Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Paul Motian performs the music of two Jazz giants Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell in the Bebop contemporary style and the result is outstanding!!!

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The voice has a central place in Michael Finnissy's output. His is an art of line, of connective lyric movement spun out over a breath; it is also a deeply humanist art, an art in ardent search of human connection, of which the voice, reaching out from the depths of the body into the world around us, is the primal vehicle. Finnissy's work manifests across the decades an abiding concern with the complex nature of this most bodily, most physical, most personal of instruments- what it is to give voice, to vocalize, to speak or sing in different contexts and different ways, private or public, as an individual or as part of a collective. The four works on this recording, spanning forty years, show Finnissian vocality at it's most blazingly intense: displays of virtuosity that push mind and body to the limits of their flexibility, reach, stamina and control.

Learning by doing: In the eighties Stefan Winter volunteered for a record company to learn autodidactically the profession as music producer. At the time a demo tape of the young Steve Coleman arrived, nobody showed any interest. During Stefan Winter's first stay in New York City (1984) he jumped at the opportunity and offered Steve Coleman a record deal. This was the hour of birth of the debut recording with the core musicians of the later named "M-Base Collective" and at the same time of the label JMT (Jazz Music Today). Right after the first record Winter started working with Greg Osby, Cassandra Wilson, Robin Eubanks, Gary Thomas, Gery Allen and many others like Kelvin Bell, Kevin Bruce Harris, Marvin "Smitty" Smith and Terri Lyne Carrington. It is historical certainty that these works were recorded mainly in the eighties, but as a listener one can hardly believe it. Each album offers a new inspiring approach to making music which is still characteristic today. Listen to the "M-Base" not to rest on tradition, but to see these artists experience as a sound basis for the future. This compilation is the second release in the Winter & Winter Jubilee Edition, celebrating the labels' 30th anniversary.

When Anton Diabelli, wishing to promote himself as a publisher, commissioned many of the best-known composers of his time to write a variation on a theme composed by himself in 1819 in order to publish a score with all of them, he couldn't possibly imagine that the greatest of them all, Ludwig van Beethoven, was going to write not one, but thirty-three variations, probably encouraged by his wish to keep his name apart from his minor colleagues or, who knows, by his eagerness to undertake an in-depth search of the possibilities of a theme that, initially, he scornfully mocked for it's 'Schusterfleck' ('cobbler's patch'). In the end, in his Diabelli Variations Beethoven turned the banal (that tiny waltzlet serving as the starting point) into transcendent. From hardly nothing he built a whole which overwhelms us with it's greatness. It's a work full of paradoxes, winks, double meanings, but it's also a contested work, not easily understandable, complex and experimental. Planned as a building with superimposed layers, seemingly heterogeneous and without an apparent connecting thread, it looks the perfect testing ground for a creative artist - like Uri Caine. In his hands you forget the quasi-monotonal character of the piece, and we remain drawn and surprised by it's continuous feinting.