Pepperland, the evening-length work the Mark Morris Dance Group will bring to the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, Feb. 7, was first a commission from the city of Liverpool, England. It asked Morris to pay choreographic tribute for the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But it is also a showcase for the talent of Ethan Iverson, the jazz pianist, arranger, musical director, and composer for Morris’ rethinking of the venerable rock album.
“I’m not interested in a Beatles tribute at all,” Morris said in an interview with TheSan Diego Tribune at the time. “If you want that, put on the record. I do. It’s nice. ... [Pepperland] is for those who love or hate The Beatles. I mean that. It’s not reverent or irreverent. It’s a new piece, and I like it. It’s not too long, it’s wonderful, and my dancers are great. It’s a very interesting evening.”
“Apple Music only allowed us the rights to five of the songs on the Sgt. Pepper record, plus ‘Penny Lane,’ which wasn’t even on the album,” Iverson says. (The dance illustrates, in Morris’ choreographic style of music visualization, the songs: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help From My Friends,” “A Day in the Life,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Within You Without You,” and “Penny Lane,” which was recorded at the same sessions but put on a different album). Iverson’s job was to build out music for an evening-length dance work. His take on Beatles’ themes offers compatible but sometimes quirky ideas which took the dance work in much more abstract directions.
“There’s nothing worse than a program of Beatles’ covers,” Iverson says. “The music is omnipresent in our culture. A lot of times, musicians approach it too reverently. I didn’t want to rock out. People take ‘60s music and try to make it contemporary by making it louder, adding more guitars, DJs, or rap. I wanted to streamline the music and take it in the direction of European chamber music.”
Iverson’s unusual selection of instruments includes voice, theremin, soprano sax, trombone, piano, organ, harpsichord, and percussion.
Iverson may have been the perfect person to take on The Beatles. He was one of the founding members of The Bad Plus, called “the power jazz trio with a rock and roll heart” by The Wall Street Journal and “the loudest piano trio ever” by themselves. Part of their reputation was earned by their versions of such rock classics as Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” the Pixies’ “Velouria,” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Other Bad Plus revisions include jazz versions of Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon.” They even composed a jazzified but respectful version of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” A non-jazz-fan writing for Esquire magazine characterized the irreverent approach of the group: “The core groove of Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ is transformed into a hectic series of freak-outs that sound like Frank Zappa bumping into Quincy Jones at Studio 54.”
“What made us fresh was our commitment to indie rock music as a resource, as well as a kind of Steve Reichian minimalism.” Iverson’s partners were bassist Reid Anderson and drummer David King. “We met quite young. We were all from the Midwest, and there was a family feeling and Midwestern lunacy to our take on avant garde jazz. The great jazz critic Stanley Crouch called me after seeing Robert Altman’s (2006) film of Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion.” He says, I understand The Bad Plus better now.’”
The trio recorded 12 studio albums together. Iverson left in 2017 to pursue other opportunities, including Pepperland. A new project with Morris, The Look of Love, featuring music by Burt Bacharach, began touring in 2020.
Mark Swed, a classical music critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in 2018: “The great advance of “Sgt. Pepper” was the Beatles’ genius for contrasting provincially comfy old Liverpool with the mod rockers of the late 1960s as well as the psychedelic visions of unseen, unimaginable other worlds. No pop record of the past, and none of such significance since, had its musical range, from music hall sentimentality to Bach to Ravi Shankar to the avant-garde of Stockhausen, John Cage and Luciano Berio.”
Reviewing Morris’ Pepperland, he says: “Every single move in the dance is, while being utterly musical, entirely unexpected. What first seems wrong always feels right, as though, to confirm John Lennon’s lyric, ‘Nothing real, but nothing to get hung about.’”
Before his time with The Bad Plus, Iverson played the piano for Morris classes and rehearsals and served as his musical director for five years. “Mark was one of my crucial mentors. There is a cliché: ‘Hear the dance, see the music.’ I was there, playing the piano for the creation of Mark’s dance [in 2001] ‘V,’ which is set to the Schumann Piano Quintet (in E flat). Mark’s imagination is boundless. There are four big movements to the piece which he unpacks structurally. He’s been criticized for being note-by-note literal in his dances, but watching ‘V’ will teach you everything you need to know about that piece of music.”
In Pepperland, Iverson composed variations using the forms scherzo, allegro, adagio, and the blues. “They all have references to Sgt. Pepper. The allegro used a trombone line from the album as a starting point. The adagio is inspired by lyrics Lennon and McCarthy wrote for ‘The Lonely Hearts Club [Band]’”
The blues movement is a tangent Iverson went off on based on the first name of Sgt. Pepper: Wilbur.
“The Wilbur Scoville system was developed to measure the heat of hot peppers. There is also a hint of the blues guitar riff from the opening of the album.”
