Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

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.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

While Pauline Oliveros' output has it's high and low marks, the composer, accordionist and organizer is an undeniable force in new music. For fifty years she has pursued sonic experiments, and as the founder of the Deep Listening Institute, she has supported many other sound innovators. Sadly, it's sometimes easier to respect her from afar than to closely follow her work. Her choices in collaborators can get in the way, and they often seem to be made out social or political sympathies as much as musical ones. But there are gems within her catalogue, such as Troglodyte's Delight (1990) with her Deep Listening Band or the early tape experiments on Alien Bog and Beautiful Soop (1997). Her 1998 release the Roots of the Moment, just reissued by Hatology, is among those essentials. Essentially a solo recording, Oliveros and her accordion are found here within an electronic environment created by Peter Ward. The electronic element isn't explained in the liner notes (written by her neighbor, saxophonist Joe McPhee, with whom she's collaborated), and it's presence seems subtle on the recording. Reverb and delay may be present at times, but it might be best just to assume they're there.

Classical Music

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.

Classical Music

Classical Music

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.

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.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music