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Portraits and other Works
Virgil Thomson's piano music can best be described as pure direct American plainsong. Hymn tunes get transposed, rhythms overturn or collide, often with comic results; cowboy songs turn into fugues. Thomson made use of all materials, from Sunday School ditties he learned as a child in Kansas City, to the tangos he heard in Paris in the Twenties, to the counterpoint of his formal musical education. Thomson's portraits often have the feeling of line drawings by a visual artist. This is because he …
Songs, Capriccios, and Octoechoes
Michelle Ekizian (b 1956) and Louis Karchin (b 1951) represent a generation of American composers that has seen postwar American serialism enriched by other compositional approaches, both new and old. The process of stylistic synthesis and individualization, evidenced in the works presented here and in others, continues unabated today.
Written in between the first and second installments of her ongoing orchestral cycle, The Exiled Heart Series, which now includes “The Exiled Heart” (1986), “Morn…
Untitled
The spontaneous exploration of musical ideas can be exciting, rewarding, and challenging for both the performer and the audience; jazz musicians demonstrate this constantly. Most of the participants in this recording project have had extensive experience in jazz. In their work here, they are exploring the conceptual similarities and connections between improvised music and concert music, an extension and development of both European and American traditions.
Each of the written compositions (Some…
Why I Like Coffee
Composer and pianist Bob Nell is best known for his work with Kelly Roberty and Brad Edwards, collectively known as The N/R/E Trio, with whom he performs regularly throughout the Midwest and Canada, backing such jazz luminaries as Eddie Harris, Ray Brown, Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, David "Fathead" Newman, Bobby Hutcherson, Nat Adderley, Emily Remler, Michele Hendricks, Sonny Fortune, Hank Crawford, and many others.
I first heard about Bob Nell shortly after moving to Seattle; he spent some tim…
Scenes from Cavafy: Music for Gamelan
Lou Harrison’s (1917–2003) long-term love affair with the Indonesian gamelan had its roots in a course he took from Henry Cowell in the spring of 1935. As Harrison refined his understanding of traditional gamelan procedures during the 1980s, he began to transfer these compositional ideas to works for Western instruments. At the same time, Harrison continued to compose for the Indonesian ensemble itself, indulging a fascination for Asia that had been part of his life since his youth while …
Opposites Attract
It is with great satisfaction that we write these notes as the final part of a compositional saga, the evolution of which we could never have foreseen at its inception. This project was unusual for us in many ways, most notably in the length of time (4 1/2 years) during which we worked and reworked the material, and in the number of incarnations that resulted from these efforts. The development of the music was closely linked to a parallel evolution in music technology, particularly in digital s…
Long Night Big Day
When it came time to prepare for this recording, I was intrigued by the possibilities of a quintet consisting of three winds, bass, and drums. My earlier projects had been either in the trio, quartet, or traditional jazz quintet format－now I wanted to write for a group that could play expressive chamber music, swing hard, and improvise on a high level.
As envisioned, the compositions would combine inspiration from numerous sources to create something relevant to the present, reflecting today's c…
H'un (Lacerations) And Other Works
The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…
Works By John Harbison And Ezra Laderman
Eclectic but distinctively original, John Harbison's Concerto for Viola and Orchestra reflects an artist of deep sensibility and training. Harbison (b 1938) is a recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize and has received commissions from numerous ensembles and foundations. The brittleness sometimes found in Harbison's harmonic language bears the imprint of Roger Sessions, with whom he studied at Princeton; yet the lyricism of Harbison's melodic line is very much his own, a quality strikingly apparent…
Whispers Out Of Time / Transfigured Wind II
If composers born in the 1920s deconstructed the classical tradition and destroyed the foundations of "normal" musical practice, it was left to the '30s generation to build a new universe amid the rubble. No one has participated more assiduously in that venture than Roger Reynolds (b. 1934). He has infused into avant-garde music a perspective cognizant of the extra-musical world. It seemed surprising, yet fitting, that in 1989, Reynolds nabbed the usually sedate Pulitzer Prize for music; he was …
Nomos Apache Alpha
2004 release ** "Most RPI and jazz fusion fans will remember Italy's Dedalus for their acclaimed 1973 self-titled debut featuring the people with "clock faces" on the cover. They would record some lesser-acclaimed works before a return in 2004 by the slightly altered moniker of Bonansone Dedalus, perhaps letting us know that the vision of the group was now that of multi-instrumentalist Fiorenzo Bonansone first and foremost, while still maintaining the fiercely independent and experimental nature…
Spiral Right / Spiral Left
2010 release ** "In the planning (and many faxes, emails and discussions in person) for 20 years, finally this stunning collaborative release for Cold Spring from Japanese Noise king Merzbow and legendary elemental sound artist Z'EV is here. The tracks were created in London and Tokyo, with each artist remixing the other's original sounds. Two tracks weighing in at 22 minutes and 28 minutes respectively! Dark Ambient Noise."
