Category: Albums

Sounds Heard: Peter Garland—Waves Breaking on Rocks

I have absolutely no idea how anything could possibly follow Frank’s behemoth SMiLE essay from last week, and in fact I have been considering covering my CD pick of this week in a haiku, as way to bring the universe back into balance. Luckily, it turns out that the title of Peter Garland’s Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) came to him in the form of a haiku. It’s reproduced in the disc’s liner notes:

Cold gray summer day
Waves breaking against the rocks—
Winter in my heart

Waves breaking on Rocks (Elegy for all of us) is a suite of six elegies commissioned by Garland’s long-time musical collaborator and friend, pianist Aki Takahashi. Each movement reflects upon the cycle of life and death, through the remembrances of lost friends or upon the progression of the seasons. Though it may seem like a rather dark proposal, this work is anything but; there is a strong sense of light and openness throughout the work, largely due to Garland’s distinctive harmonic language and sense of formal structure. Each movement has a clear “personality,” from the gentle chords of the second movement, “Elegy for All of Us,” composed in memory of the poet Laurence Weisberg, to the upward rippling scales of the final movement, “Waves Breaking on Rocks (2)/Autumn Again.” Takahashi’s performance discloses the close working relationship and friendship between Garland and herself in its fluidity and intimacy—this piece sounds as if it could only have been written for her.

After 35 minutes of beautiful, spare piano music, the percussion, strings, and vocals of The Roque Dalton Songs are a refreshing aural surprise. Composed in 1988, this work uses as text five poems of the Salvadorean poet, activist, and guerilla Roque Dalton, and is given a lively performance by tenor John Duykers and the musicians of Santa Fe New Music. Garland has intensively studied Latin American music for decades (and published extensively, including the book Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture, 1973-80), and The Roque Dalton Songs reveal numerous hat-tips to the music of various Latin American cultures. This is not the propagation of ethnic music as “other”; Garland has clearly assimilated core elements of different musics into his own compositional style. Santa Fe New Music’s instrumentation of violin, bass clarinet, trumpet, harp, piano, and percussion creates beguiling dance-like structures for Duykers’s voice to wander through, with thoughtfully chosen small percussion instruments that create a strong rhythmic foundation that fortifies rather than overpowers the other instruments. I keep returning to the clave and harp opening of the gently swaying third movement, “Como la Siempreviva,” a wonderfully simple yet effective means of punctuation that transforms into different rhythmic cells as the movement progresses.

The excellent recording quality of this disc deserves mention—the piano of Waves Breaking on Rocks has a bright, refreshing sound, and the ensemble performing The Roque Dalton Songs is aurally just close enough to conjure an intimate listening space without being too close or too dry. Garland’s music, which is clear, direct, and refreshingly devoid of self-indulgence or pretension, is engagingly represented in every aspect of this recording.

Sounds Heard: The Beach Boys—The Smile Sessions

The cover for the Smile Sessions featuring the original cartoon drawing of the entrance to "The Smile Shop"

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It might seem somewhat incongruous for the following musings about an album recorded more than 45 years ago by one of the biggest (and most financially lucrative) musical acts of all time to be appearing within this web magazine devoted to new American music that is outside the commercial mainstream. But The Smile Sessions—a total of 144 tracks (in its most complete available form) from the 80 sessions recorded by The Beach Boys between 1966 and 1967 for the never-issued LP SMiLE, finally officially released commercially on November 1, 2011—contains some of the most provocative musical ideas of the last half-century in any genre of music. Although these were recordings for an album by what was—for all intents and purposes—the most successful popular music group of its day, the project morphed into something quite other. Randall Roberts, in one of several pieces on The Smile Sessions that ran recently in The Los Angeles Times, has stated that “every library of American recording history needs this; university composition departments, music professors, budding recording engineers and composers should study it.”

In the extensive hardcover booklet that accompanies the collector’s edition of The Smile Sessions, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston boasts that back in 1967 he was wondering if The Beach Boys’ record label Capitol would realize that the music contained herein should be released on Capitol’s classical division, Angel Records. Of course, it was never issued in 1967 on Capitol, Angel, or anywhere else for a complex web of reasons that are still not completely clear at this late date. But these 144 tracks of music, many of which will be brand new to listeners despite their age, deserve an extensive explication or at least an attempt at one, so here goes.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice…

A photo of master tapes for various songs from SMiLE.

A tantalizing photograph of the original master tapes for SMiLE which is featured on the cover of the LP-sized digipack that holds the 5 CDs contained in The Smile Sessions.

