COMPLETE RECORDINGS ON AMERICAN DECCA

Catherine Russell's Live at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Dot Time Records captures her GRAMMY-nominated artistry in a vibrant, career-defining performance. A powerhouse ensemble and vintage-inspired arrangements honor the Hot Club of New York and the rich lineage of swing, blues, and early jazz. Featuring "Now You're Talkin' My Language" and "Never Too Old to Swing."

EARLE BROWN —A LIFE IN MUSIC—VOL. I • Paul Price, cond; 1–3,5 John Cage, cond; 4,7 Manhattan Percussion Ens; 1–8 Christoph Caskel (perc); 9–11 Aloys Kontarsky (pn, wood blocks); 10 Bernhard Kontarsky (cel, cymbals); 10 David Tudor (pn); 11 AMM; 12 Musica Elettronica Viva 13 • WERGO 6928 (3 CDs: 116:15)


ROLDÁN Ritmicas: No. 6; 1 No. 5. 2 HARRISON Canticle No. 1. 3 RUSSELL 3 Dance Movements. 4 3 Cuban Pieces. 5 COWELL Ostinato pianissimo. 6 CAGE/HARRISON Double Music. 7 CAGE Amore s. 8 STOCKHAUSEN Zyklus. 9 Refrain. 10 KAGEL Transición II. 11 AMM AMM. 12 MEV Spacecraft 13


Though born in Massachusetts, Earle Brown was a young composer living in Denver in 1950 when Merce Cunningham and John Cage came to perform and lecture at the McLean School. His wife at that time, Carolyn Rice Brown, was a dancer who attended Cunningham’s master class. Almost immediately, the four realized they had much in common, and Cage persuaded the Browns to move to New York in 1951—Carolyn was one of the founding members of Merce Cunningham’s dance company (where she was to remain for 20 years as a featured performer) and Earle eventually collaborated with Cage at the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. This experience with electronic equipment allowed Brown to work as a recording engineer—recording and editing pop, jazz, and classical music—for Capitol Records from 1955–1960. In 1960 he began producing records for Bob Shad’s Time label, having convinced the well-established jazz and pop maven to allow him to record a series of avant-garde compositions. The first of these remarkable documents was issued on Time, but after that label folded in 1966, Brown continued to produce the series for Shad’s larger Mainstream imprint. All 18 of these recordings were reissued on LP in the 1970s, but have not appeared on CD until now.


Brown’s broad knowledge of new music, along with his professional connections, resulted in a groundbreaking collection of music that had been largely unheard—indeed, in some cases, all but unknown—at the time. Represented, of course, were Brown himself and his friends in the “New York School”—Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and their foremost interpreter, pianist David Tudor. But Brown also included what was for the most part the first American documentation of composers from Europe like Nono, Berio, Maderna, Scelsi, and Boulez; Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle from London; an album devoted to South American composers; and one featuring the next, post-Cage generation of American radicals, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier, and Behrman. Equally important, however, was Brown’s understanding that this unfamiliar, often shocking new music needed the best possible performances in order to convince listeners of its merits, as well as the best possible sound quality to capture its tonal subtleties and extravagances. By recording performers like Tudor and pianist Yuji Takahashi, flutist Severino Gazzelloni, violinist Paul Zukofsky, vocalist Cathy Berberian, and experienced ensembles often under the direction of the composers themselves, Brown helped to establish a tradition of new-music performance styles and techniques that would stand as a model for subsequent generations of interpreters.


This long-awaited release (collectors have been paying big bucks for the precious Time and Mainstream LPs) initiates Wergo’s two-year schedule of the reissue of all 18 albums, in six three-CD sets. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the total playing time listed above averages out to less than 40 minutes per CD. Wergo has decided to maintain the integrity of the original releases’ production by reproducing the cover art, reprinting the original liner notes, and yes, limiting each CD to a single LP’s worth of music. Their digitalization of the original sound quality, which was excellent to begin with, has been handled with care (although some lingering tape hiss is inevitable)—the proof is the first CD, where the percussion timbres are clean, crisp, and vivid. I did notice one new production error in this CD release—on disc 3, the two pieces have been mislabeled; AMM is the first piece on the disc, and Spacecraft the second, not the other way around, as listed on the CD cover and in the booklet.


