Vinyl LP pressing. With his 2026 album Nothing Left Behind, Danny Bryant opens the most personal chapter of his career to date. The British guitarist and singer-songwriter - a fixture of the European blues-rock scene for more than twenty years - presents a record that marks both a fresh start and a natural progression, musically as much as personally.

Betty Bryant is a Los Angeles treasure. The singer, pianist, and composer has been a regular on the Southern California jazz scene since 1955, when she moved from her hometown of Kansas City, MO, where she was mentored by the late, great Jay McShann. Now, at the remarkable age of 96, Bryant is releasing NOTHIN' BETTER TO DO, her 15th album. Dubbed "Cool Miss B" by her producer and saxophonist Robert Kyle, her blues-based piano and vocal stylings have garnered a legion of fans at numerous jazz clubs and night spots up and down the West Coast and beyond. NOTHIN' BETTER TO DO features three original tunes (one by Bryant, one by Bryant and Kyle, and one by Kyle) as well as several tracks that are off the beaten path. With Bryant and Kyle out front, the music swings with an appealing bluesy, lilting quality. The arrangements are mostly by Bryant and Kyle, with string arrangements on two tracks by Jim McMillen.

ESSENTIAL RAY BRYANT: TRIO & SOLO ALBUMS 1956-59

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

Time, silence, light, reflection and transcendence are all explored in Jane Antonia Cornish's new album, Into Silence. A breathless fragility on the precipice of liminal space imbues the album's six over-arching linear meditations; each work an inquiry into the transitory beauty of the unknown, through self-reflection and the conscious reorientation of perspective. These hallmarks of Cornish's aesthetic experience, along with the exquisitely balanced unfolding of her material, all contribute to a highly expressive and brave musical narrative that is unafraid, and, once heard, cannot be unheard. The six works featured here are not only unified conceptually, but also through their instrumentation; each features a subset of an aggregate ensemble of violin, piano, four cellos, and electronics. Throughout, Cornish brilliantly uses a carefully planned unveiling of instrumental sonorities to actuate and propel the over-arching design of the album's broader narrative. Memory of Time explores a distant nocturnal pathos as the solo violin's expressive presence floats, suspended, over the cello ensemble's irrevocable sighs. The titular Into Silence I incorporates piano and electronics into the sonic tableaux of the proceeding work, reorienting the seemingly unappesed yearning of the introductory material with a tender earthbound comfort. Scattered Light, scored for cello alone, expounds an unbridled moment of cadenza-like virtuosity. As the harmonic rhythm increases and intensifies the work concludes in an evaporated calmness. Elegia returns to the sound-world and material of the album's opening work, now examiend through the aperture of elegiac reflexivity. A meditation on solitude, Into Silence II, for piano solo, probes some of the album's most inner-directed moments of isolation. Luminescence is a culmination of the entire album's exploration of liminality. The electronic component returns with an exquisite and arresting subtly of hushed empyrean filigree. A solo cello momentarily transforms the sighing motif of the opening into a hopeful upward reach towards transcendence. The work ends in deliquesce silence, and the album concludes with a return of the opening motif, exemplifying the elegant notion that silence is the path to transformation.

Performing on early 19th-century pianos from the Frederick Historic Piano Collection, competition prizewinners Dmitry Rachmanov, a Juilliard graduate, and Cullan Bryant, a graduate of Manhattan School of Music, explore the interrelationships between the keyboard music of Beethoven and his principal teachers in this fascinating double-album of rarities for piano four-hands, culminating in a revelatory account of the Great Fugue in Beethoven’s own keyboard arrangement. The distinctive sonorities of these highly esteemed period instruments transport the listener back to the time when Beethoven, his teachers or his own pupils, may have performed this music themselves for the first time.