The Beach Boys’ album SMiLE, scheduled for release in 1967 but never issued, has been touted for decades as one of American music’s ultimate what-ifs: the most momentous might-have-been in music history, the musical road not taken which would have irrevocably changed music’s subsequent direction. For decades it has inspired voluminous conjecture comparable to speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man In The High Castle, a novel not about the future but rather an alternative present which was the result of the Axis powers winning the Second World War. Over the past nearly half-century, knowing about SMiLE’s existence made you part of a cadre of arcane music cognoscenti. There was particular satisfaction in being part of the minority who had been let in on the secret that this group—frequently dismissed even by those who believed that popular music could aspire to a level equal to anything coming from so-called high art—had actually created something that was perhaps even more full of high art aspirations than anything else done at the time.

Like Scott Joplin’s first opera A Guest of Honor, whose performance materials no one saw fit to preserve, or Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, which some of its champions have vociferously asserted can be completed from his surviving sketches while others (equally vociferous) claim was nothing more than a patchwork of unfinished and unrealizable sketches, SMiLE has become the stuff of legend and its legend has become larger than it or perhaps any work of art can ever be. Its pedigree certainly puts SMiLE in league with those Joplin and Ives pieces, as well as such music history would-that-they-weres as an opera by Giuseppe Verdi based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which according to some accounts Verdi threw into the flames as soon as he completed it, or Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony, which its composer struggled in vain with for the last thirty years of his life and also ultimately destroyed. (Although some provocative fragments from what might be Sibelius’s 8th finally got their first performance in October 2011). Or closer to home, Charles Mingus’s Epitaph, which its jazz bassist creator was only able to record a portion of in 1962 and whose score was long thought to be lost, but which resurfaced in his papers after his death in 1979 (and only received its first hearing when Gunther Schuller led a performance of it a decade later in 1989).

The legend surrounding SMiLE also includes burning work, the release of less-than-complete portions of work, the music haunting its principal creator (The Beach Boys’ principal songwriter and musical arranger Brian Wilson) for decades, reconstructing a finished product long after that, and lost elements that miraculously resurfaced still later on. So what exactly is the story?

I Know There’s An Answer…

The cover for The Beach Boys LP Pet Sounds showing band members feeding animals.

The somewhat lighthearted cover of Pet Sounds doesn’t really reflect the serious music contained on the album.

In a nutshell (though admittedly one for a rather large nut), by 1966—when the recording sessions for SMiLE began, The Beach Boys were at the top of their game. Their now platinum-selling album, Pet Sounds, which took full advantage of studio recording techniques and was filled with dense contrapuntal layering and elaborate orchestration, was released in May of that year. That album was the first piece of evidence that The Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson as auteur, were capable of a lot more than just churning out teen fare marrying layered vocal harmonies (from low bass to high falsetto) reminiscent of contemporaneous East Coast groups like The Four Seasons to a somewhat less edgy, though way more popular, approach to the regional surf rock subgenre from their native Southern California pioneered by Dick Dale. Pet Sounds earned Brian Wilson respectability and offered concrete evidence that he might actually be—as the band’s acolytes believed and Capitol Records’ marketing department had promulgated—a musical genius. Among its most celebrated fans was Paul McCartney of The Beatles (who had yet to complete the recording sessions for their album Revolver, which was issued in August 1966). By McCartney’s own admission, Pet Sounds heavily influenced him and directly led to the creation of The Beatles’ subsequent LP, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released on June 1, 1967), the album that has frequently been credited with the birth of the progressive rock genre as well as album-oriented rock overall. Pet Sounds is a clear precedent. Among its tracks are the astonishing songs “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “I Know There’s An Answer,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and (the Brian Wilson solo) “Caroline, No,” whose ending (also the end of the album) is a barrage of sound effects. But despite the sophistication of these songs (whose lyrics also mostly eschewed the Boys’ previous summer fun fare thanks in part to Brian Wilson collaborating with an outside-the-band wordsmith, Tony Asher) and the album’s two equally surprising instrumentals, Pet Sounds was ultimately still a pop album.

Brian Wilson wanted to prove he could create something more significant than that, a fully integrated opus that demands to be listened to as a multi-movement composition containing various permutations of the same thematic material throughout, a project he at one point began describing as “a teenage symphony to God.” To further prove his seriousness, he enlisted the help of even more high-minded librettist—the erudite singer/songwriter Van Dyke Parks—to fashion lyrics for him that would be even further away from the boy-meets-girl and let’s-go-surfing fodder that had dominated the lyrics of most of The Beach Boys’ repertoire. The other members of The Beach Boys—Brian’s two brothers, Carl and Dennis, a cousin, Mike Love, high school classmate Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston, who had just joined the group in 1965—were frequently baffled by the new direction and Love was often openly hostile to it.

