Amina Figarova – photo provided by artist, no copyright infringement intended
Bart Platteau – photo provided by artist, no copyright infringement intended
Pianist Amina Figarova, from Azerbijan via Rotterdam to Astoria, Queens, composed September Suite in response to 9/11/01 — one of many works by musicians of all leanings and backgrounds created in response to the violent events of a decade ago. She and her sextet with Belgian flutist Bart Platteau, her husband, give the New York premiere of this piece on September 11 at the Metropolitan Room to cap a 7-city, mostly Midwestern tour. I reflect on post-9/11 jazz and new music in my upcoming CityArts column while looking at the season ahead, but it isn’t published until 9/14, so here’s an excerpt relevant to those searching for a beyond-jazz way to mark the 10th anniversary of attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Few musicians in the wake of the Bush era’s early calamities set their sights on reverse jihad, but many produced works based on dramas they experienced or observed. One such was pianist-composer Amina Figarova.
Born in Azerbijan, educated in the classics at the Baku Conservatory, by the late ’80s Amina was converting to jazz — I met her backstage at the first Moscow Jazz Festival in 1988. Going to Rotterdam for further  studies, she reappraised her direction; signed up for a foreign exchange year at Boston’s Berklee College; met, married and settled in Holland with Belgian flutist Bart Platteau, returned to the U.S. in ’98 for the Monk Institute’s summer jazz colony in Aspen.
Since then, the Amina Figarova Sextet has established an admirable concertizing/recording career, playing the Newport, Chicago and Detroit Jazz Festivals, among other major stages. They’ve worked they way up — in the early ’00s I stumbled on them during Jazz Fest in New Orleans, gigging in a sleazy tourist bar on Bourbon Street. Bart and Amina love America, and last spring moved from Rotterdam to Astoria, Queens. They traded in a nice house near a university for a ground floor apartment with a terrace on a yard, a living room big enough for a 9-foot-plus Bosendorfer with eight extra low keys and a lively social circle of creative bohemians from all over. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as the ending date of a mostly Midwest, seven-stop tour, Figarova’s sextet performs the New York premiere of her September Suite at the Metropolitan Room. It’s sure to be a resonant event.
Amina was visiting friends in Brooklyn on 9/11/01, and was so disturbed by the destruction she awoke to that she refused to watch the endless video replays. However, a little later a BBC documentary caught her attention with its story of a 9/11 widow and her daughter struggling with the WTC death of their husband/father. Viewing their trials as a passage through stages of grief, Amina sat at her piano and conjured the dark bass line of “Numb,” first of her suite’s nine movements. She likens that theme to pure evil.
Actually, Figarova is incapable of composing or performing music that evokes evil, violence or ugliness – she and Platteau live in a world where beauty is measured with purposeful nuance. In September Suite her flute-tenor sax-trumpet front line, crisp piano comping and probing or delicate solos with bass-drums support depict tension unto strife, sorrow met with compassion, denial running its brisk course, the bittersweet solace of memories, the urge for revenge but no unleashing of rage, attempts at reconstruction, the enduring pain of loss, tentative recovery of life’s promise and arrival of new maturity.
The Suite is not programmatic; it can be listened to and enjoyed without reference to 9/11. But the fact of that day is part of it, not to be dismissed or forgotten. September Suite on record returns to where it began, with “Numb” reprised in only slightly recast (sadder? wiser?) form.
We’re older, I’m sure — but sadder and wiser? Or heedless as ever? What music will you listen to on 9/11?