of his building, it felt like Biff\u2019s rule in Back to the Future II<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In late September, I visited New York for only the second time since my first child was born two and a half years ago. I walked from my hotel on the Lower East Side up to Bleecker Street and over to (Le) Poisson Rouge\u2014noting all of the boutique bars and restaurants that weren\u2019t there twenty years ago, or even two years ago\u2014for a show by the experimental ambient ensemble Bing & Ruth, along with Arone Dyer\u2019s Dronechoir, which featured seventeen women onstage and meandering throughout the venue singing drone for sixty minutes. It was a Wednesday night, and there were nearly two hundred people in attendance, most of them under age forty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bing & Ruth performing at (Le) Poisson Rouge, September 20, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

My work has provided an opportunity to interview several hundred musicians, from Marian McPartland to Sonny Rollins to Laurie Anderson to Jonny Greenwood and dozens upon dozens of obscure ones. I once left an interview with the soft-spoken Rollins, when he was in his seventies, utterly thrilled by what he told me, only to learn later that he\u2019d said the same thing verbatim in DownBeat <\/i>magazine before I was born. I can\u2019t blame him for repeating himself\u2014I would, too, if I had been forced to answer questions as frequently as he\u00a0has. The more obscure musicians tend to be more revealing.<\/p>\n

At the Big Ears Festival in 2015, I interviewed some three dozen musicians, including the pianist and composer David Moore, who founded and leads Bing & Ruth. During our conversation, I experienced something unexpected and unique: Moore, who was thirty-one at the time, was moved near tears when talking about the stories of Amy Hempel.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Moore was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1983. His father plays old-time country fiddle, and they attend an old-time and bluegrass festival every year in Wichita. Moore picked up piano at age six, and then took drums seriously as a teen, eventually gaining entry into the conservatory at the University of Missouri\u2013Kansas City for both piano and orchestral percussion. From there, he moved on to the adventurous conservatory at the New School, but his roots in Kansas remain strong, not just in the music but in the landscape itself. He explained, \u201cThe wide open spaces, the horizon in every direction, the feelings of all that open air, the idea of not being able to find a point where it all ends, the endless quality of things \u2026 All of that is still with me and it\u2019s probably in my music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moore now lives in Brooklyn. He\u2019s an average-size man, maybe five foot nine and a hundred and fifty pounds. He is nearly bald, with facial hair that varies from stubble to a short beard. In performances, he typically wears dark pants and a dark hooded sweatshirt and sometimes a knit cap, a combination he seems to wear when he\u2019s not performing, too. Onstage, his band displays a similar understated presence; they play almost hidden under a dark blue light.<\/p>\n

Moore told me that literature and language didn\u2019t play much of a role in his young life; music was his thing. He discovered Hempel\u2019s writing by accident in the summer of 2003, when he was nineteen and in music school in Kansas City:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was living in an apartment with no air-conditioning. It was hot, so I often went to the library to feel some cool air. Then I started wandering around the stacks and pulling books almost at random. Sometimes I\u2019d read only one sentence and put it back. At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom<\/i> was love at first sight. I read the first line and then the first page and on the second page the first story was already over. So I began the second story. In about two hours that day, I read half of the book. Within a couple of weeks, I\u2019d read everything Hempel had published. Her work made a profound impact on my life, and it\u2019s been a deep and important presence ever since. I found a certain kind of purity in her work. You trust the way she treats words, sentences, and building blocks. Nothing is there that doesn\u2019t need to be. So as a reader you focus on each line carefully.<\/p>\n

I considered her work to be the equivalent of a great landscape painting. It\u2019s all right there, no need for further explanations. There\u2019s a certain reductionism in her work, a way to see what\u2019s really important. There\u2019s a technical logic to the way the stories are built, which for me brings about a sense of enlightened resignation, a permission to let go of what you\u2019ve been holding onto, and to focus your intuition and attention in places that are right for you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cDaylight Come,\u201d the opening story of Hempel\u2019s 1990 collection, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom<\/i>, contains this paragraph on the first of its two pages:<\/p>\n

The Wellers, Bing and Ruth, developed something of a craving of their own. They found they liked the fried flying fish; when the Wellers announced their choice for dinner, it sounded like they were making fun of Japanese people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I mentioned this paragraph to the writer Allan Gurganus, a close friend of Hempel\u2019s. He said, \u201cIt has all of her hallmarks\u2014a folkloric kind of candor, a communicable affection for its characters, and the verbal wit that involves you, the reader, as when you are driven to say the \u2018fried flying fish\u2019 phrase aloud to see why it would sound racist to an Asian ear.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Bing & Ruth\u2019s break came in 2007, when Moore handed a CD of their first recordings to Ronen Givony, then a young alum of Yale\u2019s English department who has since become one of New York\u2019s most visionary music presenters, founding Wordless Music and blending genres of classical and avant-garde music into unclassifiable forms. Givony told me, \u201cI was getting handed and sent a lot of music, even back then. David\u2019s CD made a unique impression, to say the least. The first song, \u2018A Flat Line in a Round Face,\u2019 was probably the one piece of music I listened to the most in 2007.\u201d He went on to book Bing & Ruth a number of times at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the seminal club where Givony was a founding curator, and also in his Wordless series.<\/p>\n

