This release features live recordings from the historic 1983 tour of Russia, Latvia, and Romania signaled Rova's talent for musical diplomacy, a boon to whomever they have partnered with. Rova Saxophone Quartet is a San Francisco-based saxophone quartet formed in October 1977. The name "Rova" is an acronym formed from the last initials of the founding members: Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt, and Bruce Ackley. When Voigt left in 1988, he was replaced by Steve Adams, but the group did not change the acronym. The quartet's music was inspired by a broad spectrum of influences, such as John Cage, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Charles Ives, Edgard Varése, and Olivier Messiaen. It's debut album, Cinema Rovaté, was released by Metalanguage Records in 1978. Metalanguage was founded in 1978 by Henry Kaiser and Ochs. It showcased Rova as well as many independent artists and produced the Rova Arts Festival in 1980. Rova's tour of the Soviet Union in 1983 was filmed and shown on PBS. In 1985, it became a non-profit organization.
Misha Mengelberg came to Chicago for two days, made some music with a host of musicians, and went home. Which leaves us with memories. Fortunately there's this gem left behind, these two albums, containing a timeless message. Sounds that do not express, they signify, they exist. Misha Mengelberg was a Dutch jazz pianist and composer. A prominent figure in post-WWII European Jazz, Mengelberg is known for his forays into free improvisation, for bringing humor into his music, and as a leading interpreter of songs by fellow pianists Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. He also wrote music for others to perform (generally leaving some room for improvisation) and oversaw a number of music theatre productions, which usually included a large element of absurdist humor.
“As we relate to music in an on-going condition of becoming, and not (like painting) a state of being, we're able to experience these works much as Morton Feldman did, as they happen, with an equal sense of wonder and delight.” (Art Lange) A major figure in 20th-century music, Morton Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of Composers. Feldman’s works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. He wrote the title track of this album, Atlantis, in 1959.
Stockhausen calls his piano pieces his "drawings", the pieces in which he sketches out ideas without the added color complexity of instrumental timbres. More significantly, in these early pieces you can hear a composer grappling with the challenge of electronic sound, looking for "envelope curves" that will allow the old medium to compete with the new. As played by David Tudor in this historic recording, the piano gives its answer to the synthesizer. David Tudor is without question one of the premier figures in the performance of new music since the middle of this century. As a pianist, Tudor gave highly acclaimed first performances of works by contemporary composers Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, Stephan Wolpe, and La Monte Young, among others. As a composer, Tudor chose specific electronic components and their interconnections to define both composition and performance drawing upon resources that were both flexible and complex.
Nina Polaschegg writes: "Improvisation and composition as forcefield. The conundrum remains: how can one combine these two approaches to musical forming without one or the other being compromised or diluted? Christopher Fox has decided to have the best of both worlds. The soloists and the orchestral musicians are assigned roles that enable them to play to their strengths. The conductor mediates. The forcefield is maintained. Just as the improvisers are told not to study the orchestra music, to avoid coming to a fixed idea of that soundworld, so too are the orchestra and conductor confronted with the sonic, dynamic and gestural unpredictabilty of the soloists. Improvisation and interpretation meet head to head."
This album is rooted in the personal. Mike Westbrook's enduring creative partnership with his wife, the singer, lyricist and painter Kate Westbrook is represented by two songs they wrote together. Starcross is a rail station nearby the Westbrook home in Devon, near Plymouth where his creative life began all those years ago. His title track is dedicated to the tenor saxophonist Lou Gare, whose death in 2017 was a particular wrench. Starcross Bridge is an intricately woven network of musical and personal references. Born in High Wycombe in 1936, Mike Westbrook grew up in Torquay and was educated at Kelly College, Tavistock. He formed his first band while studying painting in Plymouth in 1958, moving to London in the early 1960s. He has led and composed for a succession of groups, notably his 1960s Sextet and Concert Band, his Brass Band, formed in the mid 70s, the jazz rock group Solid Gold Cadillac and the Mike Westbrook Orchestra. He has toured extensively throughout Europe, and as far afield as Australia and the Far East, Canada and New York. He has directed performances of his work with big bands in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and Australia. He has broadcast on radio and TV in many countries, and made over 50 albums.
