The legendary cello indie orchestra that has crossed boundaries and blurred lines between musical genres is coming to Moscow. The Portland Cello Project (PCP) will be performing Friday, Sept. 6, at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre.
Tarina Westlund | courtesy
Juliette Do from RPM Media said though PCP normally plays for much larger venues, she was able to pull them in to Moscow for the night between their Spokane and Missoula shows.
“It is really an electric performance,” Do said.
Doug Jenkins, artistic director, composer and cellist member of PCP, writes 15-20 new scores each performance and has lead the band through previous albums, original songs and covers.
“I write most of the arrangements for the songs we play and do a lot of the overall organizational stuff,” Jenkins said. “I’ve probably written a thousand arrangements for this group in the last six years since we started.”
Jenkins said he came to the cello relatively late at the age of 17 or 18 compared to the younger age a cellist usually begins. “It was just luck and serendipity,” he said. “I happened to luck into having a really great teacher when I started or else I never would have been able to actually play.”
PCP’s feature at the Kenworthy will be part of their “Beck, Back, & Brubeck” tour, the third of five legs in the tour, which is half way through their year-and-a-half tour cycle.
“I think the first leg (of the tour) every night was sold out,” Jenkins said. “It’s been going great and it’s such a fun show. It’s definitely a fun variety of a show to be going through the Baroque period to the very modern and then back a little bit, and the styles are all so different but they are all so fun- everything is pretty up-beat and interesting.”
Featuring music created by Beck Hansen
The central pieces of the show include music created by Beck Hansen, whose latest album was released not digitally, but in sheet music format so the only way people can hear it is to actually perform it or watch a performance, said Do.
“He did this hoping that a ton of people would start performing (it) on their own, which they have, but the PCP is the first group to actually perform and interpret all 20 songs on that album,” she said.
Jenkins said Hansen had been working on the sheet music for over six years before he released it.
“We grabbed that,” Jenkins said. “We knew when it was coming out and booked a show the next weekend so we would have (the music) for a week. We were going to try to learn it all in a week, all 20 songs, and then perform them that next weekend.”
Jenkins said PCP decided to record Hansen’s songs while learning them in the same week and had the record out with all 20 songs two weeks after its debut.
“That felt really good,” he said. “That felt like it was a result of so many years of collaborating with people and doing things on short notice and writing. That felt like a big thing for us.”
PCP will incorporate Hansen’s newer pieces that have not been heard into this concert, and they are blending it in with some jazz by Dave Brubeck and classics by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The start of something extraordinary
When PCP came together in 2007 it wasn’t the typical start to a cellist ensemble.
“How we came about is so different then what we developed into,” Jenkins said.
He said the group started off with a random get together of cellists to read and play classical music together.
“There is actually a fair amount of classical music written for cello octet, cello ensemble, and we had a few beers and played a lot of classical music together,” Jenkins said. “Then we had the idea of performing (and) playing this music in bars. So we did that and it went over pretty well.”
Over the next year or two, PCP’s style evolved into playing music normally not heard on the cello, he said. One of their first covers was Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and they invited friends and fellow musicians on stage to collaborate and put on a show with a big variety of music. PCP celebrates all kinds of music from all kinds of traditions, but doing it with the cello and reaching out to audiences in venues where the cello wouldn’t normally be seen–bars, clubs, loading docks, etc.
“The transition in music didn’t come all that easily to the group,” Jenkins said.”Definitely getting the feel right for very different styles than any of us were really use to playing– it was tricky. Some of our members are jazz players; they became jazz players even though they are classically trained.”
Blending the cello with hip-hop
PCP created a hip-hop record meant to be an homage to hip-hop music–what Jenkins said is one of the most vibrant art forms in America today.
“We (recorded) “All of the Lights” and that became a hit right away; it was like half a million hits on YouTube,” he said. “We didn’t even expect that, so (we decided) to make a record out of it, and we made the record in the next two or three weeks after that video came out, but it didn’t feel right.”
Jenkins said it was difficult for the group to not only get the rhythm in the right place temporally, but to make it feel right too. It took a year of touring and sitting on it at home and deciding not to release it. After a year, they went back in, threw out the whole old record and completely re-recorded a new one and then put it out right away.
Special guest Jolie Holland to join PCP
Accompanying PCP is indie country/folk singer Jolie Holland. This talented vocalist will be featured in several of the Beck pieces PCP will be performing.
“She is just really astoundingly great on her own,” Do said. “It’s kind of a double bonus to have them both come through town for the night.”
Entertainment Weekly claims PCP is “An ace group of rotating cellists who take everything from Britney’s “Toxic” to the Dandy Warhols and postmodern Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in their performances.”
Tickets for the show may be purchased for $12 at Book People or online at brownpapertickets.com, or they are $15 at the door.
Emily Vaartstra can be reached at [email protected]