Pianist Sophia Subbayya Vastek lives in the intersections - struggling to know her different cultural backgrounds, reveling in the questions, embracing the space between music now and before, and living squarely in the crosshairs of her wildest and most intimate emotional selves. Histories, her debut album, lives there. With Sophia's Indian heritage as a starting point, Histories is an exploration of, and homage to, the idea of our individual stories - those that make up our whole self, and which are unseen and unknown by others. These stories are often painful, and often beautiful. Included on Histories are the first studio recordings of two works by Michael Harrison, both recorded on a piano in just intonation. The first, Jaunpuri, is a composition based on a traditional Indian raga and rare, old vocal composition. The work combines Western compositional structures and materials of Indian classical music, including raga, tala, bandish, gomak, and taan. Harrison's other work, Hijaz Prelude, combines modal harmonies in raga Hijaz Bhairav with a Western, arpeggiated keyboard figuration. In between the works by Michael Harrison lies John Cage, who provides the spiritual glue, and Donnacha Dennehy's pulsing Stainless Staining - an expansion of the overtone series for piano and backing tape. In Dennehy's work, the repetitive structures and rhythms have the effect of creating a high-energy mantra, one that might be sung or spoken with the most ecstatic of convictions. In many ways, Histories is an exploration of a personal grief, but it's also a kind of ''call to prayer''. Each track is a marker and teh space between, the thread and continuing narrative. Everyone has stories. Histories marks and honors them.

A lot has happened since the 2004 release of Billband’s innova debut album, Blurred. Where that album was called “gritty and funky” by Gramophone, the group’s new album, Towards Daybreak, turns more personal and showcases the broad palette of composer/leader Bill Ryan.

With Mantra Revealed, the Marc Rossi group continues the work he began on Hidden Mandala: bearing the standard for pan-Indian jazz fusion into the present tense and beyond. The album’s rich panoply of colors and textures comes from the interplay of Rossi’s own distinctive compositions and the players’ absorbing improvisational skills. It’s become commonplace to refer to an album as a “journey” these days, but few navigate a path as wide-ranging, engaging and multi-hued as Mantra Revealed.

Flutist Molly Barth and guitarist Dieter Hennings join forces to form Duo Damiana, a trail-blazing ensemble dedicated to pushing the boundaries of flute and guitar music. In their debut album, titled Castillos de Viento, Duo Damiana has gathered some of today’s most captivating voices. Composers Michael Fiday, Jesse Jones, Shafer Mahoney, Hebert Vazquez, and Chen Yi provide a powerful soundscape that emphasizes both the individual beauty of each instrument as well as its collective power. An album with a unique global vision in mind, the works by Fiday Vazquez, and Yi look East to Japan and China for its inspiration, while the works of Mahoney and Jones are deeply rooted in the American tradition. The title castillos de viento (Castles in the Wind) refers to the “ephemeral yet powerful nature of music. Although intangible, it reaches emotions that are rooted in solid, cogent, timeless ground within us.”

Composer Jerome Kitzke’s ongoing concern with the American landscape and how we live in it manifests in full flower on The Paha Sapa Give-Back, his first all-original release in fifteen years. The political and the personal interweave in three intensely theatrical pieces whose music thrives on the spirit of Plains Indian song, driving jazz, Beat Generation poetry, and contemporary classical music. The result is a sound that is uniquely and bracingly American, where freedom and ritual converge.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Inspiration for Michael Hersch's tone poem came by way of Michael Mazur's haunting 1960's images of inmates from a Rhode Island psychiatric hospital. The work finds a genuine grain of human experience in a dark, difficult place. The highly regarded Blair String Quartet, who gave the work's premiere and for whom it was written, deliver a definitive account. 'It is the sound of a string quartet playing with rage and inconsolable sadness.'

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Saxophonist/composer Jeremy Long has an impressive curriculum vitae, as broad as it is deep, spanning the worlds of classical and jazz music and encompassing work with saxophone quartets, Ray Charles, Grammy and Oscar-winning film composer A.R. Rahman, Chaka Khan, the Cincinnati Orchestra and Opera, and many others. He's also an Assistant Professor of Saxophone at Miami University (Ohio). But all the laurels and credits are, amazingly, outshone by the engaging, soulful music of his innovating debut, in Suspension.

Classical Music