Visits blurs lines between improvisation and composition, jazz and classical, spontaneity and planning. To hear what Triade do is to lose yourself in endless possibilities. Cellist Michelle Kinney drew Carei Thomas and Gary Schulte down a new path, away more traditional jazz improvising. New possibilities opened up, and new compositions were spontaneously generated on fragments of Thomas' work. Recorded in the mid-1990s, it receives via innova it's first digital pressing.

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BABEL fragments concerns itself with enigmatic, evocative musical shards that gesture toward a broken world beyond the destruction. It's concerned with the apparent impossibility of true communication, with the frailty of language, with the frantic search for personal connection as a bulwark against disintegration. "Fracture is the musical equivalent of a box of chocolates, with none of the chocolates being the real sweet, milky pieces. No sir, this is the dark, hard stuff, and if you prefer your candy undiluted and strong that way, Anti-Social Music has a Whitman's Sampler for you." - Pico, Something Else

Maya Beiser, the “reigning queen of the avant-garde cello” (The Washington Post), presents this new release, TranceClassical. A very personal project, Maya says of this album, “TranceClassical started from a washed-out still photo in my mind - me, as a little girl curled with a blanket on my parents’ sofa, hearing Bach for the first time, hanging on to every mysterious note coming out of the scratchy LP… the pieces I bring here give me a sense of trance - a reverie and meditation on his place in my heart.” A varied program, the album opens with Maya’s interpretation of Bach’s Air on a G String, in which she channels the sound of an old vinyl record, spinning on some far-off turntable. Especially notable are Maya’s arrangements of Imogene Heap’s Hide and Seek and Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae.

“With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” (The Boston Globe)

Shakuhachi players of old followed the path of ichion-jobutsu, or "enlightenment in a single tone." the spiritual element of the simple bamboo flute with its notched mouthpiece and five fingerholes is essential to its existence, and part of what led Henry Cowell to refer to it as "the universal flute." Ralph Samuelson's album shares that name and presents remarkably evocative works for the shakuhachi by American composers. The shakuhachi first came to prominence in Japan in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was taken up by a sect of Zen Buddhist monks who used shakuhachi blowing as a core spiritual practice. Ralph Samuelson, who is among the first generation of non-Japanese musicians, was trained in the classical tradition of the Kinko School. He has played an important role in bringing the shakuhachi to the Western world.

Taking it's name from the group Blanco founded in the '50s to promote the arts in Cuba (Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo), this album brings together significant works from the span of Blanco's career. 'Cirkus-Toccata' (1983) blends Blanco's percolating prepared tape part with the percussion of Cuban legends Guillermo Barreto (timbales) and Tata Guines (congas). Created with only one oscillator, tape splicing, feedback and basic overdubbing techniques, 'Musica para Danza' (1961) is presented here for the first time, a revelation of lo-fi electronics. The most recent work is 'Espacio V' (1993), part of a series that features Leo Brower and Paquito D'Rivera following an electronic score created with the Jupiter 8 synthesizer.

These Wicked Things is the fourth release from the determinedly eclectic Boston-based band Beat Circus and the final installment in singer/multi-instrumentalist/composer Brian Carpenter's "Weird American Gothic" trilogy. The record bridges a number of disparate genres including experimental music, cowpunk, post-punk, Mexican folk music, mariachi music, and "spaghetti western" and giallo film scores. The cover and booklet include an 18-page graphic novelette by renowned Croatian artist Danijel Zezelj, best known for his live paintings, multimedia, and collaborations with DC Comics/Vertigo. These Wicked Things began after Carpenter was commissioned by the Berkeley Repertory Theater in Berkeley, California to compose music and lyrics for Dominic Orlando's play The Barbary Coast in 2014. Based on the true crime book by Herbert Asbury (Gangs of New York), The Barbary Coast detailed the violent rise of San Francisco in the late 1800s. The play centers around Joaquin Murieta, a Mexican who went on a revenge spree after his wife Rosita was killed by gold miners. Two versions of "Rosita" and some incidental music from the play are included. After recording These Wicked Things with Beat Circus at the legendary Q Division Studios in Boston, Carpenter flew out to Tucson, Arizona to mix the record with es-teemed producer Craig Schumacher (Calexico, Neko Case, Giant Sand.) Carpenter worked with Schumacher previously on his singer/songwriter outing The Far End of the World (2015, Accurate.) Special guests on These Wicked Things include trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela of Calexico, bass saxophonist Dana Colley of Morphine, and guitarist Stephen Ulrich of the NYC guitar noir trio Big Lazy.