What about the music, then? The first disc, “Concert Percussion for Orchestra,” reminds us that adventurous composers, looking for new sounds and timbres in the days before electronics, turned to percussion in order to expand the available palette of colors, and with them began to explore the rhythmic intricacies of other, non-classical, ethnic musics. Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán’s works for percussion ensemble date from 1930, William Russell’s Three Dance Movements and Three Cuban Pieces from later that same decade. Henry Cowell’s Ostinato pianissimo (1934) has become one of the repertoire’s classics. John Cage plays the prepared piano solos in his Amores (1943). Though for the most part concise exercises in unusual rhythms and timbres, many of which sound commonplace and simplified today, these pieces nevertheless were highly influential for their time, and display a charming sense of exploration, atmosphere, and, yes, even swing.


The Stockhausen and Kagel works on the second disc were hot off the press in 1960, and they receive gripping readings. The solo percussion score Zyklus , once so jolting, now has an almost meditative feel to it, and this version of Refrain emphasizes its delicacy and spontaneity, offering a constellation of Webernesque detail. Mauricio Kagel’s Transición II surveys a wider range of attacks and rhythms, with previously recorded and live taped components increasing the complexity of tonal relationships. Tudor and percussionist Caskel (who works directly inside the piano) pay sharp attention to the task at hand, briskly aligning the aleatoric elements of the score. (Alternate versions may be heard from the ensemble L’Art pour L’Art on the cpo label and Aldo Orvieto, Dmitri Fiorin, and Alvise Vidolin on Mode.)


Finally, we have what is probably the most unusual album released in the series, recordings of group improvisations by the British band AMM (which at this time included composer Cornelius Cardew) and the Rome-based group of American expatriates including Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum (and one Hungarian, Ivan Vandor), Musica Elettronica Viva. Both ensembles featured live electronics as a major part of their instrumental arsenal, and both gleefully embraced noise as a confrontational device and a link to the ritualistic musical activities that, without benefit of a predetermined compositional design, produced their truly spontaneous structures. Drones—frictional, layered, and ambient—are the source for much of their aural environment, and acoustic instruments—pianos, saxophones, even cello—are played with pseudo-electronic timbres or mixed into the fray so as to be all but unrecognizable.


AMM’s contribution is an edited excerpt from a longer, live performance (which may be heard in its entirety on “The Crypt—12 June 1968: The Complete Session” on the Matchless label). In addition, silences of various lengths were edited into the performance after the fact, interrupting the music according to some unexplained, Cagean provocation. Interestingly, these silences still contain several small tics and pops, suggesting that rather than edit in fresh, totally silent digital silence, Wergo decided to use the analog silence taken from an LP (the master tapes may have been unavailable), thus once again maintaining the integrity (albeit flawed) of the original release. MEV’s live activity, Spacecraft , was an open improvisation that they performed a number of times in their early years—other versions may be found on the Alga Marghen label, and in the valuable four-CD set “MEV 40” on New World. The AMM and MEV improvisations have less-than-optimal sound, and are difficult to listen to without flinching, but as examples of controlled chaos they project a raw, immediate catharsis unmatched by any other music of their time. Earle Brown’s decision to include them as representation of the cutting-edge of new music’s new repertoire, giving improvisation a platform equal with composition, was gutsy and prophetic. The remaining releases in this most welcome series will afford further examples of the breadth of Brown’s vision.


FANFARE: Art Lange

The ability of record companies to spring surprises on the public is always pleasant, and here Toccata Classics gives us the opportunity to hear what must be one of the very first American symphonies. Leopold Damrosch is almost unknown nowadays, but his son Walter was for many years the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and the father himself also conducted that body giving the American premières of the Brahms First Symphony and the Berlioz Requiem. Damrosch left Germany for the USA in 1871 and remained there for the remaining thirteen years of his life, during which time he wrote this four-movement symphony; but he never heard it played, and it remained unpublished and in manuscript until 2005 when it was finally edited for performance. This recording was made immediately following the première on 8 February 2015, and it reveals a fascinating if uneven work.