Before his collaboration with Parks got underway, in February 1966, Brian began recording an additional song—originally intended for Pet Sounds—that became so elaborate that he was not able to complete it in time for that album’s scheduled release. He ultimately worked on the song, “Good Vibrations” (whose infatuation-themed lyrics were, incidentally, by Mike Love), for more than six months thereafter. To perform his ornate arrangement of the song, Brian assembled an ensemble far larger than any he had put together heretofore which, in addition to the members of The Beach Boys included some of Los Angeles’s most in-demand studio musicians, such as Al De Lory on piano and harpsichord, Jesse Ehrlich on cello, Hal Blaine on timpani and other percussion, and—perhaps most memorably—trombonist Paul Tanner on an electronic musical instrument of his own invention. (Tanner’s instrument, which he had previously played on the Pet Sounds song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” has alternately been named the tannerin—in his honor—and the electro-theremin. As a result of the similar name and a somewhat similar sound, Tanner’s instrument, which is played by controlling a knob attached to a slider with string, rather than hand movements over antennae, has been frequently misidentified by theremin discographers; “Good Vibrations” does not use a theremin.) Perhaps more importantly, “Good Vibrations” was not performed in its entirely from start to finish during these recording sessions, but rather in modular sections, each with different instrumentation. It was later seamlessly layered and pieced together in the studio from a purported grand total of 90 hours of recordings. As a result, “Good Vibrations,” which was released independently as a Beach Boys single on October 10, 1966, and was slated to also be included on their next full-length album (SMiLE), sounds like no other pop song that had been recorded up to that point.

Brian’s approach to the recording of “Good Vibrations” would serve as the blueprint for how he would record everything that was planned for the SMiLE album. While no other track intended for the album had such an extensive production history, some of his arrangements were even more elaborate, such as “Heroes and Villains,” alternate parts of which were recorded on October 1966 and February 1967. All in all, the remaining sessions for SMiLE (excluding the earlier “Good Vibrations”) occurred over the course of 13 months from May 1966 until May 1967, during which time Brian Wilson grew more and more despondent due to clinical depression and drug abuse.

Smile Cover

The original Frank Holmes cover illustration for SMiLE which has graced the cover of countless bootlegs which attempted to reconstruct SMiLE over the years and which was finally officially released as the album’s cover in November 2011.
Finally, the album was shelved despite heavy advertising and Capitol Records printing over 400,000 LP covers with an image that nevertheless became iconic. (This cover image, of a store selling smiles by Frank Holmes, is also the source of the typographical strangeness of the album’s title; it would have been among the earliest covers by a popular music group to feature original, specifically commissioned artwork rather than a photograph of the performers.)

The illustrated LP cover for The Beach Boys 1967 LP Smiley Smile.

The Smiley Smile cover also does not feature a photograph of the band, but rather a cabin in the middle of a forest that presumably contains the contents of SMiLE.

In order to fulfill their contractual obligation to release something in 1967, the remaining members of the group wrested artistic control from Brian and cobbled together an album containing “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains” (which they truncated somewhat, re-recorded parts for in June 1967, and issued as a single in July 1967), and several other (but not all) intended SMiLE tracks. That LP, officially released on September 18, 1967 under the name Smiley Smile, is still quite fascinating and frequently extremely odd. (One of its most notorious tracks, “She’s Goin’ Bald,” even speeds up The Beach Boys’ voices in a rare example of musique concrète in the band’s oeuvre, a feat which undoubtedly, along with the electro-theremin and the extensive electronic manipulations on the aforementioned “Good Vibrations” which opens Side Two of the LP, earned Smiley Smile a place in the discography of Paul Griffiths’s seminal A Guide to Electronic Music published in 1979.) Yet the end result is far less ambitious than Brian’s original plan and Smiley Smile proved to be their least commercially successful venture up to that point. (Van Dyke Parks, his input rejected by the other members of The Beach Boys, embarked on his own solo debut album, an inter-related collection of his own music as well as words, tellingly called Song Cycle, in November 1967; it’s a very nice record and it launched his successful career, but it never reached the kind of an audience that SMiLE would have.)

