Category: Tracks

I always thought that Ken Russell was a genius for hiring John Corigliano to compose music for the over-the-top imagery of Altered States. Who else could have trumped Russell’s panache for the dramatic? Now Corigliano’s Three Hallucinations, an orchestral suite compiled from music written for the film, has taken on a life of its own, recorded here by a top-notch Finnish orchestra, the Tampere Philharmonic. The piece exhibits an intensely varied timbral palette, jumps moods at a neck breaking pace, and delivers imagery to the brain like an Aronofsky montage.

—RN

In the middle of A Blessing, John Hollenbeck and his crew (a complete contingent of woodwinds, brass, and “secret weapon” vocalist Theo Bleckmann) let loose and for four minutes enter into a mad sort of Dionysian rebellion. Like a two-year-old’s worst temper tantrum, the players scream, kick, and scratch before they seem to tire themselves out on their own noise and take some deep breaths. By the end of the track, they are coyly back in the sandbox playing quite nicely together. Ok, that’s what I hear anyway. What was Hollenbeck looking for? “I’m not making a special effort; I’m just being myself. I have always instinctively looked for my own personal vision. It is a blessing and a curse.”

—MS

The Jazz Suite for Brass Quintet by Alec Wilder, while a really enjoyable listen, poses a bit of a problem for a musical purist, and not because it mixes jazz into classical music. The suite was actually compiled in 1996 by Robert Levy, sixteen years after Wilder’s death, from various movements in Wilder’s eight (count ’em!) brass quintets. But, given that as of yet no group has tackled the complete cycle, we’ll have to be content with these wonderfully idiomatic miniatures, presented here in totally simpatico performances featuring Levy surrounded by other top players (Chris Gekker, David Jolley, Sam Pilafian and the great Dave Taylor). If any of you listening out there play in a brass quintet, here’s a dream project waiting for you!

—FJO

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