It is unfortunate that the disc begins with the Festival Overture written immediately before Damrosch’s departure for America and dedicated to Georg II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The booklet note discerns some influences of Wagner, especially Die Meistersinger; but any Wagnerian overtones are less than immediately apparent, bearing comparison (if at all) to some of the overblown marches that Wagner wrote for cash towards the end of his career. The tone is unremittingly loud and overblown; and that impression is reinforced by a closely observed recording in a claustrophobic acoustic which serves only to emphasize the thick brass writing and Damrosch’s reliance on busy string figuration which sometimes fails to achieve an ideal balance, shading into pure decoration. After the symphony the disc concludes with Damrosch’s orchestration of Schubert, a piece which the booklet informs us was popular with American audiences during the composer’s lifetime, but which rarely rises about the workaday.

No, the real piece of interest on this disc is the unpublished and previously unperformed symphony, and I mean no disrespect to the young players here when I say that one can imagine a better case being made out for the work. I have already noted the claustrophobic acoustic — like a confined broadcasting studio. We should also note the questionable balances which bring out the heavy brass at the expenses of the strings (and especially the violins), although these are not as serious in the symphony as in the more stridently scored other items on the disc. The playing is not always impeccable — there appears to be a split horn note very near the opening of the first movement, or at least an appoggiatura which fails to sound convincing — and although one can hear that the violins are working hard and achieving commendable degrees of accuracy they remain overshadowed by the sonorous trumpets and trombones. The woodwind playing, on the other hand, is superbly executed and well observed by the recording. Add to this the committed conducting of Christopher Russell, and booklet notes which are both informative and substantial, and we have here an issue which is of rather more than purely documentary interest. I am amazed that the composer’s son failed to program the symphony with the New York Philharmonic when he was their conductor – maybe he was unaware of its existence – but its revival is decidedly welcome. Perhaps American professional orchestras might care to look at it now that Azusa Pacific have broken the trail.

The conductor’s own booklet essay makes much of the parallels between the music of Damrosch and that of Wagner and Brahms, but the echoes seem to me to be much closer to Bruckner especially in the more atmospheric pages. The opening quiet string tremolos conjure up a definitely Brucknerian feel, and the episodic construction of the rest of the movement also has traces of that composer — but would Damrosch have heard any of the symphonies? The short second-movement Intermezzo is charming; and the solemn march of the third movement builds to a tremendous climax, crowned by a stroke on the gong, and including some positively manic episodes. After this lengthy movement, the most extended in the symphony, the finale is comparatively brief and conventional. As I have already observed Christopher Russell, whose explorations of rare repertory have included first American performances of symphonies by Havergal Brian and Robert Simpson, clearly relishes the music and manages to make it cohere even when it is at its most waywardly rhapsodic.

One more minor cause for complaint in this disc is the ridiculously short breaks between individual tracks – not just between movements in the symphony, but at the beginning and end of that work as well. The result is that the atmospheric slow introduction sounds almost like an odd sort of continuation of the raucous Festival Overture; and even more seriously, the arrival of the Schubert arrangement comes as a real shock immediately after the closing bars of the symphony’s finale. The listener will need to stand by the pause button at these points, but otherwise Toccata’s presentation is impeccable. This label’s restless exploration of the outermost fringes of the repertory is always fascinating, and the Damrosch symphony here deserves rather more than polite intellectual interest.

– MusicWeb International (Paul Corfield Godfrey)

Tried & True is music with a big, beating heart. Two first cousins and sons of two members of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, HM play country music with electric and rock influence. They are also joined onstage by former "Hot Band" member, Albert Lee. This DVD-Audio/Video disc contains bonus features including 40 minutes of additional live concert video, small club performances and a bus trip to Vegas.

Naxos has very intelligently included the spoken superscriptions for each movement of the "Antartica" at the end of the disc, so those who want them (a minority, to be sure) can program them in. Kees Bakels and his Bournemouth forces lead excellent performances of both works, and it's particularly gratifying to be able to report that both the conductor and the recording engineers seems to have taken pains to ensure that the special percussion effects in both symphonies are well caught. Of course, the music itself is splendid. The Sinfonia antartica (a.k.a. the film score to Scott of the Antarctic) takes up where Holst's Planets left off, and fans of that work will love this icy-sounding sequel. The Eighth Symphony, with its fabulous finale employing "all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the composer," deserves to be much more popular than it is. That last movement is a humdinger! So while you're waiting to hear these two masterworks of the composer's old age in a live concert, why not shell out a few bucks and enjoy them at home? --David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Call Me Madam is a pure adrenalin shot of circa-1950 zeitgeist, a screwball comedy pulled from the headlines with impeccable timing. The show was conceived as a vehicle for Ethel Merman, at that moment arguably the biggest star in Broadway musicals, and reunited her with Irving Berlin, composer/lyricist of her blockbuster 1946 hit Annie Get Your Gun. A red-hot ticket when it opened on October 12, 1950 at the Imperial Theatre, Call Me Madam proved to be the blockbuster Merman and Berlin hoped for. They were in the very best of hands: George Abbott directed, Jerome Robbins choreographed and the casting was supervised by Abbott’s new young assistant, Harold Prince. The cast included an Oscar-winning leading man (Paul Lukas), the bright new presence of Russell Nype as Mrs. Adams’s lovelorn attaché and – as Merman’s underutilized understudy – the young Elaine Stritch. The capitalization for the entire show came from NBC and its record division, RCA Victor. Unfortunately a big problem loomed as Merman was under contract to Decca Records who refused to release her to star in what was sure to be a hit record. Ultimately, RCA Victor turned to one of its hottest singers, Dinah Shore, to step into Merman’s shoes for the original cast recording. It rose to No. 6 on the Billboard album chart but by the late 1950s, it had been deleted from the catalog. The recording got an LP reissue in 1977 but it disappeared again until this Masterworks Broadway release, and is the first and only authorized CD version of RCA Victor’s Call Me Madam digitally remastered from the original tapes.

Voyage is the newest release from the Cincinnati Pops conducted by John Morris Russell and features the world premiere recording of the title track by Academy Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino, written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing and the historic “giant leap for mankind.” This 96th Cincinnati Pops album draws inspiration from the stars and also features selections from Holst’s The Planets, as well as science fiction favorites from both the big and small screens.

Jazz icon, pianist and composer Dave Brubeck wrote this cantata in an attempt to heal the rift between the Jewish people and American blacks that emerged after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Based on biblical and Hebrew liturgical texts, together with quotations from Dr. King’s speeches, Negro spirituals and the Jewish sage Hillel, with lyrics by Brubeck’s wife Iola, it was intended to underscore and resurrect the spiritual parallels between Jews and blacks. The work draws on their shared history of enslavement and dispersion, their ongoing quest for social justice, and similarities in their forms of musical expression.

Click here to view all available releases in the Milken Archive Series at ArkivMusic.

American Originals: 1918 is the newest release from the Cincinnati Pops conducted by John Morris Russell and features iconic American songs interpreted by a diverse array of acclaimed musical collaborators including MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Rhiannon Giddens, Grammy-winning Steep Canyon Rangers, Americana artist Pokey LaFarge, and tap dancer Robyn Watson. The follow-up to the Pops’ innovative American Originals album, American Originals: 1918 reimagines songs first brought to life in the first third of the 20th century as well as American popular standards from World War I and some of the first well-known tunes from the advent of jazz. The 95th Cincinnati Pops album includes fresh new renditions of “Over There,” “God Bless America,” “Swing Along,” “Memphis Blues,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘em Down on the Farm,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” among many other classic tunes. In addition, the collection includes the world premiere of Grammy-nominated composer Peter Boyer’s “In the Cause of the Free,” commissioned by the Pops to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the end of World War I.

With over 10 million recordings sold around the world, no orchestra has had more albums on the Billboard charts than the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra! Home for the Holidays is the culmination of a year-long celebration of the inaugural season of Pops Conductor John Morris Russell. Featuring an exceptionally diverse collection of Yuletide classics including "Deck the Halls," "O Holy Night" with powerhouse tenor Rodrick Dixon, and New York Voices' jazzy twist on "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town," alongside Gounod's "Ave Maria" and "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus," which cleverly combines Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" from Enigma Variations with text from an 1897 editorial in the New York Sun, narrated by Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell expressing the child-like wonderment felt during the holiday season.

