Posted: 11/11/2014 05:11:45 PM EST
Updated: 11/11/2014 05:11:47 PM EST
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@ManJourn
MANCHESTER >> Talk about a union of opposites.
On the surface, it's a long way from the heavy, blues-drenched power rock of Led Zeppelin, one of the few popular musical ensembles that can lay a claim to being transformative and influential, to the mellower, sweeter rhythms of chamber music.
But Ari Rudiakov, the artistic director of the Manchester Music Festival, who plays viola in the music festival's chamber music string ensembles, hopes to chip away at the walls between popular and classical music. On Friday, Nov. 14, a string quartet from the music festival - which will include Rudiakov and his wife, Joana Genova, on violin - will perform at a benefit concert in Manchester with Out on the Tiles, a Led Zeppelin tribute band based in Hudson Falls, N.Y.
Rudiakov's recent fund-raising events for the music festival have included tribute bands ranging from Jimmy Buffett to The Beatles.
And there is far more to the music of Led Zeppelin, the 1970s supergroup, than meets the eye, he said.
'What I like about Led Zeppelin, apart from the fact I think all their songs are incredibly inventive ... is they bring a gestalt to what they do that is thinly separated from what we do,' he said. 'The music goes around, and the degrees of separation, for me, increasingly are perceptions and barricades put up by others.'
In the 1970s, Led Zeppelin was a quartet - guitarist Jimmy Page, lead singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham. The group recorded nine studio albums, and six of them reached the top spot on Billboard's rankings of best selling albums. They sold more than 100 million records in the U.S. alone, and about 300 million worldwide, dating from their founding as a band in 1968. Several of their songs - 'Whole Lotta Love,' 'Good Times, Bad Times,' 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Kashmir,' to name a few examples - transcended popular music to become classics.
The group was also versatile. They could play heavy, crunching rock, and then play acoustic pieces influenced by Celtic mythology. They drew inspiration and ideas from the classical music world as well. Both Jimmy Page, the group's organizer and leader, and John Paul Jones, the bassist, were classically trained musicians, Rudiakov said.
Rudiakov crossed paths with Jonathan Newell, the bandleader of Out on the Tiles, last year when the music festival's quartet traveled to Hudson Falls, N.Y., to perform at an event Newell organized there. Newell's band name comes from the title of a song from Led Zeppelin's third album. Newell is a classically trained composer and pianist, has taught music at the college level for more than 20 years and is now a professor of music at the College of St. Joseph's in Rutland, Vt.
His Led Zeppelin tribute band piqued Rudiakov's interest. Rudiakov enjoyed Led Zeppelin alongside Mozart and Beethoven, and the conversation planted the seed for bringing their act to Manchester, Rudiakov said.
'This is a great crossover, a cross-pollination of a whole variety of things,' he said. 'We're trying to gather people together to enjoy what amounts to a rock concert and observe the fact that you can have seamlessly integrated strings in with the show, and draw attention to the fact that we teach people how to play those stringed instruments.'
Newell, who is renovating a former movie theater in Hudson Falls into a music hall, launched the Out on the Tiles project two years ago, when he was unable to find a Led Zeppelin tribute band he could afford for an event he was hosting. While he began as a classically trained pianist, he also moonlighted as a rock guitarist.
'When you think about what sort of musical literature you want to play as a guitarist, Led Zeppelin is at the top of that list,' he said. 'It became music that spoke to me - it's just a huge sound.'
They all seemed to want to make great, important music, and were all skilled instrumentalists, he said, their reputation for hard-core partying on the road notwithstanding.
It didn't take long to form Out on the Tiles, he said.
'I just approached three different people, and we put it together,' he said. 'We felt an instant chemistry, and we've been playing together ever since.'
They don't try to repeat the origiinal recordings note-for note, but fans will easily recognize the tunes, he said, and even Led Zeppelin played them differently from one night to the next. Out on the Tiles starts with the harmonic structure of the tunes, but there's room in their jazz-like approach for individual improvisation, Newell said.
This weekend's concert will include some of Led Zeppelin's best-known pieces and a few more obscure ones. The music festival's string quartet will perform on about a third of them, Rudiakov said. People can sit and listen - or get up and dance.
Andrew McKeever will perform as a guest artist in this show on one acoustic piece.
What: Led Zeppelin tribute concert
When: 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14
Where: Maple Street School, 332 Maple St., Manchester Center
Admission: $28
Information: 802-362-1956, mmfvt.org
Entities 0 Name: Zeppelin Count: 13 1 Name: Rudiakov Count: 7 2 Name: Newell Count: 5 3 Name: Hudson Falls Count: 3 4 Name: John Paul Jones Count: 2 5 Name: Manchester Count: 2 6 Name: Jimmy Page Count: 2 7 Name: MANCHESTER & GT Count: 1 8 Name: Manchester Music Festival Count: 1 9 Name: Manchester Center Admission Count: 1 10 Name: John Bonham Count: 1 11 Name: Robert Plant Count: 1 12 Name: Ari Rudiakov Count: 1 13 Name: Andrew McKeever Count: 1 14 Name: College of St. Joseph Count: 1 15 Name: Celtic Count: 1 16 Name: Mozart Count: 1 17 Name: U.S. Count: 1 18 Name: Kashmir Count: 1 19 Name: The Beatles Count: 1 20 Name: Vt. Count: 1 21 Name: N.Y. Rudiakov Count: 1 22 Name: N.Y. Count: 1 23 Name: Rutland Count: 1 24 Name: Jonathan Newell Count: 1 25 Name: Beethoven Count: 1 26 Name: Joana Genova Count: 1 27 Name: Maple Street School Count: 1 28 Name: Jimmy Buffett Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1uSFcMk Title: Robert Plant Reportedly Tears Up $800 Million Led Zeppelin Reunion Contract Description: Sorry to disappoint, fans of Led Zeppelin, but it doesn't look like a reunion will be happening any time soon. According to a report from UK publication The Mirror, the group's famed lead singer Robert Plant literally tore up a contract to reunite the band worth almost $800 million, saying the [...]
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