by Jessi Hafer

Though my article last year on Fresno musician Armen Nalbandian referred to him as a jazz pianist, Fresno has since seen Armen as more genre-defying.

If you haven’t already noticed this from attending one of Armen’s performances at the Fresno Art Museum or Veni Vidi Vici’s, you can take his several upcoming recordings (each with a different line-up of musicians) as evidence: one solo recording, one cd with the Armen Nalbandian trio, a duet with Derek Keller, one with Tommy Delgado (a project called “Choke the Jellyfish”), and one with Nino Moschella and the Little Big People.

Armen has hence been busy recording, rehearsing, writing, and composing. Though he has limited his performance time, Armen began touring with Nino Moschella again in late June, and he will be touring with Derek Keller in November. He has also been organizing the Festival Of Resurrected Music (FORM). Although FORM was originally slated for earlier this year in Fresno, the event has gotten bigger and bigger. Now, Armen expects the festival to occur in October, possibly in San Francisco or Sacramento to maximize exposure and audience capacity.

In addition to these tours and events, Armen is holding a benefit concert at the Fresno Art Museum on July 19 with Nino Moschella and his band. This will conclude his second season as music director for the Fresno Art Museum, and Armen expects to announce more on his future plans in late July. This July 19 concert is to benefit Habitat for Humanity New Orleans.

Armen noted that people across the country did a great job raising funds and awareness for New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, but attention and donations have waned despite continued need and neglect. Some areas of New Orleans still don’t have electricity, and a lot of working and middle class homeowners—people like the people in Fresno—have lost everything and still don’t have adequate housing.

Armen said that the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks about the time he has spent in New Orleans before the hurricane is the great food, but then even these fond recollections are overshadowed by memories of the people. “There’s an incredible brotherhood and sisterhood there,” he continued. “Everyone says hello to you on the street.” It’s one big family there, and everyone is very communally oriented. “The area just got so neglected by the government and their own people. It’s heartbreaking.”

The July 19th benefit concert will feature Armen’s new composition, “The Battle of New Orleans,” an ambitious and experimental piece in the form of a “game piece.” Armen’s approach has resulted in a 30-page book explaining how to play the piece. There are a couple of pages of written music, then pages of guidelines, rules, and instances where rules might be broken. Armen will dictate the performance of the piece during the concert, using symbols, cue cards, and hand symbols to shift the style, key, and instruments used as the piece is being played. The aptly named game piece will present about 1 to 2 hours of continuous music. It sounds like a challenge to play and a fascinating, unpredictable occurrence to listen to, not to mention quite a feat to compose.

Armen noted that the piece fits into the overall trend of the “Rhythms of Art” series, becoming more experimental. As the style shifted away from more familiar jazz sounds, the audience shifted as well. That said, Armen’s approach has always involved a strong improvisational component, and moving away from some of the more narrow views of jazz into a more experimental approach allowed for more freedom.

Armen said that even the upcoming trio cd doesn’t really have anything he would call jazz. However, he added that music, more than other art forms (i.e. visual art, live theatre, and poetry), is too often forced into big, broad categories. The MTV-effect uses visuals to tell people what they’re listening to, and “in today’s culture, unfortunately, we need to be told what to feel,” Armen explained.

He also pointed out that when you listen to music, it’s often in the background to make your immediate activity more pleasurable, which is unfortunate. You don’t usually just sit and listen to music as you might sit and read a book, watch a play, hear poetry, or look at a painting. Instead, you listen to music while you drive, clean, go for a walk, work, or write an article for The Undercurrent (good grief, I’m using music as background now, even).

It becomes so clear why improv is so important to Armen and music as a whole. The music becomes a moment. You need to pay full attention during improv, because you may never again have the opportunity to have the same sound experience. Armen brings further weight to his musical moments by using his upcoming performance as an opportunity to raise money and awareness for New Orleans, which is certainly a city that has fostered a fair share of improv.

And yet now, I have to turn off my background music as I realize that maybe New Orleans is a similar victim of the tendency to force things into genres and into the background. Maybe society has subconsciously categorized the people of New Orleans into a genre, a genre that might not be marketable enough, a genre that might not suit more desirable activities…