When I first began listening to this recording, a sliver of Brian Eno’s classic Music for Airports (1978), I just assumed it was the entire Bang on a Can ensemble playing it, because I saw pianist Vicki Chow’s name at the start of the list of performers, and because it sounded so rich. It turns out, though, that it’s just Chow and two additional musicians: percussionist David Cossin and guitarist Mark Stewart, also of Bang on a Can. And yet with that minimal available instrumentation, they’re able to flesh out the wholeness of the original piece. Now, the word “flesh” there is not entirely correct, because the source material is fairly sparse, famously so, but it’s sparse the way a very large room might be empty yet still be voluminous and communicate its volume, and this trio really gets at that spaciousness, thanks in large part to the sustain on Chow’s piano and the buzzing trail of Stewart’s electric guitar chords. The video was taped at the Ragas Live Festival at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, back in 2023, and was posted this week in advance of 2025’s festival, which is scheduled for October.
In fact, the full performance is also up on YouTube, and had been up since the middle of last year, part of a playlist of 20 videos from the festival:
