Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Christy Doran's bands are called "New Bag," "Sound Fountain," or "Bunter Hund," and the same thing applies to all of them: nomen est omen. He chooses his co-musicians exclusively according to the pleasure principle, and does not know any prejudices not only in this respect, but has played with Fredy Studer, Urs Leimgruber, Carla Bley, Ray Anderson, Erika Stucky, and many more. He regularly jumps back and forth between Jimi Hendrix, Samuel Becket, and Chinese folk music in the search for inspiration and seems to expand his artistic portfolio every second. Christy Doran, for this release, got the idea to bundle 20 electric guitars, four electric basses and a drumset into an orchestra that has never before existed in this form. He calls it "144 Strings for a Broken Chord" in view of the tempestuous storm that it creates. One has to listen to this sometimes brutal elemental force, which can change into a soft hovering in a matter of seconds, a vacuum of reverberating sound fragments. And note: Each of the 20 guitarists and four bassists brings his own personal touch to the daring project, creating a special, original sound that resembles an artistic DNA with the help of smaller or larger instruments.

The present release is a balancing act that promotes creativity. Not least because the album, exclusively recorded live, denotes the most radical, uncompromising wraparound between Orient and Occident in Yedid's discography. The composer uses traditional Arabic harmony, Jewish ritual song forms, a touch of free jazz, European classical music and improvisation, makes them collide directly, but interlocks them from one second to the other in such an organic way that a new style is germinated. The Temple Mount of Jerusalem served as inspiration for the orchestral piece "Kiddushim Ve'Killulim." Yedid succeeded in bridging the traditions of the Muslim and Jewish poles with a daring, but sometimes unsettling, bridge. Yedid composed "Chat Gadya" for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The recording at Dunwich Hall focused on violinist Rachel Smith. The "Concerto for Piano and Strings" is composed of three parts, dedicated by Yitzhak Yedid to Australian composer Michael Kieran Harvey, and highlights more radically than ever the affinity of the multicultural composer for contemporary classics. Finally, the "Aufstand der Engel" puts Rachael Shipard in scene on solo piano. The composition covers almost his entire musical range.

Philadelphia's Rave Musical Bar, where he played a few evenings, marked Coltrane's time around 1957, when he found his sound through Monk and his ecstatic play began to reach it's artistic heights in ever longer solos. After the cult quartet OM, named after an album title of Coltrane's, Christy Doran pays homage to the titan once again. After stopped teaching, he deliberately raised the bar for his own work, while successfully dedicating himself to the music of another immortal star, Hendrix, since 1993: neither adulating nor imitating and with different line-ups. The Irish-born citizen of Lucerne begins the title track almost in a similar way to Western music, but then it draws it's characteristic lines immediately over the rocky groove of the wonderful Argentine bassist Franco Fontanarrosa and the precise driving beats of Lukas Mantel. Doran's guitar alternates between irregular riffs and flat contrasts, between memorable melodies, repetitive patterns and trashy, noisy bulkiness at the end of the coziness. A few harmonies, dramaturgically set exactly in the right place, fire the sound and let us sense it all the more intensely and urgently. It is music of today, Doran's very own, long-known and yet always a surprising sound, captivating and astonishing: Rock music of the hour, rich in nuances like jazz, played by three musicians with feeling and stupendous technique. It is the fourth Sound Fountain album, one of which was recorded live in Gutersloh in the series "European Jazz Legends" - to which Christy Doran has long belonged.

For Christy Doran and Stefan Banz, aerosols are an excellent metaphor for their intermedia collaboration between music and painting, in which they have explicitly sought to inspire and influence each other. Thus Banz has responded to five pieces of music composed for solo guitar and electronic devices by Doran with five new paintings in acrylic on cotton, and Doran in turn has responded to five paintings in acrylic on cotton by Banz with five new compositions for solo guitar and electronic devices. This publication contains the complete outcome of this fruitful collaboration, with additional texts by Stefan Banz and a link to a digital video animation of the total of ten music compositions and paintings

Classical Music

Christy Doran's bran new formation "Sound Fountain" proves again, that Doran enver accepted genre borders - this time he and his band oscillate between Avantgarde Rock and Rock Jazz. The trio explores the musical territories, pushing to the limits of their capabilities of the standard guitar trio: guitar, bass, drums. Sound Found has a huge amount of experience in many musical situations - each member of the band could easily play a solo concert - but prefer to play music with interaction, surprises and risks.

Classical Music

The music of SOUND FOUNTAIN is a mixture of diverse influences from jazz, rock and ethnic to new classical music and free improvised music. Taking advantage of the sound possibilities of the standard formation of guitar, bass and drums, the three musicians explore surprising musical landscapes. They use a method that has interested them for a long time: interpreting composed and improvised music as a unity. SOUND FOUNTAIN comes with a vast range of experiences from various musical situations - each of the three musicians could readily perform a solo concert. However, they play music in this trio that benefits their individual potential of interaction and surprise. The three personalities, who grew up in greatly different music environments, generate substantial magnetic attraction and together develop an unsuspected creative potential, which unloads in versatile musical information: haunting melodies, catchy grooves, spherical moods and abstract musical textures, but the intensity comes from each individual and the trio is more than the sum of the three individuals. An energetic SOUND FOUNTAIN!

Gebhard Ullmann celebrates twenty years of his band Basement Research with a striking new CD. Featuring the renowned multi-instrumentalist as well as trombonist Steve Swell, saxophonist Julian Arg�elles, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, and drummer Gerald Cleaver, the band's seventh CD showcases improvisers at the top of their game, with Ullmann's rich, dynamic compositions.

One year after the release of Kintsugi and shortly after the double CD Haydn, Between the Lines is proud to offer a third CD by the Scott Fields String Feartet. Contrary to it's predecessor, there is no explicit reference to classical composers. Fields' guitar also takes up more space, even though it is a special feature of the "Feartet" that the ensemble playing is in the foreground. On this program, the "master juggler" of improvised jazz and new music presents six "comprovisations," of which the majority easily surpass the 10-minute limit.

Classical Music

Classical Music