Here’s the official version of the story being told now…


God Only Knows…

As the time when Brian Wilson attempted to realize SMiLE and forever change the history of American music—popular or otherwise—recedes further and further into history, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate actual facts from the mythology that has come to surround that era. The 1960s remain a watershed period in the history of music of all genres. In classical music, it was the time when many composers desiring to keep up with the zeitgeist were torn between the rigors of integral serialism and the process-oriented experimentation of indeterminacy and conceptualism, while performing musicians began seriously recreating the sound world of earlier eras (the de-facto birth of the so-called period instrument movement). It was also the decade that spawned minimalism as well as a time when electronic music became a viable performance and compositional possibility—Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach was the most commercially successful classical album of its day, Morton Subonick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, released in 1967, was the first electronic composition created expressly for release on a commercial recording (on Nonesuch, which was then a budget label devoted almost exclusively to contemporary and early music), and Charles Wuorinen’s Time’s Encomium, another Nonesuch release from the end of the decade, was the first all-electronic piece to win the Pulitzer Prize. In jazz, the chord changes that had underpinned musicians’ solos from the earliest recorded manifestations of the music up to bebop and beyond, had already given way to modality inspired by non-Western musical traditions as well as completely free improvisations, but this music grew further and further out as the decade progressed. Rock and roll, ostensibly a music associated with youth culture, grew even more rebellious but also more sophisticated, morphing forever into rock and eventually myriad subgenres. Rhythm and blues, which was basically a racially charged code name given to the rock and roll-type music being made by African Americans, evolved into soul and later funk, also getting more and more experimental in the process. Even composers of film music and Broadway shows somehow seemed to be aesthetically tilting toward the avant-garde, or at least toward a consciousness that went far beyond Western musical traditions. And music from all parts of the globe—from North India and the Far East to Southern Africa—not only profoundly influenced much of music being made in the West but it too became available to the general public in the West through commercially available recordings as well as live performances by some of its greatest practitioners who finally were given opportunities to tour.

We will never know all the music that Brian Wilson had heard up to the point where he began work on SMiLE and how much of it influenced the new music that he was trying to invent. He has acknowledged his indebtedness to Glenn Miller and much has been made over the years about how Paul McCartney’s admiration for Brian Wilson was not only mutual but also competitive. Brian saw himself in a race with The Beatles to create the great rock record. He also fancied himself a latter-day George Gershwin since he, too, as a teenager had become a world famous songwriter but by his mid-20s aspired to be something more—a serious composer, though one working in a thoroughly vernacular American idiom. (In recent years, Brian Wilson even secured the rights to complete some of Gershwin’s unfinished compositional fragments and recorded them in 2010.) Rumored among Brian Wilson’s earlier compositions is a piano sonata that he never completed, another musical holy grail. According to comments made by the late Dennis Wilson, Brian’s brother and the drummer for The Beach Boys, Brian had heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 at some point and was completely floored and humbled. But could he have also heard Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4, a work that finally received its world premiere in 1965, eleven years after the death of its composer, and a work that—all practicality be damned—was trying to redefine the symphony in much the same way that Wilson was attempting to redefine the popular song and the record album?

It would have been impossible for Brian Wilson to escape hearing the theme music for the TV show My Favorite Martian, which also featured Paul Tanner on the electro-theremin. As a Southern California native who knew many session musicians, he was probably also aware of Samuel J. Hoffman, who had recorded on an actual theremin for numerous film soundtracks including Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. But could he have possibly also heard Honegger’s 1935 oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher or Olivier Messiaen’s massive 1948 Turangalîla-Symphonie, both of which use the ondes martinot, another early electronic instrument, similarly to the way Brian eventually used the electro-theremin on “Good Vibrations”? What about John Cage, the composer who completely redefined music, making it more inclusive than anyone else had acknowledged it to be previously? At one point during his work on SMiLE, Brian Wilson considered recording an entire album of various sounds to accompany the album of songs that would make up SMiLE, but this idea never got much beyond the conceptual stage.

Listening with 2011 ears, Brian Wilson’s experiments in 1966 and 1967 seem normative of the kinds of things most interesting musicians in any genre were up to at that point and even tamer than some of them. The blurring of boundaries between musical genres was pretty much commonplace at that time, as was the attitude, however real or imagined, that just about any musical undertaking was somehow an expansion beyond anything that had come before it. In October 1966, John Cage mounted performances of his Variations VII, an all-encompassing live electronic music environment which included the amplification of sounds received from ten telephone lines which had been distributed in locations ranging from lost dog holding rooms at the ASPCA to the press room of The New York Times. By 1966, La Monte Young, now acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, was exploring extended duration drone installations that lasted for months. In 1966, Meredith Monk gave the first public performance of her music, 16 Millimeter Earrings, a work involving her now signature extended vocal techniques as well as tapes. Across the Atlantic, German serialist-turned-electronic music guru Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose face is among those portrayed on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s proving that they knew who he was) created Hymnen, a Wagnerian two-hour magnetic tape composition based on national anthems from all over the world.

