If you like the clarinet, you'll love this CD! Frankie Kelly is one of the greatest clarinetists of all time. In fact, she's so good, you will probably love this CD, even if you think you don't like the clarinet! Frankie Kelly has carefully chosen compositions of the Americas by 6 brilliantly gifted composers. This Eroica CD takes you on a musical tour throughout the Americas. The music is a mixed bag of multi-cultural influences. Frankie Kelly's sumptuous sound is professionally and breathtakingly backed by chamber musicians in various combinations, including: clarinet violin and piano; clarinet violin and double bass; clarinet, piano and vocals (by Patricia Repar and Frankie Kelly who takes a breather from the licorice stick). There is also a violin solo featuring Adrian Justus, and the set closes with a rousing rendition of Five Pieces for Three Players, featuring the clarinet, saxophone and marimba. Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a beautiful ride! BIOGRAPHIES: Clarinetist Frankie J. Kelly is Assistant Professor of Clarinet at SOutheastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. She has extensive orchestral, chamber, and solo experience in the Southeastern and Midwestern states and has performed in Mexico, Germany, Austria, Italy, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Tapestry, Music from the Americas is her attempt to bring these experiences to a logical and thoughtful conclusion. The other artists participating in this project are: Adrian Justus, violin Eric Segnitz, violin Patricia Repar, vocals Elena Abend, piano Jayne Latva, piano Jonathon Helton, saxophone Michael Cameron, doublebass Eliot Wadopian, doublebass Linda Siegel, marimba About This Eroica CD Argentinean-born Pablo Ortiz was first trained in his native Buenos Aires, where he received a degree from the Universidad Catolica Argentina. At 27, he came to New York to study with Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University. He also studied composition with Jack Beeson, Chou Wen Chung, Jacques Louis Monod, Fred Lerdahl, Gerado Gandini, and Roberto Caamano. At present, he is Associate Professor of Composition at the University of California, Davis. He taught composition and was co-director of the Electronic Music studio at the University of Pittsburgh from 1990 to 1994. He has received commissions from the Fromm and Koussevitzky foundations, and is the recipient of Guggenheim and Charles Ives fellowships. His works include chamber and solo music, vocal orchestral, electronic compositions, as well as music for plays and films. Yehuda Yannay is a composer, conductor and professor of composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A musician of international repute, he is the creator of more than 100 works for virtually all musical media. Yannay is the co-author and performer in several films, videos and stage works. In 1994 he formed with visual artist Marie Mellott the intermedia performance duo Mindbender Theater. Yannay is also devoted to the organization and conduction of performances of music by living composers. In 1971 he founded the 'Music From Almost Yesterday' concert series and continues to present every season numerous concerts of 20th Century music to the Public. His music is published by Levana Music, The Israel Music Institute, and Media Press. Patricia Ann Repar was born in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. She earned her B.F.A. (composition/ethnomusicology) from York University in Toronto. The pursuit of this degree, however, was frequently interrupted with performance tours as a professional musician: rock and roll, piano bars, musical theatre and jazz. Returning to academia, she earned an M.A. (composition) from Brown University and a D.M.A. (composition/theory) from the University of Illinois. Alongside her study of music she has gained substantial experience in contemporary theatre, dance and video production. Having traveled in Cuba, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, Central and South-East Asia, her pieces reflect not only an interest in multimedia but in multiculturalism. Challenging traditional relationships (composer-performer, and performer-audience), her works are also frequently collaborative in nature, employ alternative performance spaces, and require virtuosity on the part of the performers in non-traditional ways. Leonardo Velazquez (b. Oaxaca, 1935) is considered to be one of Mexico's 'nationalistic' composers. The major influences in his writing can be traced to Rodolfo Halffter, Blas Galindo, Jose Pablo Moncayo, Morris Ruger, and Carlos Jimenez Mabarak. He studied later in the National Conservatory of Music of the City of Mexico and in the Conservatory of Los Angeles, California. In addition to music for concert, he has composed for theater, dance, television and cinema (including over 22 film scores). Matthew Nicholl has been a member of the faculty at Berklee College of Music since 1996, teaching courses in harmony, arranging, music production and ensembles. Nicholl was a member of the faculty of Western Carolina University, in North Carolina, where he developed a new program in applied music technology. CPP/Belwin published his textbook on music technology, Introduction to MlDI/Synthesis, in 1993. Since 1980, Nicholl has worked as a composer/arranger and keyboardist. Composed soundtracks for films by the National Geographic Society, NASA, Postal Service, the Marriott Corporation, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and scored station ID and promotional packages for PBS, as well as numerous local television and radio stations. He has provided music for the national advertising campaigns of Maybelline, Radio Shack, Subway Sub Shops, and United Way. He also composed scores to TV spots for the presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, and George Bush.