Over the eleven years of its existence, Bing & Ruth has featured Moore on piano and up to fifteen other musicians, all of which play acoustic instruments except one on tape delay. In the past two years, Moore has winnowed the ensemble down to a core group: himself on piano, Jeff Ratner and Greg Chudzik bowing stand-up basses, Jeremy Viner on clarinet, and Mike Effenberger operating the tape delay. Ratner, Viner, and Effenberger have been with the band since the beginning; Chudzik joined five years ago. I know of no other band in the world with this instrumentation.<\/p>\n

Before my recent New York trip, I\u2019d been listening to Bing & Ruth\u2019s records and thinking about how to describe their music in words. When the prose doesn\u2019t come for me, I try to mine the voices of my subjects, let their words say what I can\u2019t. After their sound check at (Le) Poisson Rouge in September, I tried this with Moore: \u201cOut of what tradition does Bing & Ruth\u2019s music come?\u201d He looked off into the distance, looked back down at the table between us, looked back off into the distance, rubbed his chin and his face, and then looked just to the side of me, tilted his head, and said quietly and sincerely, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was another long pause, and then he said, \u201cI\u2019m the worst person you could ever imagine to deejay a party. I have no idea what to play. So I\u2019ve learned not to accept anymore deejay invitations. In the music we play, something similar is happening. I try to keep it as intuitive as possible, so it\u2019s hard to describe where it comes from, hard to describe where it fits.\u201d<\/p>\n

I tried a similar question on Moore\u2019s bandmates. Chudzik replied,<\/p>\n

The word ambient<\/i> is great for describing room temperature or wallpaper, but not music. There\u2019s a certain acoustic phenomenon that happens when we play, which is very intentional, where the individual instruments\u2019 sounds blend to the point where you can\u2019t really tell which instrument is which. If you listen to some of Glass\u2019s solo piano music, there\u2019s a tendency to hear instruments that aren\u2019t actually there, which happens in our music, too. I think we\u2019d all be remiss if we didn\u2019t owe a debt to the founders of minimalism, namely Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Bing & Ruth\u2019s temporary recording studio in an old church in Hudson, New York.<\/p><\/div>\n

If you google \u201cBing & Ruth,\u201d you\u2019ll find sentences and paragraphs mentioning the band together with today\u2019s burgeoning field of ambient artists, such as Holly Herndon, Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen. What makes Bing & Ruth stand apart from this group of contemporary artists is that their sound is produced live, not reproduced from prerecorded computer files. \u201cI come from a background of old-time country music,\u201d Moore told me, \u201cwith the musicians in a room together playing acoustic instruments, unamplified. That concept is important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tape-delay musician Mike Effenberger explained that the physical presence of each musician in the room together informs the music. \u201cTime and gesture,\u201d he says, \u201care the main attraction and are often not notated at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When we moved to Bloomington, we found a rental property owned by an audio engineer and producer in Los Angeles, Brian Bender. Built near downtown in 1890, the house was his childhood home, inherited from his mother when she passed away. Not quick to rent to students, nor to sell when downtown Bloomington real estate is surging, and carrying the hectic schedule of a producer in LA, he\u2019d left the house vacant for a couple of years.<\/p>\n

We met him in Bloomington last October\u2014he was scouting us as much as we the property\u2014and after an afternoon of looking over the house, I joined him at a townie bar. Bender is a big man with long, sandy hair and a furry beard. We established a quick camaraderie on the subject of music, and I learned that he had assisted the producer Craig Street on Joe Henry\u2019s 2001 album, Scar<\/i>, which I have written about. I asked him which of his current projects were favorites. He mentioned working with Jos\u00e9 James, producing music for two films that would premiere at Sundance a few months later, and producing the jazz drummer Nate Smith\u2019s latest record.<\/p>\n