Among the jazz community, John Coltrane was in Japan mesmerizing a live audience with an hour-long interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard “My Favorite Things” in addition to his own expansive compositions. In Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell was joined by fellow members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on the first recording of his free-form music, a forerunner of the group that would soon be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. On the East Coast, Cecil Taylor assembled his largest group to date to perform his gnarly atonal charts, and Albert Ayler was terrifying the denizens of the Village Vanguard with his otherworldly skronking. Before Miles Davis pioneered the fusion of jazz and rock in New York, another trumpeter, Los Angeles-based Don Ellis, outfitted the entire trumpet section of his latter-day big band with quarter-tone trumpets, fed his own instrument through a ring modulator, and made quintuple, septimal, and even higher prime-based rhythms sound perfectly natural. Around the same time, a seventeen-year-old trombonist Willie Colón went into the studio to record his first album, El Malo, blending Cuban and Puerto Rican music with jazz and soul, a style that would soon be universally described as salsa. For his score for the motion picture Wait Until Dark, released in October 1967 (but to this day never released on a separate audio soundtrack album), even the then dean of Hollywood composers, Henry Mancini, whose scores were tailor-made to please mainstream tastes, included two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart in his orchestration.

At the same time, rock music seemed equally poised to break beyond listener expectations. Almost every other pop song from that time seems to include either a harpsichord or a sitar or some kind of oddball-sounding electronic manipulation. San Francisco-area bands like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were already crafting musical statements that went on much longer than three-minute songs, as were groups in England as diverse as Pink Floyd and The Who. Hair, the first evening-length rock musical, debuted on Off-Broadway the same month that Wait Until Dark opened in movie theatres across the country and would move to Broadway the following year. Jimi Hendrix proved the electric guitar could be the vehicle for virtuosity as intense as on any classical or jazz instrument. Even rock’s premier poet-songwriter Bob Dylan (who was a role model to many aspiring wordsmiths at the time, undoubtedly including Van Dyke Parks) released a side-long track, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. And La Monte Young’s extended drones found their way into rock music via The Velvet Underground, a group whose original line-up included Young’s former musical collaborator John Cale (who several years later recorded a tribute song to Brian Wilson). Groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears would soon be crafting rock albums scored for almost symphonic ensembles. (BS&T’s debut album, released in February 1968, is coincidentally titled Child is Father To The Man, after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but its title is also eerily similar to “Child is Father Of The Man,” one of the key songs recorded for SMiLE that had never been officially released.)

Bigger, longer, and stranger was all the rage. While Frank Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention arguably advanced rock music further than anyone else at that time, scores of now-forgotten groups across the country, who sometimes only recorded one single, were making music that sounds even more eccentric. Record collectors to this day scour the bins for these rare, unknown psychedelic rock recordings hoping to track down the ultimate transformative musical experience. What has gone down in history as the breakthrough, however, is The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Soon after its release, everyone seemed to have an artistic response to it, from The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request to even Zappa and The Mothers’ We’re Only in It for the Money. Sgt. Pepper’s—with its eclectic mix of music hall, harpsichord, sitar and tabla, string quartet, and musique concrète—embraced a much larger musical language than most listeners thought possible in rock music. And since they were so famous, it made a statement that everyone heard. The only band that was anywhere near as famous at the time and poised for similar accolades from a broad audience was The Beach Boys. (They, like The Beatles, were even admired by Leonard Bernstein.) Despite how remarkable Sgt. Pepper’s was and still sounds 44 years later, had SMiLE actually been released, that honor probably would have, could have, and should have been accorded to it instead.

Heroes and Villains…

Undeniably the wide proliferation and relatively easy acquisition of a variety of mind-altering substances was part and parcel of the rampant experimentation that seemed ubiquitous in the music of this time. That many of these great ideas could ultimately not be sustained and developed into more substantive efforts is the creative chasm that the abuse of these substances took away from some extremely talented musicians; some fared worse, dying tragically young. Brian Wilson survived but nevertheless was one of drug addiction’s unfortunate casualties.

From Smiley Smile onward, Brian Wilson was no longer the de-facto leader of The Beach Boys. Although he still recorded with them and wrote new songs for them to perform until the early 1980s, he rarely appeared with them in live performance. Some of the subsequent Beach Boys’ albums have some interest, musical or otherwise. (Their 1969 album 20/20 actually includes a song that Brian’s brother Dennis co-wrote with the notorious Charles Manson as a result of Dennis hanging out with the “Family.”) But these efforts overall were rather lackluster compared with the band’s earlier output. Nevertheless, some of these albums occasionally contained a very unusual song which had invariably been intended for SMiLE. The bizarre closer of the December 1967 album Wild Honey, “Mama Said,” was originally created as a break for the SMiLE song “Vege-Tables” (released sans break on Smiley Smile). “Cabin Essence” appeared on 20/20 as “Cabinessence.” A less-than-SMiLE-monumental version of “Surf’s Up,” which Brian Wilson has described as the best song he ever wrote with Van Dyke Parks, served as the title track of a 1971 LP release.

The cover for SMiLE, featuring a cartoon drawing of a "Smile Store."

Many of the SMiLE bootlegs that surfaced from the 1980s onward sported some version of the iconic Frank Holmes cover. The cover above, interestingly, does not call attention to the song “Good Vibrations.”

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a variety of bootlegs of variable sound quality attempted to re-create Brian Wilson’s original SMiLE (based on the printed materials that had survived, such as ads and track lists) using unfinished masters that had leaked, plus the songs that had been released on Smiley Smile and other later Beach Boys albums. By that point in time, The Beach Boys had become mostly a nostalgia act, playing their famous early ‘60s hits for their aging fan-base, and Brian Wilson’s further degeneration and the exploitation of him by a megalomaniacal psychiatrist would occasionally make newspaper headlines.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch CD Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch release Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE does not feature Holmes’s artwork, but nevertheless sports a similar font-style to the original.

Eventually Brian Wilson overcame his demons and embarked on a solo career which over the past decade has put him in the headlines for something other than his personal travails. In a live concert in 2002, he performed the entire Pet Sounds album accompanied by a group of ace players from a band called the Wondermints (and no one from The Beach Boys). Then in 2004, nearly 40 years after its original conception, Brian Wilson completed and performed SMiLE with many of the same players in front of a live audience and also recorded it for, of all labels, Nonesuch Records on an album titled Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE. It sold widely and appealed to listeners across generations; iTunes actually describes it as “indie rock,” a genre for which SMiLE indeed is ultimately the progenitor. Mike Love tried to sue Brian Wilson for performing the music without his permission; Love lost. Everyone thought that was the end of the saga, until earlier this year.

I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times…

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE is a wonderful album, but it is also not quite right. It is not and can never be a substitute for SMiLE, even though it might have originally been intended to be just that. By the time he recorded it in 2004, Brian Wilson was 61 years old and was a completely different person from the seemingly totally possessed (by drug addiction as much as by passion and genius) Brian Wilson who was only 23 years old at the beginning of more than a year of sessions for SMiLE. The young man who attempted to corral his sometimes reluctant brothers, cousin, and other bandmates into going along with his crazy musical ideas got noticeably different results than the Brian Wilson of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, a revered elder statesman whose assembled session musicians were willing and prepared to do every last iota of his bidding. Whereas Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was the realization of a dream finally come true that came after decades of hardship and a great deal of hindsight, the original SMiLE was an innocent dream filled with youthful naïveté and vulnerability. Admittedly that original dream ultimately turned into a nightmare, but you can never quite dream the same dream again after you wake up.

Perhaps more importantly, the world into which the album Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was released was a very different world than that of 1967. True, since the beginning of the 21st century there have been tons of people creating album-oriented music that mines the borders of rock and, for lack of a better term, contemporary classical music idioms—e.g. the music of Sufjan Stevens or Joanna Newsom, groups like Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, The Fiery Furnaces, Flaming Lips, My Brightest Diamond, and just about the entire discography of New Amsterdam Records immediately come to mind. And the LP, a format that requires sequential listening from start to finish, has been resurgent. But the zeitgeist (at least according to the pundits who control the spin) favors quick listening fixes packaged in non-corporeal files that get shuffled at the whim of their listeners. This is the antithesis of listening to an album which commands and demands attention for approximately an hour, sometimes longer. The very idea of an album is considered by some members of the my-laptop-contains-my-whole-life generation as needless clutter, the ultimate anachronism, and—perhaps worst of all—a quasi-fascistic attempt to force listeners to listen to what you want them to listen to rather than to rightfully allow them to determine that for themselves. SMiLE, to quote a lyric from Pet Sounds, just wasn’t made for these times.

