Category: Listen

According to Matthew Shipp, One is his last studio album. Yeah right, and Cher is retiring after her next farewell tour. Well, if this truly is our last dose of Shipp’s recording prowess, at least the intrepid pianist is going out with a bang. Listen as Shipp channels some cosmic energy and weaves a whole new universe in front of our ears. Chords, melodies, structures, dynamics, pitch, range…everything sounds interrelated here. Following Shipp’s head trip is a pleasure especially in tunes like the album’s opener “Arc.” With an undulating character, the piece unfolds with a relentless forward motion, perhaps unaware of its final destination—that is until it reaches its perfectly logical conclusion. Too bad if this One is indeed the last one.

—RN

Even if you buy into the old adage that there’s nothing new under the sun, that hasn’t stopped quite a few composers from trying to reorganize the pieces of the puzzle into a new picture. Often, the process includes stealing pieces from other puzzles, all in the hope of birthing some new sonic image that, if not start-from-scratch original, screws up your ear just enough to make you hear in a new way. Quinsin Nachoff is giving such theory a test drive, utilizing a “diplomatic blend of musical genres” on Magic Numbers, but where sometimes this strategy of appropriation falls down due to an inadequate understanding and/or respect for all genres involved, the collection of players assembled here make for a fluid marriage of a range of musical words. Part of his success may also lay in the fact that the individual voices are not left to wallow in their stereotypes—avoiding the cliché of syrupy orchestra strings meet sax trio, and instead making room for seven instrumentalists in a room to speak in an unforced dialect.

—MS

I’ve been a devout George Russell fan since I played his insane 1962 send-up of “You Are My Sunshine” as a college freshman. One of the first records of his I ever bought was Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, a 1968 sextet created during his expat days in Scandinavia. But that was just the first of many recordings of this mind-altering longform comprovisation which morphs from a steady groove to musique concrète plus improvised passages that recall Davidovsky. Here it is featured in a performance by Russell’s 15-piece Living Time Orchestra during his 80th birthday tour back in 2003. The groove has changed quite a bit since 1968—drummer Richie Morales adds hip-hop chops that couldn’t have existed in the ’60s under fully orchestrated pronouncements of what were originally solo piano power chords—but the electronic tape created in Stockholm as well as the overall sense of late ’60s rebellion are still very much there. It’s something we need to be reminded of more and more these days.

—FJO

The atmospheric combination of piano, percussion, and electric guitar is fully explored on The Distance, an album of composed improvisations. Tracks like “Treacle” signal the trio’s commitment to textural exploration while at the same time exposing their canonic jazz chops: these kids know their chord scales. Jump cuts between traditional ride cymbal groove and arrhythmic happy places are executed with hairpin precision—beware, it’s startling at times. Always changing things up, the album rarely settles into a lengthy jam, which is perfect for those who prefer music with an element of surprise.

—RN

John McNeil, trumpet; Allan Chase, baritone saxophone; John Hebert, bass; Matt Wilson, drums, slide whistle

Ever wondered if a twelve-tone row could swing? No? Well, honestly, the concept never crossed my mind either, but jazz trumpeter John McNeil plays that card to surprising effect off a genuine Schoenberg quotation. It’s just a three-minute tune making an appearance at the end of a disc that’s so swank it would not surprise me in the least if Philip Marlowe walked over and lit my cigarette, but it’s also more than just a clever closer. It really finds its groove. But when and how did the tone row find its cool? “There’s just a feeling you get from a truly atonal line—where all the pitches are present—that you can’t get from a chromatic line,” writes McNeil, who then lets us in on a little secret. “Sometimes when I get a commission to write some ‘inside’ music, I can get a tone row in there, and they won’t even know it.”

—MS

2005 Broadway Revival Cast starring Michael Cerveris and Patti LuPone

Composers who write for symphony orchestra have frequently disparaged their Broadway and Hollywood colleagues for outsourcing the orchestration of their music to other people rather than doing it themselves. But it’s a long-standing tradition that’s never gone away for a variety of reasons, some artistic and some just practical. Even a composer as trained as Stephen Sondheim turns over the job of orchestrating to someone else. Although Sondheim’s piano scores are impeccable in their precision—he studied with Milton Babbitt after all—his primary orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, is largely responsible for the idiosyncratic timbral world we’ve come to know as Sondheim’s.