Langston Hughes (1902–67) was an American poet, novelist, social activist and playwright whose work showcased the dignity and beauty in ordinary black life. His African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The hours he spent in Harlem clubs affected his work, making him one of the innovators of “Jazz Poetry.” Hughes’ poetry is still powerful and contemporary today. The Langston Hughes Project came from jazz guitarist Larry Simon, who is the founder of JazzMouth, unique festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that combines jazz and spontaneous music with readings by some of the finest poets. Hughes’ texts are brought to life by the rich, soulful delivery of Eric Mingus, son of Charles Mingus. For some years he worked as a session musician and backing singer, playing on dates with artists such as Carla Bley, Bobby McFerrin and Karen Mantler. He has also performed with the Mingus Big Band, Elliott Sharp’s Terraplane, Todd Rundgren, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Catherine Sikora and Levon Helm, and a featured performer in many of Hal Willner’s projects. Simon also brought David Amram — composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, and author — to the project. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz, folk and world music led him to work with Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Levon Helm and Betty Carter. Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, and written many scores for Broadway theater and film, including the classic scores for the films Splendor in The Grass and The Manchurian Candidate. Amram collaborated with Hughes on the cantata "Let us Remember." Importantly, in the 1950s Amram collaborated in clubs with Langston Hughes and Jack Kerouac on the spontaneous creation of words and music which came to be known as “jazz/poetry.” And jazz/poetry is what “Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper” is. Half of the poems find Mingus with Amram on piano, as a duo. The instrumentally varied balance of the album are Mingus duos with electric guitar or Hammond organ; with woodwinds and percussion or larger ensembles.

Brahms' fascination with music of the 16th to the 18th centuries was nurtured during his appointment in Vienna as conductor of the Singakademie. His own choral compositions had gradually moved from an almost pastiche Renaissance style towards a fully mature, Romantic approach, culminating in his large-scale choral masterpiece Ein deutsches Requiem. This performance is sung in a new English translation prepared by Lara Hoggard that fits the original German declamation and with the piano four-hands accompaniment written by Brahms himself.

This superb recording features a reunion of two of jazz's finest - tenor-saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell. At the time of this session, the two had not been on a recording date together in 32 years. Here they revisit "If Could Be With You One Hour", a song they first recorded in a classic version back in 1929.

This is Ray Brown's Final Recording New York City, March 2002 featuring a bonus CD a retrospective of Ray Brown's Telarc recordings chosen by his producer.

MOOD SWINGS

Young trumpet genius (who has toured w. Branford & Wynton Marsalis) blazes new trails on originals, feat. Greg Tardy-sax, Sherman Irby-flt, Stefon Harris-vibe, James Hurt-pno, Eric Revis-bss, Ali Jackson-drms

Fine young jazz player pushes the limits of jazz composition to the max - this album is a multi-movement suite which blurs the boundaries between jazz & other genres; he's surrounded by an accomplished group of young players

Fiery trumpeter is an imaginative composer, forceful leader & sturdy sideman - here he has a showdown with straight-ahead, burn-your-face-off jazz, played by a quintet that plays with some real aggressive tension & a little darkness

With this, his third outing as a leader on HighNote guitar master Russell Malone returns with his talented quartet, featuring the potent pianism of Rick Germanson, the solid underpinnings of Luke Sellick on bass, and drummer-extraordinaire Willie Jones III. Malone possesses phenomenal technique, a warm luminous tone, an innate sense of swing, and his distinctive chording. The set consists of a wide range of songs including funk, ballads, up-tempo hard bop performances and even a pop tune and a TV theme. Malone varies the instrumental textures and tone colors throughout to reveal his considerable inventive melodic art. This latest recording is further proof that Russell Malone is one of the top guitarists in jazz, here backed by his superb trio of masterful musicians.

LOVE STORIES

RUSSELL GUNN PLAYS MILES

Young jazz lion, trumpeter, Russell Gunn reutns with this Blue on the D.L., a great blues-based, classic jazz album containing a fierceness of attack! It's refreshing to find jazz of such aggressive tension and darkenss amid today's "smooth" and "tehcno" trends.

Britten: War Requiem

REVIEWS:
BBC Music (6/98, p.67) - Performance: 3 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5) - "...the exquisite and atmospheric miniatures that make up the Mozariaan 'Masques et bergamasques' and the incidental music for 'Pelléas et Mélisande'....feel ever fresh....The 'Shylock' suite....contains beautiful moments and Lynda Russell's pure, light voice suits the style very well..."