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Violinist and composer Cornelius Dufallo began his "Journaling" concert series in 2009 as a way to document the work of living composers and contribute to a repertoire of 21st century violin music. In 2012, Innova Recordings released Journaling, the first album created out of these concerts and now comes teh follow-up, Journaling 2. Bringing together elements of electronics, extended techniques, chance techniques, and digital interactivity, the pieces here were composed by Kinan Azmeh, Guy Barash, Missy Mazzoli, Raven Chacon, Armando Bayolo, and Dufallo himself. Azme's "How Many Would It Take"draws inspiration from the composer's long visit to his home country of Syria; Bayolo's "Tisch" takes off from Bach's "Toccata in F Major"; and Dufallo's "Reverie" expresses the unpredictable and often contradictory thoughts encountered in dreams. For the past two decades, Cornelius Dufallo has performed and promoted new music, as a soloist and as a collaborator. Dufallo has been a member of several notable ensembles, including the Flux quartet, Ne(x)tworks, and ETHEL. He currently performs as a member of the Secret Quartet. In the performance of his own work, Dufallo was described as "an intensely introspective thinker who is committed to visual communication as he is to the purely musical" by the Washington Post. His work with the musical technology illustrates "how much amplification can expand the isntrument's palette. Far from robbing the violin of its beauty, electronics add textural elements and graduations of timbre that the acoustic instrument cannot approximate" (The New York Times).

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Inspiration for Michael Hersch's tone poem came by way of Michael Mazur's haunting 1960's images of inmates from a Rhode Island psychiatric hospital. The work finds a genuine grain of human experience in a dark, difficult place. The highly regarded Blair String Quartet, who gave the work's premiere and for whom it was written, deliver a definitive account. 'It is the sound of a string quartet playing with rage and inconsolable sadness.'

A lot has happened since the 2004 release of Billband’s innova debut album, Blurred. Where that album was called “gritty and funky” by Gramophone, the group’s new album, Towards Daybreak, turns more personal and showcases the broad palette of composer/leader Bill Ryan.

There is a zone of beauty between light and dark, where colors and transitions are at their most ephemeral. Nevada-based composer Jennifer Bellor reflects on some of those impressions as specifically inspired by the gorgeous sunsets in the Las Vegas area when overlooking the Whitney Mesa Trail. Far from the Strip and gazing at the expansive skies juxtaposed with the rocky terrain, Bellor meditates on the gently shifting lyricism where earth meets the sky. Well, usually gentle - the cover photo was taken during the July 2019, 7.1-magnitude earthquake when the tremors threw up a haze of colorful dust that suspended in the evening air. This album of six chamber works emphasizes shining sonorities - think vibraphones, harp, and wind chimes. Words like cerulean, amethyst, and indigo infuse the works' titles. And most of the pieces are performed by associates at UNLV where Bellor teaches composition and directs the Nextet new music series. If you're in the mood for something crepuscular, Reflections at Dusk will satisfy. Born and raised in northern New York, Jennifer Bellor earned a PhD in music composition at Eastman School of Music, a Master of Music degree at Syracuse University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in music at Cornell University. Her primary composition teachers included David Liptak, Bob Morris, Andrew Waggoner, Sally Lamb-McCune, and Steven Stucky. She is on the music composition faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Founded in 1971 by Ornette Coleman, Karl Berger, and Ingrid Sertso, the Creative Music Studio (CMS) had a simple goal: create music, without boundaries. Artists came to Woodstock, NY, to be a part of a collective synergy, to live and work together as they found common ground and developed their vocabulary. The CMS Archive Selections documents that vocabulary and those creations, and this 3-CD set on innova Recordings represents its first fruits.

