From the beginningss of free improvisation in the 1960's, proponents subjected their instruments to unprecedented interrogation, in pursuit of the instrumental impulse. This is shown in the work of Swiss-German trio Kimmig-Studer-Zimmerlin: Harald Kimming, Daniel Studer and Alfred Zimmerlin. On this recording, the instrumental impulse is exuberantly expressed, in what Studer prefers to call 'improvisation without any prefixed compositional tool'. The trio pull, grab and smack their strings, scratchign and striking the body of the instrument, using it as a resonator. These are not mere 'extended techniques'.'' (Andy Hamilton)

Classical Music

Classical Music

So let's trust our ears. The music unfolds from small gestures. In the opening movement the piano takes the main part and successively combines with various partners. The early gladly follows through different stages - and then, a small element, a little portamento on the clarinet (the kiss of the little old woman?), is enough to let us know that it is almost over. The music proceeds, delicate, determiend; it draws a line that it follows, in the second movement it even moves along a kind of walking bass line. Its dramatic climax continues in the third movement, which is about ''The Monster and the Big Yellow Poppies''. Deep, powerful chords on the piano - and high notes fluttering above: there's something threatening about it. The movement ends iwth an almost menacing fortissimo. Are we scared? Or was that just another intimidating artifice of the Wizard of Oz?'' (Thomas Meyer)

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)

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 Var�se, and Olivier Messiaen. It's debut album, Cinema Rovat�, 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.

Classical Music

Like all portraits this album can be read in different ways: it represents a moment in time, not just the artist's time but our collective time; it is intimate, but in its intimacy it shows us something of the society in which this music was made. The moment in time covers the years between 2011 and 2015, the period in which Cat Hope made the five works gathered here. Each of them inhabits what the composer herself describes as a ''nexus of electronic and acoustic instruments, animated notations, drone and noise'' and although all o fthem might be described as chamber music, none of them is a chamber work in the classical sense of music for an exclusively acoustic instrumental ensemble. Instead, in each case the sonic resources of acoustic instruments are located within a musical frame that includes other elements: sometimes, as in Cruel and Usual, the live electronics extend the sounds of the instruments; sometiems the sounds created by the musicians are augmented by, or juxtaposed with other sound sources, such as the AM radio static and Miss Fortune X.

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.

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.

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.

Renowned trumpet player Hans Kennel writes of this new release: “As a trumpet player with many years of experience I am still interested in the music of younger colleagues. In the summer 2016, by pure coincidence I met and heard Silvan Schmid play and I was both impressed and touched by his very special playing. I was pleased to hear a trumpet player who plays “different”. Silvan does not sound “out of a school”. In his early years he already has his musical dialect… His beautiful tone, his very sensitive articulation and phrasing are an earcatcher. Brilliant technique, but no “flasher”. He integrates, without giving any of his personal assets away, into a given situation. Great fulfillment he obviously finds in an ideal way in his GAMUT projects. A fascinating group of astonishing young musicians that creates an ambient where improvisation and composition mutually dissolve into a resolution.”

Harrison is a melodist who has found his own patterns for melody, apparent in the anxious repetiion of an unresolved motif in the opening "Preludial," in the transformative, alchemical heat suggested by "Sintering," or the contrast of the transparent resolution of "River Dolphin." Throughout, Harrison creates his own structural language with a music that is both deceptively simple and, ultimately, wholly beautiful...(Stuart Broomer, August 2014)

The quality of this music may be heard in the way it simultaneously invites and rewards different kinds of listening. It can be heard as both responsive dialogue and as an assembly of layers. Marco von Orelli exploits the particular clarity of his sound - whether open or muted - to provide a kind of linear focus, while Keller can generate an orchestral sweep at the piano and Suter sometimes brings a drama that resembles the energy of taiko drums; however, all three are adept at making music at teh granular level, creating continuous sound at the leve of the particle, suggesting the atomic make-up of sound itself, the grain of consciousness.

Classical Music