Then he said, \u201cThere\u2019s one band that I believe is important that I\u2019m lucky to have been involved with for several years. I\u2019ve engineered, recorded, and produced all of their recent records, and they\u2019ve got a new one coming out in a couple of months and I believe it\u2019s a high point of their work and a high point of new music in general. But I doubt you will have heard of them. Not many people have heard of them outside of certain tight circles. You have to have a pretty arcane knowledge of music to know about these guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho are they?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re called Bing & Ruth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, I called Bender and asked him to help me describe Bing & Ruth\u2019s music. He said, \u201cI\u2019d call it ambient, tonal, spectral minimalism,\u201d and then he paused and added, \u201cor something like that.\u201d He then echoed Greg Chudzik\u2019s rejection of the term ambient<\/i> to describe the band\u2019s sound: \u201cDavid doesn\u2019t identify with ambient artists. If you listen to Music for Airports<\/i>, it\u2019s an amazing record, but it\u2019s electronic in conception and execution. Bing & Ruth\u2019s music is acoustic, and I believe it\u2019s more romantic and highly emotive than most ambient music. It\u2019s music written for this band to perform in a room together. He gives each musician a set of notes that they can choose from. He gives them markers and at each marker they can play, say, a C or an F\u2014their decision. It\u2019s a shared language and shared experience. When the band\u2019s sound swells into an enormous wave, it\u2019s swelling because these guys are digging in harder. They are exercising their will on the technology, not the reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Minimalism<\/em> is a term that has been used to describe both Amy Hempel\u2019s writing and Bing & Ruth\u2019s music. Regarding the latter, Chudzik put it this way: \u201cI\u2019d say that using the minimalist<\/i> term broadly, that that defines us the best, in the sense that we\u2019re using a minimal set of parameters to explore an entire world.\u201d This is a good way of getting at the foundation of\u00a0Hempel\u2019s work, too.\u00a0Of\u00a0At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom<\/i>, <\/i>Rick Moody wrote, \u201cIt\u2019s true that it took Hempel five years to write the 137 pages of [this] volume of stories, and it\u2019s true that this was actually fast <\/i>for her \u2026 but when the results are as pitch-perfect and unforgettable as [the stories in this volume], all of them stunners \u2026 who really gives a shit how long the book takes?\u201d<\/p>\n

Moody goes on to consider a story in Hempel\u2019s book called \u201cThe Harvest\u201d: \u201cI remember being arrested not only by the broad course of the story itself, but most especially by the double-space break in the middle, after which the following appeared: \u2018I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. I\u2019m going to start now and tell you what I left out of \u201cThe Harvest,\u201d\u00a0and maybe begin to wonder why I had to leave it out.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

I wrote to Hempel and asked her about Moore\u2019s \u201clove at first read.\u201d She said, \u201cI like to open a collection with a short-short story, and have done so in each of mine. I like to show a reader what it\u2019s possible to do in a small space.\u201d<\/p>\n

And what about the influence of her writing on Moore\u2019s music?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was such a lovely surprise to hear that David Moore had thought to name his band after characters I had created in that story!\u201d she responded. \u201cI was very moved by that. I feel an affinity with some musicians in terms of the rhythm of sentences or lines in a story and in a song. You can certainly hear this in the sentences of Barry Hannah, for example, and he was a musician as well as a writer. You can even hear it in his titles: \u2018Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa,\u2019\u00a0for example. And I took that in when I was starting to write. David sent me some of his music years ago, and I don\u2019t know if I was hearing my<\/i> influence, but I remember thinking we were\u00a0aligned in our thinking about what needed to be there and what did not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sam Stephenson<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0biography of W. Eugene Smith, <\/em>Gene Smith\u2019s Sink: A Wide Angle View<\/a>, was just published.\u00a0Join us on October 26 as we celebrate the publication of\u00a0<\/strong>Stephenson\u2019s book at National Sawdust<\/a>, with performances by\u00a0percussionist Victor Pablo, pianist Angelica Sanchez, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, and a string quartet from Wordless Music Orchestra (Pauline Kim Harris, Ravenna Lipchik, Isabel Hagen, and Clarice Jensen).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  New York has felt like a second home since my parents first took me there as a teen in the early eighties. I grew up in rural coastal North Carolina, but the Mets became my team in 1979 when we got cable TV, and WOR carried 162 Mets games. On that first trip, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[31145,10411,14257,12223,22583,5235,31143,31137,31138,31146,13057,31152,18148,31141,30444,31148,11368,31139,16968,31142,31150,31149,125,173,339,3217,31151,31147,31144,1550],"class_list":["post-116865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen","tag-allan-gurganus","tag-ambient-music","tag-amy-hempel","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-barry-hannah","tag-ben-frost","tag-bing-ruth","tag-bloomington","tag-brian-bender","tag-brian-eno","tag-greg-chudzik","tag-holly-herndon","tag-jeremy-viner","tag-joe-henry","tag-jose-james","tag-le-poisson-rouge","tag-long-john-nebel","tag-mets","tag-mike-effenberger","tag-music-for-airports","tag-nate-smith","tag-new-york-city","tag-north-carolina","tag-radio","tag-rick-moody","tag-ronen-givony","tag-tape-delay","tag-tim-hecker","tag-w-eugene-smith"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBing & Ruth and Amy & David<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How David Moore, of the band Bing & Ruth, discovered his music in Amy Hempel\u2019s stories.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/bing-ruth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bing & Ruth and Amy & David by Sam Stephenson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 19, 2017 \u2013   New York has felt like a second home since my parents first took me there as a teen in the early eighties. 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