But that didn’t stop Capitol Records (a subsidiary of EMI) from one-upping Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE by finally releasing on November 1, 2011 The Beach Boys’ actual recordings from the original SMiLE sessions in a variety of packagings, including what is destined to rank among the most lavish boxed sets in record history. For casual listeners, The Smile Sessions has been issued on a single CD or—for those who want to recreate a more authentically 1967 listening scenario—two LPs. This version attempts once and for all to present the album that would have come out back then, and throws in a few additional bonus tracks of out-takes for good measure. (The 2-LP package, like the 1980s vintage Original Jazz Classics reissues of classic Prestige and Riverside albums from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, attempts to eschew anything that might reveal it to be an artifact of now rather than then; it features Capitol’s originally album cover design and even their intended matrix number for it—T 2580—on the side of the sleeve jacket!) But folks wanting a broader context can get a 2-CD deluxe set containing even more out-takes from those sessions which reveal some of the real-time performances from which this music was assembled.

A wall of vinyl LPs with the Smile Sessions box lying horizontally on top of it.

The unshelvable collector’s edition box of The Smile Sessions stands out even in a large record collection.

For die-hard completists, however, Capitol released a massive collector’s edition that comes in a huge box sporting a three-dimensional simulacrum of the original SMiLE album art on its cover. Inside the box are the two LPs, presented as described above, as well as the single CD, giving listeners both options. Plus there are four additional CDs containing all the fragments released in the deluxe set as well as—they claim—every other sliver of audio that survives from those 1966-67 sessions, some of which are as long as eight and a half minutes, others as short as 24 seconds. (It’s actually not everything; a strange track called “George Fell Into His French Horn” which appears on several widely-circulated SMiLE bootlegs is missing.) The box also includes two vinyl 7″s containing what The Beach Boys had intended to release as singles during the time of The Smile Sessions (the songs “Heroes and Villains” and “Vege-Tables”), a poster, and finally a lavish hardcover booklet filled with discographic annotations, essays, lyrics, and photographs taken during the session. The box is approximately three-inches wide and is slightly more than 13 by 13 inches in length and height. It doesn’t quite fit on standard record shelves and calls attention to itself wherever it winds up being put. Its unabashedly unapologetic thing-ness is an object of wonder in our era of non-corporeal sycophancy. The box is not cheap: it comes with a hefty triple-digit price-tag. But if you weren’t aware of SMiLE before reading this essay thus far and you’re still reading it, you’re probably well on your way to becoming a SMiLE enthusiast (or at least I hope so) and you should therefore at least consider the possibility of acquiring the whole thing. (Admittedly, all 144 tracks contained in the five CDs have also been made available as individual mp3s or bundled together as an album at a significantly lower price than the physical box which is yet another option if you completely can’t bear the thought of owning things.) Even if you already own Smiley Smile, or one of the various SMiLE bootlegs that sometimes surfaces in collector’s shops, or even the Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE CD, there will be something new for your ears herein. While SMiLE did not get to be the first piece of album-oriented rock, The Smile Sessions is perhaps poised to be the last (although I hope not).

Wonderful…

The Smile Sessions’ attempt to recreate SMiLE is actually extremely convincing and sounds remarkably fresh, even after having heard all the other versions of this material over the years. The transitions from song to song (and the occasional instrumental interlude) feel completely natural, confirming the veracity of the track order of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE which served as a roadmap with the original recordings for The Smile Sessions’ version of SMiLE. (The track order on the back cover of the aborted 1967 LP is of no help since it instructs listeners to see the disc’s label for the correct playing order.) While at times the performances are not as polished as those on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, the occasional pitch or timbre gaffes I perceived make this feel all the more like a real 1960s album by a young rock band, rather than a perfected rendering realized by seasoned professionals.

As soon as the needle drops on the first side of SMiLE, however, it sounds nothing like most rock records. The opening track, “Our Prayer,” is an unaccompanied wordless chorale. The music is reminiscent of Bach and even earlier polyphonists, but the voices are The Beach Boys and there’s something about the music that is vaguely reminiscent of the backing vocal tracks of “Good Vibrations,” a song you would have already undoubtedly had heard before, even if this disc came out in 1967 as planned. Here “Good Vibrations” comes at the very end of the album, so the thematic relationships between the two function as bookends for the record. It isn’t actually terribly different from the way an opening chorale prelude and a final chorale are thematically related to one another in many of the Bach cantatas. However, before you have an opportunity to completely absorb the ethereality of “Our Prayer” something very down-to-earth occurs as soon as it ends: an almost scat-like coda (separately tracked herein and called “Gee”) which leads directly to “Heroes and Villains.”

