Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music