So what happens when you strip out the orchestration of a Sondheim musical and completely rescore it? Does it still sound like Sondheim? That’s exactly what Sarah Travis has done with the most orchestral of Sondheim’s works, Sweeney Todd, reducing the orchestration to merely ten parts. The result is a radical transformation along the lines of Josh Rifkin’s recording of the Bach B-Minor Mass in which parts traditionally sung by choruses were given to solo vocalists instead. Like Rifkin’s Bach, Travis’s Sondheim has remarkable clarity and allows the listener to focus on some of the subtler details of Sondheim’s score such as its numerous inner voicings and cross rhythms. But while Travis is the one who brought these arrangements to fruition, the real mastermind behind the idea was director John Doyle whose specialty is deconstructing musicals to their barest essentials and having instrument-playing cast members themselves serve as the orchestra, kinda like what John Eaton has been doing with the Pocket Opera company for years. And Patti LuPone on tuba as well as singing Mrs. Lovett is also quite a surprise. Who knew?

—FJO

Equal parts Romper Room silliness and tuxedo seriousness, Sean Hickey’s Left at the Fork in the Road is wistfully tuneful. Listening is like eavesdropping on a tentative conversation between the trio of instruments. Perhaps they’re wondering where the French horn and oboe went, the phantom members whose absence prevents the piece from classical wind quintet status. No matter, the piece gets along fine without them.

—RN

While listening to Randy Woolf’s new release, I read Scott Johnson’s brief liner essay on the obliteration of genre—the sort of sonic no-man’s-land he argues Woolf is working in. How does that distort (or not distort, depending on how you look at it) the way the listener comprehends a piece of music? So I take my headphones off and then put them back on, all while trying to trick myself into believing that I don’t know what disc is already in my stereo. I am hoping just to listen to the sounds without knowing that this is “new music” by a “trained composer” and all, baggage. On No Luck, No Happiness, this listening strategy works especially well. Woolf himself does the honors at the turntable, scratching his way over samples of Rachid Taha’s Barra Barra, with violinist Todd Reynolds laying down an aggressive line in something of a transnational Roma fiddle style that’s tasty like icing. Taha’s track did its part to conjure the madness of war in the film version of Black Hawk Down, and Woolf and Reynolds captures a similar violent energy here.

—MS

Yvar Mikhashoff, piano

Back in the days of the larger than life virtuoso, usually a pianist, transcriptions and paraphrases of standard concert repertoire ranging from symphonies to opera scenes was a rather significant component of piano recitals. Chalk it up to excesses that eventually needed to be reigned in by the correctives of the period instrument movement and high modernist music played by specialists who were allowed precious little room for individual interpretation, but no one seems to do this sort of thing anymore. I’ve never heard someone do a Messiaen paraphrase or a suite from Sessions’s Montezuma as an encore! All the more reason why I was thrilled to discover Mode’s new 2-CD set devoted to similar fare by one of new music’s top pianists, the late Yvar Mikhashoff (1941-1993). But Mikhashoff claimed that the source for his interest in piano fantasias on operatic repertoire was not Leopold Godowsky or Feruccio Busoni, rather it was John Cage in whose operatic mash Europeras he had just performed.

While one disc offers fare that’s not that far removed from what 19th and early 20th-century pianists might have done to Rigoletto and Madama Butterfly, the other updates the practice with reinventions of Wozzeck and more recent operas by Kevin Volans and Sylvano Bussotti. The Bussotti opera is set in a piano bar, with the piano (performed onstage rather than in a pit), serving as the only instrumental accompaniment to the singers. From the original three-hour score, for which Mikhashoff served as the pianist at La Scala, Mikhashoff combined vocal and piano parts into this seven-movement suite.

—FJO

Infused with a folk music vibe, Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9 is definitely off the post-minimalist beaten path and carries with it an atypical clarity and reverence to classical traditions. Melodies, often quite catchy, collapse under their own weight then recede into the background, proliferating the surrounding accompaniment figures before wrestling back into the forefront again. At one point a tiny ornamental gesture takes over the entire focus and a strange trill begins to sounds as if the CD is skipping. No need to adjust your equipment though, everything is perfectly out of tune—according to equal temperament, that is—just how the composer wants it.

—RN