Category: Listen

There are all sorts of “hey, listen to this!” moments on the new Other Minds release of work by that master maverick of the piano roll, Conlon Nancarrow—early works, late works, never released material, interview excerpts. Study No. 51 dates from 1992. (The 3750 is a joke title Nancarrow offered—surely coming from the man punching the holes it must have felt like it.) Things start off simply enough, at least as compared to the composer’s more manic output for the instrument. But the material doesn’t stay so introspective for long. For the complex tempo fans in the crowd, liner-note writer Kyle Gann has done the math for ya: “the plot thickens with three more lines that bring the entire tempo matrix to 24:32:42:56:77:96.” If you can’t hear it with such precision, it’s still a hell of a ride.

—MS

Sarah Cahill, piano

There have been a lot of gamelan-inspired compositions by American composers over the past century, but few Western composers have absorbed the language of Indonesian music as originally as Evan Ziporyn. He does not merely find a way to fuse cross-cultural elements, but rather uses both Eastern and Western classical traditions, as well as elements of jazz and rock, to explore his own very personal post-minimalist voice. In Pondok, a 25-minute, four-movement solo piano composition from 2001, here convincingly conveyed by Sarah Cahill, Ziporyn uses ostinatos that are hallmarks of each of the musical idioms to create a virtuosic tour de force of immense emotional power.

—FJO

If you’ve traveled down the svelte roads of rural Ireland, chances are you’ve been stuck behind some slow farm equipment or held up by a herd of cows. Marc Johnson’s Shades of Jade album is the perfect accompaniment to such scenes. The leisure melodies forge their own deliberate pace—don’t bother honking the horn because you’re not getting to the pub any quicker. The timbral richness of Johnson’s bass, shadowed by John Scofield’s guitar and Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone during the opening track “Ton Sur Ton,” sets the mood to laidback, way back. Yet solos manage to flash and sizzle despite the unhurried tempo.

—RN

Jane Ira Bloom – soprano saxophone & live electronics, Jamie Saft – keyboards & electronics, Mark Dresser – bass, Bobby Previte – drums and electronic drums

After being subjected to a Kenny G Christmas album ad nauseum, the last thing you probably want to hear in January is a soprano saxophone. That is, unless it’s played by Jane Ira Bloom whose proficiency on the instrument (she has been the unchallenged winner of the Jazz Journalists Association soprano saxist award for years) is even further enhanced by her original exploratory compositions. On her latest release, Bloom adds electronic processing to the mix, creating a truly 21st-century sound world out of the time-honored sax-led quartet accompanied by keyboard, bass, and drums. Of course, it helps that she’s enlisted an all-star cast—Jamie Saft, Mark Dresser, and Bobby Previte—who are all equally adventurous composer/bandleaders in their own right. On “Night Skywriting,” the quartet navigates through textures that subtly waft between hard bop and sonorities more reminiscent of Stockhausen’s Telemusik and somehow never lose the groove. All the more impressive given the fact the entire set was recorded live in real time.

—FJO

A disc of solo violin music which opens with works by two Armenians, anchored by a Hindemith sonata, with some Augusta Read Thomas and Leif Segerstam thrown in for good measure—what to make of all this? No matter, because somewhere in the middle of it all, David Felder’s Another Face still manages to drop the hint: And now for something completely different. A difficult feat considering the diversity already built into this collection. But Felder’s knack for gestural contrast actually seems to tell a story in sound, not just strut and fret.

—RN

Moby Dick is Peter Westergaard’s fifth opera which, coupled with the fact that he also directed the Princeton University Opera Theatre during his more than 20 year career there, perhaps begins to account for his mastery of the idiom. Granted, Westergaard has picked himself a doozy of a subject for operatic treatment. There’s just something about the dark mist that surrounds every aspect of the tale, physically and psychologically, that makes it particularly appropriate for such exploration. And Westergaard exploits it to full advantage musically. The vocal performances turned in by this all-male cast and the orchestration eloquently capture the ambience of the plot without sacrificing the sophistication of the music. (Plus, he lets his characters talk-sing some of the material which adds welcome additional textures). This is not exactly leave-the-theatre-humming scoring, but still it seems to connect more primally than you might first expect before listening. What’s halfway between Sondheim and Wuorinen? Yeah, right about there.

—MS

Czech National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Freeman

Like father like son? Half a century ago Dave Brubeck created a sound that fused a classical music sensibility with immediacy and trappings of jazz as well as a penchant for making oddball meters groove. His son, Chris, carries on the family tradition in works that have the trappings of classical music but retain a jazz sensibility. For me, this duality is most effective in “La Grande Parade du Funk,” the third and final movement of Convergence, where the spirit of a New Orleans Mardi Gras romp is in no way compromised by scads of violins and cascading bi-tonalities.

—FJO

This must be a classical music completist’s dream: a composer’s entire oeuvre for solo piano conveniently packaged on a single compact disc. The composer in question is Roger Sessions, and the music collected here spans 50 years, nearly his entire compositional career. Like Sessions’s orchestral pieces, these works are dense and expansive. The music runs the gamut from hauntingly expressive to offbeat and individualistic. In his early Sonata No. 1, melodies break orbit momentarily before getting reeled back in to tonality, all delivered with a sheen of snappy rhythms—picture a cross between Alexander Scriabin and Christopher Rouse.

—RN

Joseph Joubert, piano
Chicago Sinfonietta conducted by Paul Freeman

Just as New World’s 3-CD set of works by the forgotten African American composer Julius Eastman ought to rewrite the history of minimalist music, Cedille’s new disc of world premiere recordings by another neglected African American, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) ought to change our assumptions about the so-called mid-century American romantics. Despite the racially restrictive world of classical music of the 1950s, Perkinson, who studied with Vittorio Giannini at Manhattan School of Music and later with Earl Kim at Princeton, wrote music as searingly beautiful and dramatically powerful as their best work as well as that of other similar minded composers now being rediscovered like Paul Creston or Nicolas Flagello. Rejecting what was probably an unattainable career in academia at the time, Perkinson earned his way by writing arrangements for Harry Belafonte and later Marvin Gaye and even briefly served as the pianist in a quartet led by Max Roach.

A sense of the blues occasionally pervades Perkinson’s remarkable Grass: Poem for Piano, Strings and Percussion. Something of an American-grown response to Bartók, even down to the timpani glissandos of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta whose eeriness undoubtedly helped made Kubrick choose that famous score for the soundtrack to The Shining. Perkinson manages to transform that eeriness into a seeming joie de vivre even though the work was written in response to the possibility of being drafted to serve in the Korean War.

—FJO