Category: Listen

Nearly fifteen years ago, jazz producer Helen Keane who had been Bill Evans manager for decades, produced a demo of a jazz piano trio featuring Roger Davidson, who is also known as a composer of large scale orchestral and choral works. This recording, Davidson’s first as a jazzer and a rubric for subsequent forays such as the 2003 bossa-nova infused Rodgers in Rio, was actually the brainchild of Keane who had heard Davidson perform one of his own “classical” compositions and afterwards exclaimed: “You play really well. What about starting to play jazz?” While Keane was impressed enough to turn the demo into a full album, somehow the session was never released until this month. If you expect this to be some sort of classical crossover thing, you’d be completely mistaken. Davidson’s playing is idiomatically jazz all the way, helped in no small part by his handy sidemen, bassist and the aptly named drummer David Ratajczak. This is all the more remarkable given that the orchestral and choral compositions I’ve heard by Davidson are not at all jazz-tinged.

—FJO

More than a year after their final concert, The Dale Warland Singers are letting their fans down easy by releasing a few last CDs, and the Twin Cities-based a cappella choral group is in characteristically fine form on this outing. I was prepared for a slightly drippy, sentimental effort based on the album’s title, but the disc captures more of a puritan, hard-working sort of heartland. The brisker temperatures of fall pair especially well with Carol Barnett’s contribution, “McKay,” a selection from her three-part 2003 commission from the Singers, An American Thanksgiving. Using text by Samuel Stennet (1787), the piece is based on arrangements of Appalachian hymns published in The Sacred Harp in 1844. The simple tune and sentiments expressed are transformed into a powerful celebration when harnessed to this 40-voice chorus. Thanks to deadly accurate intonation on the part of the sopranos, the performance might trick listeners into believing they have actually taken flight over the “sweet fields arrayed in living green/ and rivers of delight.”

—MS

The enfants terribles of Juilliard who sowed the seeds of the minimalist movement (a.k.a. Steve Reich and Philip Glass) are both represented here by works for two pianos, performed by Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa. Reich’s early work, Piano Phase, displays the composer’s thrilling formalistic rigor, which then gets contrasted by Glass’s keen dramatic sensibilities. Re-scored from its original three-piano format by the performers, Glass’s Six Scenes from “Les Enfants Terribles” retains all of the original’s cinematic flair. The music ranges broadly in mood, from the offbeat majesty of the Overture to the melancholic “Elizabeth Chooses a Career.”

—RN

Ezra Weiss, piano; Michael Philip Mossman, trumpet and fluegelhorn; Antonio Hart-alto sax and flute; Kelly Roberge-tenor sax, clarinet and bass clarinet; Leon Lee Dorsey, bass; Billy Hart or Jason Brown, drums.

Pianist Ezra Weiss’s new album of all originals for jazz sextet shares much in common with classic early 1960s Blue Note albums featuring similar instrumental line-ups, which is unusual for reasons other than the fact that for Weiss, born in 1979, the ’60s are not even a hazy memory. Still, like those classic albums—I’m thinking of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch or Wayne Shorter’s The All Seeing Eye—there’s an amazing group energy that comes from a real sense of the music being shared. The big difference here is that most such records were led by horn players rather than from the keyboard. For a pianist, Weiss is remarkably understated, allowing his sidemen to shine and share center stage with him. But that’s not to say he’s got nothing to say pianistically—listen to the sensitive way he comps under bassist Leon Lee Dorsey in “The Dancer”—rather, he is aware that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts which is the essence of good classical chamber music playing and great small group jazz playing as well. It’s ultimately also the essence of being a good composer too. It’s noteworthy that Weiss, who studied composition with Wendell Logan at Oberlin, identifies himself as a composer first; he is!