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From Gothic horror to ghostly whispers to Boschian excesses, Anne LeBaron’s music evokes fantastical worlds tempered by excavations of Bach-tinged ruins. Ramping things up, she embellishes Gertrude Stein’s ruminations on money with call bells and ratchets to materialize cash registers in sound, followed by a musical depiction of a fiery sandwich. Topping it all off, she lifts all the words on the spines of volumes forming the first Oxford English Dictionary, transforming them into a whirlwind of utterances punctuated by the letter A, Hobbit, Walrus, and Zythum. Unearthly Delights, a collection of chamber and solo works from the past decade, begins with the unearthly power of the crack in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. As depicted in the initial work, Fissure, the crack widens with renderings of a door harp recording in a haunted mansion blended with a hairbrush strumming piano strings. Meanwhile, the loosely sketched characters Roderick and Madeline play their piano and violin amid gathering doom. With its hellish hedonistic excesses, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, jump-started Julie’s Garden of Unearthly Delights. Square-waved multiphonic bassoon tremolos, frogs singing in Julie’s garden, and two live bassoons blast away in the night. Harp and violin solos calm things down. Gertrude Stein questions the role of money; one bassoon returns to conjure a Dammit to Hell sandwich, and the alchemical creation of birds by an Owl-Woman is invoked in a piano solo. A – Zythum tears through bizarre words and even non-words to offer a distinctive history of the OED. Poem for Doreen returns, the languid portrait of a friend performed by two different harpists.

Mysteria Fidei represents the culmination of a six-year collaboration between Chicago-area composer David M. Gordon and Far Song, a husband-and-wife art song duo from South Carolina. Featuring three sacred chamber works, Mysteria Fidei explores the notion of “searching amidst life’s many difficulties—searching for understanding, searching for rescue, searching for hope, searching for fulfillment, searching for joy, searching for God.” Along the way, it deconstructs hymns spanning nearly two millennia and recontextualizes them within our polarized, fear-stricken, and increasingly isolated 21st-century milieu. Mysteria Fidei begins gently, with an elegiac prayer for peace. The short Swedish art song Fader, stilla våra andar draws on a hymn by Gordon’s great-grandfather, Frank Earnest, and pays homage to his cultural and spiritual roots by setting its words in Swedish. Though its plaintive strains gradually build in intensity, they belie deep pain roiling just below the surface. It is not until the opening of the second work—Consolation New—that the pain is laid bare. Scored for a single pianist simultaneously playing two microtonally-tuned pianos, Consolation New is “a meditation on suffering and the nearly universal desire for liberation from it.” Based upon an early 19th-century shape-note hymn of the same name, the piece is at turns aggressive, desolate, and contemplative, weaving a dense and ominous—yet strangely seductive—harmonic web. At the heart of Mysteria Fidei is Mysteria Incarnationis, a large song cycle for soprano, violin, prepared piano, and various auxiliary percussion, string, and wind instruments. Featuring texts by fourth-century poet/theologian Ephrem the Syrian and sung in ancient Syriac, Mysteria Incarnationis ponders the manifold complexities of Christ’s incarnation. Ephrem’s richly paradoxical verses are set to music that is at once ancient, exotic, and otherworldly.

