Category: Listen

How many percussionists does it take to screw in a light bulb? It’s safe to assume the answer is one, but did you know it takes six to put a new spin on the famous “Wipe Out” drum solo. Not exactly The Surfaris, but no less rockin’ is composer Bruce Hamilton’s Raptures of Undream. Well okay, maybe not rockin’ but in the right neighborhood at least. Each percussionist is armed with floor toms and a suspended cymbal to execute Hamilton’s polyrhythmic score. Sadly, there will be no broken surfboards or maniacal laughter here—luckily, no wipeouts either.

—RN

Listening to Chas Smith’s newest CD, Descent, is like sifting through space. It’s atmospheric and otherworldly, yet never stands still. Here and there are small craters and crescendos of electronic sound, and the harmonic landscape seems to suggest a tonic center, but then it slowly drifts into outer orbits to explore a much larger sound vocabulary. Three tracks are all Smith needed—the first two enjoying fairly long sitting times for you to find your inner Dream House—but all three employ Smith’s own take on the limits, or lack there of, of the southern steel guitar using electronic enhancements.

—AR

Playing the piccolo can’t be an easy job. A quick Google search for piccolo jokes returns 628 pages of jabs at the instrument, most revolving around a certain problems of pitch and volume. But the opening moments of Persichetti’s three-minute Parable XII (just one of 25 meditations he wrote for various solo instruments) presents the piccolo as a strikingly pastoral sounding instrument. The lone sheepherder on the hill image doesn’t really do the capabilities of the piccolo player in question, Jeannine Dennis, adequate justice as she follows the work down the virtuosic path of its middle section. Still, the romance of lush fields and babbling brooks and all that quaintness is never far from the sound if you choose to listen for it. But I couldn’t help myself. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some sheep to tend to.

—MS

Present Music, Kevin Stalheim – principal conductor

People were wryly amused when Henry Brant tongue-in-cheekly remarked upon winning the Pulitzer Prize, in his 88th year, that he was an emerging composer. But Wind, Water, Clouds and Fire composed just two years ago (2004) in his 90th year, shows that this maverick nonagenarian is continuing to develop and explore new compositional terrain. This sprawling 35-minute work for three women’s choruses and ensemble adds unabashed beauty to Brant’s toolbox of techniques and the results make the most compelling case for his spatially-conceived music I have heard yet.

—FJO

Chin up all you drift-heads, Don’t Look Down, the latest album from Suilven Recordings’ founder, Daniel Patrick Quinn, enlists the talents of fellow dronemeisters DAC Crowell and Kurt Doles. The results: an intricate haze of timbres swathed in reverb and glistening electronics which lay the groundwork for gradually evolving melodies that pirouette in slo-mo, coalescing the misty din like a crochet hook. Lose yourself inside these Eno-inspired vistas filled with sustained electric guitar, clarinet, and who knows what else. Is that a shakuhachi? The final track, Kami To Isshoni Yodooshi, injects field recordings made by Crowell last year in Japan into the wash of sound, adding a layer of complexity which sounds like an underwater celebration, a village dance and feast after finally reaching the illusive end of the rainbow.

—RN

Ever feel like you just don’t get improv? I admit it leaves me feeling intellectually lacking sometimes, and the opening seconds of Leroy Jenkins’s The Art of Improvisation sound a bit like everything I’ve ever feared about musicians working this particular stylistic bent. But take a deep breath and just listen for a few minutes more to this band of violin, pipa, piano, and percussion, and the sounds start to connect in an abstract expressionist sort of manner. The second track, the 18-minute fantasy “To Sing,” begins with a the piano dragging itself up from a watery grave before Jenkins breaks into a cadenza that would likely have had Paganini enthralled with its audacity—ostentatious flourishes skimmed over in a sul ponticello and harmonic ethereal haze. Each band member gets a chance to take a solo turn before coming together in the closing minutes. But this is not to gear up for a powerhouse ending. Rather it’s more akin of a flock of migrating birds teaming up to fly a very long commute in each others company.

—MS

The first time I heard Marin Alsop conduct was back when she led Concordia, a chamber orchestra devoted to finding the elusive meeting point between contemporary so-called classical music and more—to invoke the dreaded “so-called” again—vernacular forms of expression. A new MMC disc offers three such musical explorations by John Carbon, William Thomas McKinley, and Peter Homans. But the composer that most sparked my curiosity, since I had never before heard a note of his music, was Homans, a one-time Donald Martino student who took a 12-year hiatus from musical composition to pursue a successful career in money management. While Homans is not quite a latter day Charles Ives, his Tribute—a series of homages to Frank Zappa, Bill Evans, and Igor Stravinsky—makes a compelling case for blurring musical categories, and not always ones you might think. To my ears, the Igor movement conjured Zappa’s sense of rock abandon as much as the Frank movement captured Bill Evans’s impeccable sense of jazz timing. Wonder if Marin will ever program this in Baltimore?

—FJO

If you’re anything like me, few things excite you. But one thing definitely in the exciting camp is music that raises more questions than it answers. The artist is composer, performer, computer programmer, Frank Rothkamm who is known under eight different pseudonyms. On this CD release he’s simply referred to as Rothkamm. Photos of the artist are, shall we say, arty (is that silver lamiae underwear he’s wearing on the album cover?). The album is FB01, after Yamaha’s petite digital synth module that hit the market in the mid ’80s. I’m sad to report that I actually remember wanting one of the little black boxes when they made the pages of Keyboard magazine. Anyway, if you can get through Rothkamm’s heady manifesto, you learn that he uses these then digital-newborns as his main instrument of choice in creating music “with no imitational reference to any thing in the empirical world…axiomatic during execution in time and space.” From such lofty goals comes lofty music.

The sound of the disc is predictably retro, but just below the Jurassic hi-tech sheen there’s a virtual neural net of compositional or anti-compositional processes in place. The result is some truly unique digital music, sapping with an air of sci-fi. And like a whiff of coffee beans or a cracker to clear the palate, a brief, less-than-a-second-long R2D2-like belch of rapid sine tones cleans out the ears, not only between compositions on the CD, but also as you first enter and finally exit the album. Back into the real world you go.

—RN

Hang around in new music long enough and you start to get the impression that the field is made up pretty much exclusively of people who looked at their mothers as toddlers and said indignantly, “I can do it myself.” And the artists putting out albums on the ArtistShare label are making a declaration, albeit a professional one, of a similar sort. Ingrid Jensen has taken the plunge for the first time, perhaps chasing the success Maria Schneider has enjoyed releasing discs this way, but that childhood spark of independent creativity gets a nod on the opening track—the unsung lyrics for “At Sea” having been snagged from a poem she penned in the 9th grade to English-teacher praise. The woman has chops and she’s not shy, but as a bandleader her instincts are definitely group oriented, and from the warmth you can feel in the interactions of the band members, I get the sense that’s appreciated.

—MS

Dan Clucas, corent; Brian Walsh, clarinet; Noah Phillips, electric guitar; Michael Ibarra, contrabass; Rich West, drums

The members of Dan Clucas’s jazz quintet seem equally comfortable playing straight-ahead riffs, wigging out on distortion, or showing off their free improv skills, all of which they do in abundance, bleeding seamlessly from one mode to another on the cheekily-titled “Stating the Obvious.” While Clucas on cornet and Brian Walsh on clarinet conjure up the totally simpatico interweaving of voices of the great late ’50s and early ’60s hard bop quintets that made skeptics acknowledge jazz as bona fide chamber music, Noah Philips’s electric guitar adds some danger to the mix creating a musical mélange that would only be possible in a post-grunge universe.

—FJO