House of the Deafman is a musical-dramatic dance-ritual about the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. The action takes place in a magical, endless night during which Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. His nightmarish Black Paintings come to life in the play in the form of OmniCircus robots and virpets (virtual digital puppets), and the painter is visited by the ghost of his great love, the Duchess of Alba. Review by James A. Gardner, All-Music Guide What is the sound of a mind disintegrating? If you could wire yourself somehow to record the sounds of your brain, badly impaired by alcohol and depression, it might sound like House of the Deafman. Especially if you were a brilliantly gifted artist who was being visited by the dark visions he has committed to canvas ... and the ghost of his lost love. There are whispers, chants, echoes, voices that seem to materialize out of the shadows and dissipate into the mist. Disturbed and disturbing. Chilling. Rich in aural imagery. Place yourself in a dimly candle-lit room, drink enough to cross over from euphoria to despair, and listen to this dark, haunting sonic journey through an anguished mind. And when it's over, House of the Deafman lingers like the nightmare that wakes you in the dim pre-dawn hours. When the music ends, put the CD in a Quicktime-enabled computer (and I recommend watching the multimedia presentation last, so as not to color your experience of the music). The sinister robotic puppet show of the OmniCircus is as unsettling as the Lady in the Radiator from David Lynch's Eraserhead. And I mean that as both an endorsement and a caution. It is evocative and memorable. Garvey's CD is a remarkable realization both of his troubling artistic vision and of the capabilities of audio-visual media. This is deeply creepy, and highly recommended. Review by Fran�ois Couture, All Music Guide Subtitled 'A Robotic Scabaret,' House of the Deafman is a very strange multi-media, pluri-stylistic work. The story line is based on elements of painter Francisco Goya's life and works: in an endless night, Goya gets drunk and contemplates suicide. Some of his most nightmarish paintings come to life and he is visited by the ghost of the Duchess of Alba, his love. The stage production of this work by Frank Garvey called for various robots and real-time virtual puppets, along with musical performances by singer Diana Timble and DeusMachina, the resident ensemble at the composer's OmniCircus performance space. The crossover instrumentation of DeusMachina is what makes this CD such a mesmerizing experience: it includes keyboards, sampling, and other forms of atmospheric sound design, but also guitar, tabla, kora, and the voices of Riffat Salamat Ali Khan and Shafqat Ali Khan. Traditional Pakistani singing ('Deafman 1' and 'Deafman 2'), avant-gardist post-industrial soundscapes (the very creepy 'Tweedledee-dee'), and pop songs ('Three Fates') come together to create a surrealistic and unclassifiable sound narrative. But most importantly: it works like a charm. House of the Deafman is the kind of record you put on when you want to enter a totally different world, regardless of your affinities with avant-garde or world music; the kind of record you cherish, simply because it can be compared to nothing else. This enhanced CD also includes a short video showing the robots in action, paintings by Garvey, and the script of the stage work. Review at sonoloco.com Light children voices in nursery-rhyme innocence immediately shift into a sticky, elastic, rubbery dream-world of demons and ghastly shapes in the corner of your eye, and you're plagued by persistent flash-backs of painful moments - and suddenly you're in a percussive organ-ic stereo play that promises - and is - relief! This is an hour of ever-changing soundscapes, sonic environments, geographical hints, emotional inklings, cultural diversity and stylistic havoc in a rarely experienced richness of invention! An African kora, treated like an acoustic guitar, blends in with a desert feel, dunes and all, in a Westerner's corrupt notion, watered down to fathomable dimensions by big city streets and corner laundromats of the Americas... Slight electroacoustic deployments - really slight, fingertip sensitive, careful on the verge of elusiveness - renders the scape a dreamy, vaguely off, sub-real touch, which is very attractive to any dreamer... A flute, sounding just like a Persian nay (a wondrously simple reed flute), is in fact a keyboard, and layer upon layer of sub-reality shift like mirages across West Texas highway asphalt. An American singsong Tin Pan Alley voice secures some Western Hemisphere security in all this, in a folksy, bluesy downtown 