The Swiss pianist and composer Luzia Von Wyl is one of those musicians who is eager to bring their projects to the stage themselves, and she leads her own ensemble, the Luzia Von Wyl Ensemble, all of whose compositions she writes herself. Along with jazz, her passion is contemporary music - and all the realms in between. Besides her own projects she regularly writes music for other musicians and ensembles as well. Luzia regularly gets invited to festivals in Switzerland and abroad: To the Swiss Days Dubai, the Lucerne Festival, the Schaffhauser Jazzfestival, the BeJazz Winterfestival and the Jazzwerkstatt Bern, just to name a few. Born in 1985, Luzia earned her baccalaureate degree in 2004 in Lucerne. She then went on to study piano and composition at the Bern University of the Arts, the Zurich University of the Arts, and the University of Music in Lucerne, completing her studies in 2011 with master's degrees in both piano and composition.
This newly remastered reissue of multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton’s (Willisau) 1991 Studio was recorded with his quartet at the Hotel Mohren in Willisau, Switzerland in June 1991. These works feature what many consider Braxton's finest ensemble at their creative apex, consisting of pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, and percussionist Gerry Hemingway.
Symbol Systems occupies a special place in Matthew Shipp's discography. Originally issued in 1995 on the No More Records label, it was at the time his sixth release as a leader or co-leader, but significantly his first solo album, and as such provided us with the purest view to date of his multifaceted, indivisible improvisational/compositional concepts. Matthew Shipp was born in 1960 in Delaware. He began piano at 5 years old, and fell in love when jazz when he was 12. After moving to New York in 1984 he quickly became one of the leading lights in the New York Jazz Scene. Mr. Shipp has reached the holy grail of jazz in that he possesses a unique style on his instrument that is all his own- and he's one of the few in jazz that can say so.
Myra Melford is a polystylist, who draws on and creates multiple playing styles. In Alive In The House Of Saints these include stomping classic jazz piano with a funky attack of Horace Silver, gospel plangency, Keith Jarrett's country and blues lyricism, and Don Pullen-style free jazz episodes. Though from quite early in her career, Alive In The House Of Saints, Parts 1 and 2 is one of her finest recordings - high on the musical power spectrum, and one of the most exciting albums of piano jazz. The members of the trio respond organically to one another - their creative empathy is clear throughout. Reggie Nicholson is a great, rather neglected drummer who, on this session, is on dazzling form. The result is a consummate live performance, full of feeling, in which no one is wrong-footed. Melford is alive to everything she hears, responding in the moment to her musical partners.
Parsed into four discrete pieces, the Taktlos performance is a fluid exercise in revolving roles from the jump. Ducret trades in jagged punctuations, mercurial arpeggios and swollen drone bursts on Stoppage, the first and longest. Blaser reacts as balm, his lubricious lines drawing a direct invisible lineage back suave and soothing bop purveyers. A reversal and it’s Blaser with low brass growls as Brunn colors the corners and edges keeping a rhythmic presence which bolsters and ornaments without drawing attention away from the colloquy of his colleagues. A drum solo filled with fluid, frothing beats works as both palate cleanser and reset into an ambling blues. Later, a froggy brass ostinato serves a similar purpose signaling first clean picking from Ducret and then feral, sharp-fanged blasts of distortion.
Ustvolskaya: Clarinet Trio - Piano Sonata No. 5 - Duet
Hat Hut Records
CD
$20.99Oct 13, 2017
Ustvolskaya's music is dark, somber, even remote when a solitary voice holds sway. Her rejection of easily recognizable form suggests that, metaphorically, time is not a factor; as temporal references are acutely literai, the means to escape an oppressive time and place are found in spiritual, not social, values. Similarly, the chilling sparseness of textures becomes an emotionallandscape, scarred, sometimes painfully severe, where inner strength is necessary for survival. But there is, too, especially in the Duet For Violin And Piano, a sanctity of mood (shared with the later Shostakovich, when he was obsessed with death, and where, in his final works such as the Viola Sonata and Sonata For Violin And Piano, the influence of Ustvolskaya may be felt). ln moments like this, rare is the music where the human will is so immediate, so enduring.
Feldman's canvas contains sparse, isolated tones and commentary in an environment of heightened concern. (Concern negates the idea that Feldman's music embodies an existential void.) Concern creates tension, energized by the composer's sense of responsibility, and desire. The music sounds familiar at times, where a motif occurs and is not forgotten, but returns in another place in another guise. Or multiple motifs (each instrument's personal statement) are reassembled into something resembling something else, or only itself. Even Feldman's repetition is never exact, as there are slight shifts in weight, shade, density, intensity. And when, eventually, the music ends, it just ends, for no need, or reason, with no explanation, no answers.
