Category: Listen

In this office, the prettier the CD the sooner it’s listened to. Just human nature, I guess. Of course you can never judge a CD by its beautifully designed cover. Case in point, January 14 & 15, 2005, which documents a two-night stint at Tonic by Billy Martin’s improvising outfit Socket, with its calculated and subdued little squiggles, doesn’t even hint at the sonic chaos contained on the disc inside. From the inscrutable utterances supplied by Shelley Hirsch to the din of Min Xiao Fen’s amplified pipa, Socket is an industrial-strength blender, shredding through styles and genres with selfless abandon.

—RN

In “Worldwide Funk,” Foday Musa Suso and Jack De Johnette take timbres that might hastily be dropped in the “world music” category and stretch them far beyond the Pier 1 Imports^®-esque lifestyle music that characterizes much of the genre. Framed as “music from the hearts of the masters,” this is a jazz fan’s global fieldtrip—a product of four days in the studio mixing Musa Suso’s virtuosic kora and dousinguni playing with the carefully paired beats provided by De Johnette. The auxiliary looping and processing on display in this track sew the two together in a way that dares you to sit still.

—MS

“Act,” the final movement of Alex Shapiro’s three-part suite At the Abyss has a freneticism and spontaneity to it that is usually associated with jazz improv, but as far as I can see—Alex features a healthy portion of the score on her website—everything in this trio for piano and two percussionists is completely written out. Further proof of how simpatico pianist Teresa McCollough is with her percussionist cohorts Peggy Benkeser and Tom Burritt on this innova CD. I heard them pull this off live at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall last season and that gig left me wishing I could hear it again and again. Now I can!

—FJO

The composers have spoken. In a near unanimous decision, trumpet extended techniques have been deemed merely the tools of improvisers, too unruly for the printed page. When is the last time you’ve seen multiphonics, half-valve effects, and alternative fingerings for microtones notated in a score? Sure, all these sorts of things were rampant in the ’60s, but today nobody seems too interested in taming the entire spectra of sounds available on the instrument. A listen to Rex Richardson’s Three Etudes for Solo Trumpet might just fan the winds of change. Using all the afore mentioned techniques and more, Richardson creates a lyrical meditation highlighting some rarely heard timbres inside a composition that is focused more on melody than texture.

—RN

As a girl with an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia and a connection to the Appalachian foothills, traditional music, played with the unavoidable force of an impersonal 80-member orchestra, doesn’t work for me. This is one musical area where I’m a sucker for, well, tradition. That said, many others would disagree: Mark O’Connor and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg have been having quite a bit of success touring around his traditionally influenced Double Violin Concerto, here recorded with the Colorado Symphony. I found myself skipping over the concerto, however, to the miniature “Appalachian Waltz” that features O’Connor and Salerno-Sonnenberg alone in an elegant duet of dense harmonies. It is in a musical moment such as this that I think O’Connor most succeeds in getting out from under the shadow of the traditions that influence him and he is able to deliver an un-clichéd music of his very own.

—MS

Susan Narucki’s recital disc of contemporary American art songs composed at the MacDowell Colony comes with an odd twist. In addition to songs by revered masters of the contemporary art song like Ned Rorem, Aaron Copland, Amy Beach, and David Del Tredici, there are recitations by Nathan Randall of poems by such luminaries as Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, and Galway Kinell (also created during MacDowell residencies). While the intrusion of spoken word is somewhat jarring—when it comes to recordings, I confess a music-only listening bias for better or worse—the real treats are the handful of surprises by lesser known composers, at least of art songs, such as David Rakowski (cool as always) and Joel Phillip Friedman. Friedman’s epic “What the Living Do,” based on the title poem of Marie Howe’s 1998 collection, clocks in at nearly seven minutes and feels much larger than an art song. But who says art songs must be brief and aphoristic?

—FJO

Coyly titled fred, eighth blackbird’s newest disc is completely devoted to the beloved musical radical Frederic Rzewski. The premiere recording of Pocket Symphony, a piece written for the ensemble, opens the CD and gives each of the players plenty of room to show what they’re made of (though rumor has it that the theatrical aspects of their performance not on display here make the piece a must-see should a live performance come to a town near you). Contrasting sharply with the composer’s engaging music, the Q&A-style liner notes between the band and Rzewski offer a bit of insight into his working process: “I never know what I’m doing until I’ve done it and even then I don’t know what I’ve done.”

—MS

One of the most moving conversations about music I’ve ever had was with Charles Lloyd. Perhaps the time and place added to the effect (a poetically rainy September 14, 2001, in a cozy Greenwich Village apartment), but really it was Lloyd’s guru-like carriage and soft-spoken insight that I found both inspiring and challenging. His music amplifies that effect exponentially. Clearly, I’m not the first to have had this experience (as Stanley Crouch’s liner notes demonstrate) and Lloyd’s new disc, Jumping the Creek, captures another snapshot of this master improviser at work in the close company of Geri Allen (piano), Robert Hurst (double-bass), and Eric Harland (drums, percussion). Though perhaps one of the more simply constructed tracks on the disc (three minutes of sax with percussion accompaniment), “Both Veils Must Go” is the one I find the most affecting, as if Lloyd has leaned towards me to impart some bit of grandfatherly advice or recalled moment from the distant past.

—MS

I’ve devoted a major portion of my life to studying the violin and still get a vicarious thrill out of listening to just about anything written for the instrument (though, thankfully, I haven’t been caught playing air-violin by anyone in the office yet). But even if you didn’t spend your adolescence with a piece of wood tucked under your chin, it would be easy to form an attachment to Leila Josefowicz’s rendering of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt. A little showy, a little classic, a little melancholy, but mostly just written in such a way that it fits together as tightly as an aural jigsaw puzzle.

For the new music trivia buffs in the crowd, the title (Laughing Unlearnt) is a quote from the ninth movement of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.

—MS

Daniel Lippel, guitar.

Think of Peter Gilbert’s Ricochet as a sort of virtuoso guitar concerto sans orchestra. Instead, the composer applies a visceral electronic accompaniment of shifting textures—sounds that conjure up the din of a noise show rather than your average concert hall performance. In the end, the composition somehow straddles proper bowtie recital music and sound art through its extreme timbral palette.

—RN