1970s New York manner; Essra Mohawk revisited in a dream toward Battery Park, trying to catch the Staten Island ferry! Percussive prisms, pearly pantomimes of sound, again - through sly electronic shadings wringing reality out of your grasp - enter the Bardo of the hereafter, wherein the scarecrows of your mind confront you with karmic horror. Out of a sudden silence a hunky-dory story arises, in black magic Burundi whispers, which soon grow into a gloriously funny and loudmouthed Harry Partch mimicry in the courthouse park! A more dense, ominous, saliva-dripping underworld of sewer electro acoustics sweep past, pulling at your sleeve - pulling you down -, but the sad Judy Collins voice reappears out of the binaries of the crazily outwardly rotating - spiraling! - six kilometer CD track, albeit in a more medieval, Hildegard von Bingen (that's a long-shot!) guise, or perhaps in the vein of a late 1960s Joan Baez ballad... A dhrupad singer emerges out of the shadows, in a peculiar mix of North and South India traditions, in vocal expressions, which nonetheless lead on into Pakistan and strict qawwal singing in the style of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. "The Bonedance" is a Stonehenge rhythm of many summer solstices, as the rock ages and new generations pass on in procession, life after life, birth after death - and all illusory! "Nada" is nothing, but here it is something, with - of course - a Latin flavor. A Mercedes Souza voice and twanging Latin acoustic guitars sparkles soften the view. The melody is a real melody (!), with a recurring pattern of a dream. Vibrant and dynamo-like electro acoustics sweeps the song off track, as the music suddenly hints at African lamellaphones and Indonesian gamelan... and a koto spreads Japanese incense and a furious technical industriousness across the horizon... The music gets downright magical and devastatingly illusionary right about here. Stockhausenesque vocal permutations - ring modulations like in "Mixtur" - paints the scenery in fluorescent colors which glow in the silence... Distant choirs of humming monks or demons threaten your security in the frail safety of your listening room. The Pakistani singing commences on a backdrop of a minimalistic, repetitive series of soothing chords; beautiful, consoling. The music conjures up all it's magical might and embraces you in a dream that elevates you into a surreal sensual sensitivity. Liturgical vocal sequences with Iberian fragrances open up the hills and valleys in a splendor of white monasteries and flowing rivers. Layers of musical, historical, cultural styles shift like breaking ice in spring, and you see right through the transparency of vast epochs. Magnificent! Inspiring! Like nothing I've heard! A swirl downward, inward, closes the set in a Saami rite by the fire in the snow, coffee brewing, as shamanistic ecstasy covers your skin with sweat...

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

When Randall Hall puts a sax to his lips, engages fingers and lungs, and fires up the laptop, it seems like he is driving helter-skelter towards the Classical music of the 22nd century.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Downtown Music Gallery, the first to review Pharaoh's Daughter's music says: 'Pharaoh's Daughter - Daddy's Pockets (self released) It seems as if klez bands have been crawling out of the woodwork rcently in NYC, but I gotta admit that Pharaoh's Daughter is one of the best & brightest to emerge from this ever-expanding scene. What makes them unique is that tye play all original material written by their leader - vocalsits and acoustic guitarist Basya Schechter, and consist of many women, with almost no traditional songs to be found. It is the fine blend of Basya's acoustic guitar, Adam Levy (from TJ Kirk & Trevor Dunn Trio) & Benoir on el. Guitars, Tracey Love's flute and crumhorn, Martha Colby's cello and two exotic percussionists that makes this blend so special. It is also Basya's deep & compelling voice, powerful acoustic guitar playing and mesmerizing middle eastern melodies that make this entire CD so wondrous.' 'Basya's music borrows echoes from the prayer-filled cadences of her youth as a fervently Orthodox girl in the haredi world of Borough Park, Brooklyn, weaves them with MIddle Eastern syncopation and ties it all in with her hip New York chick's ironic sensibility to create something totally original.' (Debra Nussbaum, JTA) 'I want more of this band, much more! They are so good!' (Derek Reid, fRoots) 'Pharaoh's Daughter is one of the most original and exciting groups to have emerged from the new Jewish Music movement.' (Ben Frandzel, Rhythm)

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music