Classical Music

“From the nobility of Europe, to the petit bourgeoisie reading Thonoit’s Arbeau’s Orchesographie, to the already pregnant bride in Brueghel’s The Peasant Wedding, everybody danced their way through the rituals of life…. Their music, like their dance, reflected a delicate balance between the restraints of culture and convention, and ingenious flourishes of improvisation….”

– Adam Gilbert

Cellist Antonio Lysy, winner of the 2010 Latin GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Contemporary composition, joins pianist Bryan Pezzone in performances of colorful works for cello and piano by Argentinian composers.

Yuko Mabuchi Trio thrills audiences with every concert. Her January performance opening for Branford Marsalis in the 1,800 seat Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall whet international jazz appetites. She next headlined the Arlington Jazz Festival in Texas, and Yuko Mabuchi Trio performed in Blues Alley in April as part of the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D. C. European and Asian stages beckon. Yuko s debut recording on Yarlung, "Yuko Mabuchi Trio," was a top seller in the Yarlung catalog last year, in all formats. Yuko deserves this success. "The Absolute Sound" published a rave review of her Segerstrom concert. Elaborating further, Rick Brown writes in Yarlung News Yuko Mabuchi combines sexy athleticism at the piano with serious musical poetry. The young fans in the house responded to both with great enthusiasm. So did audience members in their 70s and 80s. This was a fast up tempo set resulting in thunderous applause with audience members yelling and stamping their feet for the standing ovation at the end.... I recognized some audience members who had driven from San Francisco or flown in from Hong Kong and different parts of the country for the event....

Yuko Mabuchi moved to the United States from her native Japan only recently, but when she plays American jazz she speaks the language perfectly. We love Yuko’s sense of rhythm and melody, and her improvising feels like she was born in Detroit or New York City. Her technique reminds one of some of Yuko’s music idols like Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock and Monty Alexander. But beyond her talent for traditional jazz, one can also hear flavors of American R&B, Hip-Hop and Blues, which Yuko loved as a teenager. This album’s associate producer and Yarlung special advisor Billy Mitchell describes Yuko’s playing as “funky from the heart,” and he means that as an enormous compliment. Yuko was born in Fukui, on the west coast of Japan, north of Kyoto. She studied classical music and the piano starting at age four, and continued her studies at the AN Music School in Kyoto, where she was a jazz piano student of Kunihiro Kameda. Yarlung first heard the Yuko Mabuchi Trio at Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood and offered to record their debut album the next day. This live concert recording session took place in Cammilleri Hall, the same concert venue designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, where Yarlung recorded Sophisticated Lady jazz quartet in 2014. Jazz pianist and educator Billy Mitchell served as associate producer.

Executive Producer Russell Ward writes of this new release: “This album explores the relationship between acoustically produced music created by human beings and CERN LHC atomic decay files from the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. The CERN tracks function here as intermezzi. For each of these “intermezzi” I have converted the most basic “sonified“ files in the CERN Sounds Library to midi piano and violin tracks using the native instruments in Apple’s LogicProX. I intend the paired piano-violin tones to represent particle-antiparticle pairs typically produced in the LHC collisions. I have set the key and tempo globally for each track, in order to better match the music performance movements. I have not altered the relative arrangement of tones within the tracks, meaning that I preserved the original structure of the data. Tracks on the album alternate between recordings made and previously released by Yarlung Records with the midi tracks, which my friend Brian L. Ruhe and I recorded from a high-resolution audiophile playback system I designed and built for projects like this. Special thanks to Yarlung’s Martin Chalifour (violin), Joanne Pearce Martin and Bryan Pezzone (piano), Mika Sasaki (piano) and Elinor Frey (cello). I hope that the patterns in the music you hear performed by these outstanding musicians connect in your mind with the patterns generated by the most elementary known particles in our universe, as captured in their ephemeral dance in CERN’s accelerator complex in Switzerland. Musicians and composers create symmetry and harmony out of physical matter. The alchemy of music emerges from the wood body and metal strings of violins and pianos and from the blood, sinews and muscles in human beings. Like the metaphoric music emerging from CERN’s particle detectors, music originating in our great concert halls comes from matter also…”

