Dirty Projectors and The Los Angeles Philharmonic

By: Elizabeth Marcellino | February 22, 2010 | Music

Out looking for a night of good, live music in town, most folks wouldn’t dream up The Echo and Walt Disney Concert Hall in the same thought. But the Eastside music club is where Johanna Rees, senior program manager for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, first saw Dirty Projectors and thought they’d be a “great fit for the concert hall.”

Months later, the Brooklyn-based, imaginative, indie rock band is set to perform with the orchestra, in a show Rees says will be “completely different than any other show they’ve done before.”

The Philharmonic has been making eclectic matches like this for six years, but Rees and Chad Smith, vice president of artistic planning, say there’s nothing formulaic about the effort.

“It’s not a series that we are trying to plug [bands] into. … We could do three shows [like this] one year and zero the next,” Rees says.

The Feb. 27 performance will feature the Philharmonic first, playing a series of orchestral pieces chosen in collaboration with David Longstreth, Dirty Projector’s innovative front man. The format follows that of the orchestra’s well-reviewed collaboration with Grizzly Bear in 2008.

It’s not about the orchestra reimagining the band’s work or vice versa, but about letting both groups “do what they do best,” says Smith, “finding complementary performances and bringing them together in a unified whole.”

“For most [of the indie audiences], it’s the first time hearing the orchestra in its full glory,” says Rees.

The repertoire, still not fixed by mid-January, is being selected through a “very iterative” discussion of Longstreth’s musical influences and the works in the classical canon the band finds interesting, says Smith.

The creative collaboration is a chance to “get inside of each other’s heads,” Rees says. She likens the work of building the show to creating a play, hinting at the complexity of the finished product.

The diversity of musical ideas and forms that animate Dirty Projectors songs are part of what influenced the creative team to bring the group on board.

“It’s such an eclectic sound that they create … with influences well beyond the rock ’n’ roll world,” Smith says.

Dirty Projectors will play its own music in the second half of the show. Experimental, complicated, compelling and precise are all words used to describe the band’s distinctive work. Its last full-length release, Bitte Orca, offers intricately blended and contrasted vocals as another form of instrumentation alongside Longstreth’s virtuoso guitar acrobatics. It received largely rave reviews.

If you’re not familiar with their music, a two-track single (dubbed a “digital 7-inch” by the band), released in January, is available free at http://www.dirtyprojectors.net.

Fans, not to mention Longstreth and his band mates, should be woozy at the thought of hearing that complex sound through the fabled acoustics of the Disney Concert Hall. And they may be pleasantly surprised to find out how much they enjoy live classical music — something they’d never discover at The Echo.

Feb. 27, 8 p.m. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tickets available at the box office, Tuesday-Sunday, 12-6 p.m., or online at http://www.laphil.com. A press release detailing the orchestral repertoire is available at http://www.laphil.com