yesaroun' Duo

By David Wildman, [Boston] Globe Correspondent, 2/11/2001

Twentieth-century classical music has long had the reputation of being overly obscure and didactic. Now that it is the 21st century, two 21-year-olds from Jamaica Plain are bent on changing the face of modern classical music with their new ensemble, the Yesaroun Duo.

Percussionist Samuel Solomon and saxophonist Eric Hewitt first met when they both played in the Greater Boston Youth Symphony. Now Solomon is attending Juilliard in New York City and Hewitt is at The New England Conservatory, but they meet regularly for their ongoing project - commissioning and playing the works of young composers.

''As you can imagine, there aren't a lot of works written for percussion and saxophone,'' says Solomon.

''We do fund-raising and use the money to pay composers we know to write pieces for our ensemble,'' says Hewitt. ''These are all young composers in their 20s like us, and for a lot of them it will be the first time they've gotten paid for a work. Of course, we can't really pay them a lot of money.''

The compositions, some of which come from a loose group that call themselves The Minimum Security Composers Collective, often combine a rich variety of elements unusual to classical music, including smatterings of avant-garde jazz, rock, and funk.

''There's one piece that was written for us by Adam B. Silverman called Smelting Solid Gold,'' says Solomon. ''It's a series of deconstructed James Brown riffs. It speeds up and slows down as if it were being played on a turntable.''

Another work, Suspended Contact, written for the duo by young composer [Shawn Crouch], has epic drum swells as the saxophone swims along in smooth stream-of-consciousness melodies.

A Yesaroun Duo performance also includes solo pieces such as Gunther Schuller's ''Marimbology,'' performed by Solomon, who in his short career has earned honors such as being made a Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, for which he received the Pierre Mayer Award.

Hewitt, who has also played at Tanglewood and with the Boston Philharmonic, is an eclectic and diverse musician as comfortable playing with the Ryles Jazz Orchestra as he is soloing on bass clarinet for MIT composer Evan Ziporyn's complex work, Tsimindao Ghmerto.