Jazz has been declared “dead” innumerable times since saxophonist Ken Field formed the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble in 1990. The band obviously didn’t get the memo! In fact, it’s ironic that over the years rather than playing a “Second Line” dirge for jazz’s funeral, the horn-heavy sextet- inspired by the New Orleans brass band tradition- has been developing and cultivating a distinct sound critics and audiences alike hail for invigorating an illustrious musical heritage with fresh ideas wit, and spunk while in the process attracting new and younger audiences to music. Over more than a quarter century of touring and performing in settings ranging from clubs and concert halls to festival and parades, RSE has been evolving and refining a unique sound that incorporates post-bop and avant jazz influences without ever losing its allegiance to the groove and the party spirit of NOLA. This release is RSE’s fourth album, and it celebrates the band’s collective experience by providing a snapshot of where and what it is today- a tight, funky, fun, and heady unit that’s transgenerational in its appeal and whose music resonates with listeners on melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic levels. The personnel heard on the album is Field’s current working band and the RSE line-up that has played continuously together the longest. This is also the group’s first album to feature all original material.

For over a decade, the Cassatt String Quartet has collaborated with the composer Gerald Cohen. “Telling stories through music is central to all I do as a composer and performer – most explicitly in my operas and vocal works, but also in purely instrumental works such as those on this album,” said Gerald Cohen. “This album is the culmination of the voyage I have taken with the Cassatt String Quartet during the past decade. I will always be grateful for the collaboration with these wonderful colleagues.”

Breathing – Remembering – Dissolving is a collaborative record bringing together a collection of contemporary experimental musical perspectives that all share a common interest: challenging the idea of what the human is in a musical performance. Composers, Clara Allison, Seán Ó Dálaigh, Julie Herndon, Hassan Estakhrian, Manuel Pessôa de Lima, and Marcel Zaes, contribute unique responses to themes we typically associate with being human, the body, and the larger aspects of sociality in/with/around humans. The project collects six works by composers of various backgrounds, gender and racial identities, and diverse musical styles, coming from the San Francisco Bay Area, United States, Latin America, and Europe. Each original work was created specifically for the Kuku-ruz Quartet while in residence in the Bay Area.

Based in Switzerland, the Kukuruz Quartet— 4 pianists on 4 pianos — is a close-knit group of divergent artistic personalities, all trained in disparate musical fields: Simone Keller is a versatile pianist in contemporary and classical music, Philip Bartels is an exper-imental theater stage director, Duri Collenberg studied composition in Amsterdam, and Lukas Rickli has broad experience in improvi-sation. They are equally at home on theater stages, concert halls, clubs, bars, office buildings, and studios.The ensemble was founded in 2014 in a corn field — Kukuruz means “corn” in several languages. These four pianists were first seen and heard making their contribution to a production by musician and theater director Ruedi Häusermann at the Zurich Schauspiel-haus. From the outset, the group has been engaged with classical music, jazz, and improvisation. This album is sponsored by Innova Recordings and American Composers Forum’s Bay Area Pilot program with support from Pro Hel-vetica and the Stanford Department of Music.

Pianist and composer Mike Garson is perhaps best known for his longstanding musical relationship with David Bowie, which began in 1972. He made his mark on numerous Bowie albums and traveled thousands of miles on tours spanning more than four decades, including Bowie’s first and last performances in the U.S. When classical pianist Danny Holt first heard Mike Garson’s music, it was as if it reached out of his stereo speakers and grabbed him. Holt and Garson first crossed paths in 2004 when Holt was a graduate student at CalArts. The two hit it off, and Garson even helped produce Danny’s Fast Jump album, also released through innova. Garson and Holt developed a musical kinship, and that relationship led them to this album, Piano Music of Mike Garson. Mike Garson and Danny Holt share a voracious appetite for new music and monster piano technique. Garson developed a compositional process that favored first-take improvisational works composed in real-time with the help of a Yamaha Disklavier. Holt’s playing and Garson’s music both have a sense of immediacy, aliveness, and being ‘on the edge.’ All of this comes together to form a perfect pairing in this first-ever album of Mike Garson’s solo piano works, a project that survived both Garson’s home burning to the ground in a 2018 wildfire, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Danny Holt has been called “the classical music equivalent of an extreme sports athlete” (The Record) and Gramophone called his Fast Jump album (innova Recordings, 2009) “a compelling showcase for Holt’s innate virtuosity and gregarious temperament.” Known as a champion of adventurous new music, Holt has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Blue Man Group, Bang on a Can All-Stars, California EAR Unit, and the Calder Quartet, among others.

