Portrait of Ad Reinhardt

Lyrics

(needs lyrics)

Chronology

• Five American Portraits
  • Gina Birch - vocals
  • Tom Rogerson - piano
  • Alex Dower - drums
  • Q - saxophone

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2023

The Ad Reinhardt tune, that's Mozart's piano concerto. [...] The piano player in there I'd gotten — it was a studio in London — the Russians had just invaded the Crimea and we were trying to record. I said, do you know anybody who can play Mozart? And I had this Mozart book. And they said, "Oh yeah," and they got me one of the piano players Tom Rogerson out of Three Trapped Tigers and he [mimics fast tapping] plays like crazy. So I have had the luck always to be able to work with good musicians.

Mayo Thompson, 2010

[...] Ad Reinhardt I got to know about when I got to know about art. And Mozart of course I had known about since I was an infant. I've heard his music all my life.

The funny thing about the Mozart piece is that my wife is a molecular biologist. We were living in Scotland at the time and she had a piano. She's also an accomplished pianist, although she doesn't play any more. At one time she had to choose between biology and the piano, and she chose biology.

Anyway, she would come home and sit down at the piano sometimes and play. One evening she came in and started playing this Mozart piece. She was working on some passage of it that didn't quite satisfy her. She's quite technically accomplished, so she was working on the left hand. I heard this figure, and I said, 'Honey, what's that you're playing?' She told me what it was, the name of the piece, and I'd heard it before but just didn't know what the name of it was.

And I said, 'Would you play that again? Just the left hand, and play it slowly.' She did, and it's the motif from 'Paint It, Black' by the Rolling Stones. This is in the second section of Piano Sonata No. 6 in D (sings). The first 32 bars of the second section of the Piano Sonata in D, that is a motif. It changes register and changes around, it doesn't stay the same way it does in the Stones' version of it, but then I thought to myself, 'Brian Jones, surely he heard that. He had piano lessons as a kid and knew Mozart, and that line had always stuck in his head. Who knows?'

So that was an easy association. And it turns out, of course, that Ad Reinhardt always painted all of his pictures black. They're all black. So there's a certain kind of literalism and a kind of associationism, trading in familiarities, some straightforward representation, which is a little bit different from what I've ever done, but like I said I don't like to do the same thing twice. So that's how that stuff came about.

Interpretations

• Musical references listed on the back of the record:
  • "Piano Sonata No. 6" K284/205b, first movement, first and second sections (W.A. Mozart)
  • cf. "Paint it Black" (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards)

Live recordings

Show
November 19, 2009	partial, video