—FJO

Dawn Upshaw throws herself at the text she’s been given here with such force, you’ll be forgiven if for the first minute of Golijov’s Ayre you become disoriented—I found myself wondering if I was listening to a Roma woman captured on tape by an enterprising ethnomusicologist. But then the klezmer line weaves its way into the track and the piercing power of Upshaw’s upper range enters the picture, and it’s quite obvious that no, this is not some gypsy camp fantasy but Golijov at work once again weaving geographies to great artistic effect. The music at the base of this work is not the composer’s, but rather a collection of traditional material arranged and assembled into this song cycle, designed to compliment Berio’s Folk Songs, with which it shares space on the disc.

—MS

Stephen Vitielio lets his cerebral hair down so to speak on the latest New Albion release Scratchy Monsters, Laughing Ghosts. Gone are the carefully plotted conceptual ideas that typically form the foundation of the sound artist’s sonic explorations. Instead, Vitielio teams up with slide guitarist extraordinaire, David Tronzo. The result is a roaming textural journey which often eases into repetitious jazz-like accompaniments with twangy melodic riffs that cut through the comfortably trippy wash of electronics. The first four tracks are given the appropriate title Long Walk, as the music seems to stroll through territories that resemble the blues, prog rock, and child-like lullabies, all veiled by the musicians’ experimental sensibilities.

—RN

ARTE Quartett
Put together a saxophone quartet, harpsichord, and Indian vocal techniques. The sax quartet should drown out the harpsichord and the harpsichord’s slight delay ought to sound too exposed in music which is essentially monophonic, right? It shouldn’t work, but it does! The saxes sometimes sound like tamburas, at other times like a choir of sarangis; the harpsichord like a sarod on overdrive. Once again, Terry Riley finds a way to reconcile the seemingly unreconcilable, and in so doing creates music that is simultaneously totally natural and totally new.

—FJO

Lean in close, kids, I have two guilty confessions to make. My ears have been stretched and turned inside out by all sorts of new sounds and compositions, but sometimes I just long for a good groove to fall in and dance around a bit. But after all this new music yoga, the average dancehall beats sound just a little too empty. To the rescue come Jessica Lurie and Andre Drury. “Paprikash,” the first track off their collaboration this is what it’s like to be features Jess totally rockin’ out on sax (and here’s my second confession—though I know better, I still actually exclaimed to the officemates, “And that’s a girl!”). Andrew is throwing the irresistible dance beats down over the scronk, and it’s a recipe for three minutes in new music dance heaven.

—MS

Robert Ashley’s latest opera, Celestial Excursions, is partially set in an “assisted living facility.” At one point during a counseling session, the patients inform us “the only thing that counts is what people don’t understand. If you make it so they can understand it, you are a fool and it’s not going to be any good anyway.” Coming from Ashley, statements like this become metonymical and make perfect sense. As always, the composer manages to travel far beyond the limits of opera—you won’t find any bel canto singing here. Sonically, the overall impact is closer to rap music, with its fountain of motor rhythm text, the opera sets the mind in wander-mode with signposts pointing in every possible direction, all eventually leading to the vast conceptual solar system which Ashley gleefully orbits.

—RN

Writing a series of 24 short keyboard pieces in all the major and minor keys of a 12-note scale (whether equally-tempered or otherwise) is, of course, an idea that goes back to Bach, but it has since captured the imagination of composers as unrelated as Chopin and Shostakovich. It’s an idea that continues to resonate among contemporary American composers, too, ranging from Easley Blackwood, who created a cycle in all equal temperaments between 13 and 24, and Sebastian Chang, who created an atonal cycle based on each trichord, to Henry Martin whose jazzy preludes and fugues were a CD highlight last year.

Ken Benshoof’s set, composed in 2003, is probably closest in spirit to Henry Martin’s in terms of his reconciliation of common practice period pianism with American vernacularisms. Where it stands alone among all the other cycles I’ve heard, however, is in its brevity. The longest one clocks in at under three minutes while the shortest, offered here, is a mere three measures. But undoubtedly next year someone will attempt to surpass this with a whole cycle that’s just 24 notes!

—FJO