REVIEW:

Mike Garson may be best known for his extensive collaborations with David Bowie on disc and in concert, yet his credentials as pianist, composer, and arranger embrace a wide stylistic scope. You can’t really pinpoint his virtuosity within any genre, because he interweaves classical, jazz, and pop traditions organically and fluidly. What is more, he evolved a technique blurring improvisation and composition, where he would improvise fully-formed works, recording directly onto a Yamaha Disklavier, bypassing the notation process. He’d usually record at slightly slower tempos, and then use the Disklavier’s technology to play the pieces back faster. Over a period of about 10 years, Garson amassed around 3200 piano pieces this way, of which roughly one out of ten was a “keeper”.

Garson often takes his cue from preexisting pieces. The nearly eight-and-a-half-minute 3X18 uses Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit as a jumping off point, although some of the compound two-handed arpeggios border on Sorabji-like atonality. Homage to Chopin and Godowsky is a brilliant, freewheeling fantasia inspired by Godowsky’s transcription of Chopin’s C major Op. 10 No. 1 Etude, and may be more dazzlingly difficult to play.

Imagine a David Bowie ballad effortlessly merged with a Fauré Nocturne, and you’ve got Garson’s Nocturne in D-flat. Although the Hommage to Ligeti mirrors that composer’s restless rhythmic asymmetry and use of registers, the music’s rhapsodic lyrical qualities are pure Mike Garson. Actually, Garson’s Tribute to Keith Emerson sounds more authentically “Ligeti-like”, even though it’s superficially rooted in the opening of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Tarkus.

The point is that Garson’s magpie temperament and eclectic outreach never yields formulaic or clichéd results. There’s a consistent freshness to his inventiveness, and he rarely repeats himself. You can’t say that about many contemporary composers who write a lot for the piano.

Along with his brilliant technique, Danny Holt is able to imbue each composition with a distinct character. He gets exactly the right rhythmic feeling for jazz and pop oriented works, yet brings a wide dynamic range and sophisticated voicing to more complex selections. It would be interesting to hear Garson’s original Disklavier renditions of the 17 pieces selected for this release, yet one would miss the imprint of Holt’s own musicality and multi-leveled, even transcendent virtuosity. Holt provides detailed notes about the process of learning, assimilating, and recording this music under the composer’s supervision. A major and, needless to say, unique piano release, not to be missed.

-- ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)

The latest album from cellist Laura Sewell, Threescore, is a dedication to family and place featuring chamber music from Minnesota composers commissioned by the Sewell family that span a vast range of musical expression. The culmination of decades of work and relationships, Threescore, highlights the cello in works that dive deep into the human experience. The first piece, Six British Folksongs, inspired by her time spent in London studying with – the legendary British cellist, Jacqueline duPré, and written by composer Paul Schoenfield, takes common old tunes and uses them as a foil to explore coming to terms with the diagnosis of a serious illness. Banchetto Musicale is just that, a neo-baroque musical feast set by composer Stephen Paulus, while From the Land of Song by David Evan Thomas takes the listener on a journey that both commemorates a family tragedy and goes back in time. Finally, Benediction, a work perfectly suited for poignant and touching moments, closes the album in peaceful acceptance. Minnesota native, Laura Sewell, was the founder and cellist of the award-winning Lark Quartet. During her tenure in the Lark, the quartet was a top prize winner in the Banff International String Quartet Competition and performed nearly 100 concerts a year in Europe, Asia, Canada, and throughout the United States. Later in her career, she was the cellist of the Artaria String Quartet from 2007-2016. As both a soloist and chamber musician, Ms. Sewell has premiered works by such distinguished composers as Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus, Paul Schoenfield, Peter Schickele, Steve Heitzeg, Jon Deak, Andrew Waggoner, and Stanislaw Skrowacewski.

Classical Music