Morton Feldman's preoccupation with what he called 'acoustical reality' was the primary subject of all his work but the intimate acoustic reality of the piano, the instrument at which he worked, became a particular focus during the last decade of his life. Piano (1977) and Triadic Memories (1981) sound like Feldman of course - both share that extraordinary sense of time suspended, of instrumental color refracted through pitch and back again- but each also offers a radically different conception of the piano. “What do we listen to in Feldman? Music as an art form, versions of ‘something else,’ how time passes, or a man sitting at a piano? Such clear music, so many questions.” (Christopher Fox)
The SLD Trio is an exciting and adventurous group of young musicians from Buenos Aires. The Argentinian capital is not a city that is exactly known for an extensive free-jazz and improvised music scene; however, there is a dedicated core of artists and musicians in the city, and the members of this piano trio, pianist Paul Schocron, bassist German Lamonega, and drummer Pablo Diaz, are at the heart of it. Individually, they have studied at institutions like the Classical Composition at Rosario University, and the Contemporary Music School (part of the Berklee International Network, which is run by the popular music school in Boston), as well as the University of Fine Arts in La Plata. They have been working together for years, along with other important Buenos Aires musicians like Enrique Norris. All the while, their musical rapport has grown closer and closer, and most recently the trio has been greatly expanding their network of collaborators and welcoming new influences. This is a lovely and exciting album from a trio that is just as willing to give as to receive, and ready to synthesize the familiar with the unknown. On Tensegridad, these three strong, empathetic musicians are flexing their creative muscles, working hard together to share their excitement in making music, and giving back the community that they have received as much from.
Listening, eight years after it was created, to this primary chapter in the recorded legacy of Myra Melford's first trio evokes a rush of feelings. There are warm memories of in-person encounters with Melford, Lindsey Horner and Reggie Nicholson; and satisfaction regarding how the ideas Melford articulated here as both pianist and composer have metamorphosed into the triumphs of her subsequent music. What is absent is the uncertainty one often feels when contemplating the recent past, that feeling of needing more time to take the full measure of a musical statement. Melford has made it easy for us, through the clarity of both these now-historic performances and her subsequent efforts, to hear the present works as both glorious ends in themselves and the foundations of her ongoing creations. Melford formed the trio in 1990, and immediately began the touring and recording that made her and it among the most positive signs of musical health in the early 1990s. What set the trio immediately apart was its ability to merge a strong blues feeling with notions of rhythmic and structural complexity associated with the exploratory end of the jazz-trio spectrum. The music conveyed a strength and unguarded emotionalism that burst forth in dynamic arcs, with a sense of shape and completeness that made the trio’s collective creations anything but random. Even as the band broke new ground, it was clearly a product of the jazz tradition. However odd the meter or angular the thematic material, the music always had a propulsion that all sides of current debates on jazz aesthetics could identify and celebrate as swing.
Feldman: Patterns in a Chromatic Field / Saram, Schroeder
Hat Hut Records
CD
$29.99Mar 24, 2017
Morton Feldman was one of the most enigmatic composers of the 20th century. That is to say, he was extremely intelligent and enormously opinionated, pulled no punches when it came to passing judgement on historical figures or his peers, and loved to talk about his work, so that there is a remarkable collection of his writings and many scattered interviews to give us insight into his music. And yet the information he offered, frequently anecdotal, was often philosophic or metaphoric in nature, so that it ultimately revealed few specifics about his compositional methods and aesthetic choices. For example, as forthcoming as he was about his obsessive relationship with painting, primarily although not exclusively the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the late 1940's, 50's and 60's who were his close friends, we find that for all his talk, of the congruities between artistic and musical qualities of scale, surface, or space, among others, much of his music - especially the later, longer scores of which Patterns In A Chromatic Field is a prime example - remains mysteriously idiosyncratic and marvelously cryptic.
American composer and music theorist James Tenney (1934–2006) occupies a central position in the history of American experimental music. Dedicated to expanding the dimensions of aural perception, he sought innovative ways to reconcile such conventional dualities as sound/noise, consonance/dissonance, and harmony/timbre—all of which are artificial constructs of language that tend to impede the fluidity and rich variability of the listening experience. Just as Tenney was fascinated by the perceptual intersection of musical dichotomies, so did he believe there was no meaningful distinction between his theoretical research and his compositional explorations. He wrote extensively on the perception of musical form from a phenomenological perspective, and he composed numerous works that highlight the elegant and complex relationship among natural acoustic phenomena.
Dark, edgy and superb electric guitar work from Joe Morris in a trio with Stave Lantner on electric keyboard and Jerome Deupree on drums, the final part of what Morris calls "Big Loud Electric Guitar Trilogy" that started with "Sweatshop" and "Racket Club", following the Hendrix legacy.