REGIONS: All Regions
PICTURE FORMAT: 16:9
LENGTH: Approx 156 Mins
SOUND: 5.0 DTS SURROUND / PCM STEREO
SUBTITLES: ENGLISH/FRENCH/GERMAN/SPANISH/ITALIAN/DUTCH
NO OF DISCS: 1

In ‘Marco Polo, an opera within an opera’, composer Tan Dun portrays the Venetian explorer’s travels to the Far East as a journey of both inner and physical discovery, a voyage depicting spiritual experiences as well as a geographical expedition. At the same time the work, on a libretto by Paul Griffiths, can be seen as a compositional adventure of the composer himself, unifying the various cultural worlds he occupies: a blend of Western avant garde and Oriental traditions. Pierre Audi’s mythical staging and Jean Kalman’s fabulous set design complement the composer’s own musical direction, forging the dazzlingly versatile soloists, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Capella Amsterdam to a stunning symbiosis of elements across time and space, a true testimony to cultures intertwined in globalisation.

Polo: Charles Workman
Marco: Sarah Castle
Kublai Khan: Stephen Richardson
Water: Nancy Allen Lundy
Shadow 1/Rustichello/Li Po: Zhang Jun
Shadow 2/Sheherazada/Mahler/Queen: Tania Kross
Shadow3/Dante/Shakespeare: Stephen Bryant
Chinese/Arabian dancer: Mu Na

Netherlands Chamber Orchestra
Cappella Amsterdam
Musical Director: Tan Dun
Stage Director: Pierre Audi

Recorded live at Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam, on 13th and 18th November 2008.

Plus
Illustrated synopsis.
Cast gallery.
Documentary: The Music of Tomorrow – including interviews with the creative team and principle cast members.

Reviews
‘Tan Dun’s Marco Polo was, for me, a multi-dimensional experience which went beyond my expectations and indeed overwhelmed my senses… Here was an opera of our generation: a fusion of elements across time and space, a true testimony to the way our worlds have become intertwined in the globalisation process.’ Anne Ku, Bonjournal.com

The four works on this recording, Unexplored, offer a wide spectrum of musical styles and introduce listeners to new additions to the recorded cello oeuvre. Works by Tchaikovsky, Cassado, Rudnytsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov are presented by the dynamic and versatile cellist Nada Radulovich with Cullum Bryant, one of the most active chamber and collaborative pianists in New York City. Tchaikovsky composed Six French Songs, opus 65', to the original French text by three French poets. Although this is a fully instrumental program, Radulovich provides the first English translation of these songs sonata. The four movements of Cassad�, written by composer and cellist Gaspar Cassado (1897-1966), represent various moods and dances. At times poignant, dramatic, playful, or uplifting, this compelling work, recorded here for the first time, is an effective synthesis of tradition cast in striking, harmonic terms. Romantic Fantasie for Cello and Piano, Op 43, by Ukrainian composer Antin Rudnytsky (1902-1975), displays a conservative 20th-century harmonic language, while exploring the folk idioms of the composer's native land. The intricate dialogue between the instruments illustrates the composer's skill at evoking a variety of moods within a single composition. One of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's best-known works, Flight of the Bumblebee, evokes the erratic path of the tiny insect. The unique transcription of this work was created by pianist Bryant and inspired by his collaboration with Radulovich.

Honey from the Rock: Entrance and Communion Antiphons for the Church Year, includes 20 antiphons selected from the Missal that allow, by virtue of their texts, for broader application. Although Holland’s initial intent was to meet a specific need of the Black Catholic community, our hope is that these antiphon settings may be of use to the entire Catholic Church and the wider Christian community. The majority of the texts are taken from the Psalms. The settings vary in style and genre, including traditional and contemporary gospel, classical, praise & worship, reggae, jazz, R&B, and even a bit of funk. No matter your liturgical environment or faith tradition, we are sure you will find something in this collection that is suitable for your worshiping community.

Charles Workman, Sarah Castle, Stephen Richardson, and Nancy Allen Lundy star in this production of the Tan Dun opera with the composer conducting the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Cappella Amsterdam.

W. Tab Smith's Septette (inc. Taft Jordan & Leonard Feather), Doc Pomus, Laurel Watson, Bobby Smith, Haywood Henry, Bob Range, Leroy Kirkland +.

RUSTY RIDES AGAIN