Il Gesto Del Suono 2.0
2009 release ** Featuring: Amy Denio, Cristina Zavalloni, Joan La Barbara, Demetrio Stratos, Sainkho Namchylak, Meredith Monk, Luigi Nono, Cathy Berberian, David Moss, Fátima Miranda, Greetje Bijma, Sabina Meyer, Marcello Abbado, Sidsel Endresen.
Towers of Silence
2018 release ** “Towers of Silence features Malaysian master saxophonist Yong Yandsen and Singapore-based Australian drum virtuoso Darren Moore. Recorded at Tokyo's legendary GOK Sound studio in October 2017, Towers of Silence is a distillation of Yong and Moore's approach to acoustic improvisation. The amalgam of their sounds at times creates ghost tones where apparitions of unknown origins create rarefied space.”
Liberation Music (Spiritual Jazz And The Art Of Protest On Flying Dutchman Records 1969-1974)
2013 release ** "UK collection that focuses on Flying Dutchman Records, a Jazz label started by Bob Thiele. Liberation Music looks at the label's first five years, through it's Jazz and spoken word releases. This exciting and revolutionary label was launched in 1969 by producer Thiele, after he left the Impulse label where he produced John Coltrane. Featuring: Angela Davis, Gil Scott-Heron, Lonnie Liston Smith, The Esoteric Circle, Black And Blues, Louis Armstrong, Bob Thiele Emergency, Carl B S…
O Despertar Do Funâmbulo
2000 release ** "We are not dealing with examples of crushed language; he does not need to start from language, he does not need to. In this sense, we can say that he amplifies some intuitions already had by Hugo Ball or Raoul Hausmann, at the beginning of the century: the potential is oral. And, in fact, Américo Rodrigues shows the muscles of the mouth, all the noises that the oral apparatus can make. It is the body itself that speaks its primitive language, in a pre-Babelian situation, where e…
Trees
2014 release ** "Trees brings together an unusual quintet of string trio—viola (Ernesto Rodrigues), cello (Guilherme Rodrigues) and double bass (Gianna de Toni)—with soprano saxophone (Christophe Berthet) and electric bass/objects (Raphael Ortis). The five tracks contain a deep range of sounds from all of the instruments: Sparse textures evoking creaking wood and the rustling of dry leaves (Ancient Trees); long bowed tones from the cello and double bass and suspended harmonics (Whistling Trees);…
A Worm's Eye View From a Bird's Beak (Book)
A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon's scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. The publication features newly commissioned texts including three long-form essays by Aruna D'Souza, Anthony Huberman, and Dylan Robinson/Patrick Nickleson; experimental short-form writing by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Eric-Paul Riege, Ánde Somby, a…
Real Time Two
** Edition of 250 copies, remastered from the original master tapes ** Recorded live in concert. Rome, Italy December 12-13, 1977 by Nicola Bernardini and at Teatro Comunale, Pistoia, Italy December 14, 1977 by Carla Lugli. "It was a magic evening. Not only did the trio burst with a creative energy that was homogeneous and interactive, but the acoustics, usually inadequate, of the half-empty sports pavilion with a capacity of 10,000 people, gave the music an ethereal transparency and crystalline…
Requiem for the Snake of Maidan
Holidays Records is on fire! Hot on the heels of their recent incredible vinyl releases of the Italian sound artist and musician Ezio Piermattei’s “Gran trotto” and the duo Acchiappashpirt’s “Ninulla”, they return with one of their most important and captivating releases to date: Hartmut Geerken’s “Requiem for the Snake of Maidan”, a mind-blowing body of archival recordings from the 1970s, made on a stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains of Afghanistan, encountering the artist locked in a sprawl…