More jazz records should be like Sophisticated Lady Quartet-relaxed yet focused, tradition-based yet modern, elegant yet conveying a sure sense of swing. The recording is so pure that you almost feel as if you're eavesdropping on four musicians who seem completely in their element while performing, in a one-take environment, a set that's evenly split between previously rehearsed arrangements and performances where they had one chance to turn a composition into a memorable piece of music. No splicing or editing here-just a live-in-the-studio recording where the mood, playing and sonics are so solid that that jazz lovers will wish that the mostly-classical label Yarlung wandered over to this side of the street more often. -Jeff Wilson, The Absolute Sound The Sophisticated Lady Jazz Quartet's debut recording should be of great interest to fans of forward-looking straight ahead jazz. Each of the four musicians is excellent both as soloists and in ensembles, the music that they perform ranges from melodic versions of standards to lyrical originals and freer explorations, and their subtle playing keeps one guessing. This CD is well worth exploring and I certainly recommend it. -Scott Yanow, Los Angeles Jazz Scene Look out Brubeck, Sophisticated Lady's remarkable debut should perhaps be re-titled TAKE ONE. Why? Each tune was captured in one take! The 60 minute CD also celebrates Yarlung's audiophile venture into JAZZ with a splatter of Chet Baker's seductive, kicked-back Californication daubed with a drizzle of Miles at his mellowest. No matter how busy your day, an evening spin through this one will definitely move your mood. -David Thomson, Record Collector News

Michelle Mayne-Graves and her Lifeline Quartet perform spirituals from the Civil War and earlier celebrating code songs for the Underground Railroad. These spirituals include hidden messages about maps, navigational strategies and timing for slaves to escape toward freedom in the Northern States and Canada. "Wade in the Water" serves as a reminder of where to walk in the rivers to make it harder for dogs to scent people escaping at night. "I'm On My Way to Canaan's Land" talks about the route to Canada. Harriet Tubman is one of the better known heroes who escaped slavery herself and then worked as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, helping subsequent groups of people flee to the North. In addition to directing choirs, performing spirituals and helping to coordinate and lead veterans singing groups, Michelle supervises a team and works as a nurse assisting homeless veterans at the Veteran's Administration in Los Angeles. For Lifeline's debut album we chose "If I can Help Somebody" to be our opening track. This song not only honors Harriet Tubman, but reveals Michelle's generous heart as well. Michelle lives what she sings.

A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album!

Soprano Laura Strickling writes: Song serves as one of the most important building blocks of western civilization. The Bard in the Ancient Greek world sang Homers epic poems for small groups of people, probably accompanied by a simple stringed instrument like a lyre. All of our best research indicates that the Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic, give or take 1,000 years earlier than Homers Iliad, was also likely sung, not recited. Like the contemporary songs on this album, these ancient texts shared material that was intensely personal and timelessly universal detailing the inner world of the protagonist, revealing hopes, insecurities, fear, and longing When a composer sets beautiful and important words to music, we hear, understand, and internalize them in a different way than we do when we read them or hear these words as speech. In the course of any recital the audience learns something about who I am as a singer, but also who I am as a person what I believe, what moves me, my insecurities, my struggles, my fears, my hopes, what makes me happy. Connection and communication are essential to the human experience, especially right now. In opera there are costumes, cast, orchestra, conductor, elaborate sets, staging, and blinding spotlights. The composer, librettist and director determine the narrative and the cast shows the story to the audience. But in a song recital, singer and pianist share a narrative they craft through their repertoire choices and offer this narrative directly to the other people sharing their space in a concert hall, or in a room listening to a recording like this one. Song requires a commitment to honest interpersonal communication and invites an audience to participate in a group intimacy people tend to avoid these days. It is far easier to hide at home behind our technological devices

“Antonio Lysy at The Broad: Music from Argentina won a Latin GRAMMY® Award and earned a coveted spot in 'The Absolute Sound' list of the top 40 recordings of all time. Argentine virtuoso Antonio Lysy captures the cultural range of his country in our recording. He chose these particular works because they all draw inspiration from the folk music traditions of Argentina. This album highlights the cello as a solo instrument and illustrates the impact of pre-Hispanic Amerindian traditions and Spanish based Creole influences as well as the effect of more modern musical developments like the tango on Argentine composers. In this remastering in honor of Yarlung’s 15th Anniversary, we used SonoruS SHI18 technology to glean all the phase information and dynamic content embedded in our Agfa formula 468 tape to create an even more vivid and three dimensional sound image for this rerelease.” -Bob Attiyeh, producer