On Smiley Smile, “Heroes and Villains” is a remarkable chain of somewhat unrelated fragments which baffle and amaze for sheer audacity. (“Good Vibrations”—however remarkable—sounds like just a warm up compared to this modular collage of different instrumentations and textures.) Here it also baffles and amazes, but even more so because all the disparate fragments somehow fit together. They actually fit together even more cleanly on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, but perhaps there they fit together too cleanly. “Do You Like Worms” (a.k.a. “Roll Plymouth Rock”) flows directly out of “Heroes and Villains,” continuing and further developing some of the same musical material.

“I’m In Great Shape,” “Barnyard,” and “My Only Sunshine” (a.k.a. “The Old Master Painter” / “You Are My Sunshine”) all come off as somewhat fragmentary, but seamlessly flow into one another and feel like harbingers of the much longer, subsequent “Cabin Essence.” Next up is “Wonderful” which is a truly beautiful song, with some great harpsichord riffs, that deserves to be a standard in its own right. But what follows is perhaps more awe inducing: “Look (for the Children)” and “Child is the Father Of The Man” form a completely integrated two-movement exploration of counterpoint and elaborate orchestration.

“Surf’s Up,” whose title seems a throwback to early Beach Boys fare, turns out to be nothing of the sort. It contains some of the most perplexing lyrics in the entire album, such as “columnated ruins domino,” and the leaps and disjointed rhythms of the melody Brian Wilson created to match Van Dyke Parks’s words is perhaps the most difficult thing he ever composed. In almost every other version I have heard of this song over the years, it never quite comes off. Particularly jarring for me has always been the setting of the following lines:

The glass was raised, the fired-roast,
The fullness of the wine. A dim last toasting.

In the various bootlegs of this I had previously heard, as well as the only official previously released version by The Beach Boys (on the 1971 album Surf’s Up), the group doesn’t quite sound together during those lines. And on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, though the ensemble is spot clean, Brian’s diction is somewhat garbled. Yet on the recording included for these Smile Sessions’ completed SMiLE, it all comes off without a hitch. It’s a musical miracle that alone justifies acquiring this recording. (Test this yourself: on the recordings of “Surf’s Up” that appear on both Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE and the first CD of The Smile Sessions, this line occurs from 2:06 to 2:10.)

Then comes a brief, somewhat jazz-tinged instrumental accompanied by various sounds of hammers and other tools (“I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”), another of the album’s more experimental tracks. I wish it would have been longer, but I’ll take what I can get. Then comes the delightfully goofy song “Vege-Tables,” a song about the joys of eating vegetables containing a variety of appropriate sound effects worthy of the Vienna-based Vegetable Orchestra (which would not be founded until 1998). The inclusion of the song’s original break (the aforementioned “Mama Said” found on Wild Honey) is the only immediately discernible difference here from the song as it appeared on Smiley Smile (under the less typographically obtuse title “Vegetables”). The brief track called “Holidays” which follows foreshadows a melodic motif that will later re-appear as a countermelody in “Good Vibrations”; it also serves as a prelude to “Wind Chimes.” The arrangement of “Wind Chimes”—which is much the same as the versions on various SMiLE bootlegs, as well as on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE—features some really nice mallet percussion. But for me it is one of the few instances where I actually prefer the less elaborate arrangement that was released on Smiley Smile. There it’s a sparse and somewhat creepy sounding track featuring vocals by brother Carl Wilson who whispers and at times clearly strains as he attempts to sing the tune Brian had composed for his own voice.

“The Elements: Fire” (a.k.a. “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow”) is another peculiar instrumental with occasional wordless vocals. It was supposed to have been one of the movements of a four-movement Elements Suite that Brian eventually abandoned. Again, it shows a level of compositional and performance sophistication that few listeners are aware this group was capable of. Then another short fragment, “Love To Say Dada,” leads into the concluding “Good Vibrations,” a track which admittedly is difficult to listen to with fresh ears. But despite how extraordinary, as well as famous, “Good Vibrations” is and how some of its inner vocal lines parallel SMiLE’s opener, “Our Prayer,” which make it a fitting bookend for the entire album, it doesn’t quite sound right to me as the closing track. Brian Wilson was actually worried back in 1966 that “Good Vibrations” didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the album, even though it was created in much the same way and contains thematic allusions to other SMiLE songs. He asked Van Dyke Parks to write a new set of words for it (perhaps triggering the overall antipathy of Mike Love toward SMiLE), but Parks refused and the version with Love’s lyrics was released as an advance single. At one point, Brian tried to cut it from SMiLE, but it was so popular after it was released that Capitol Records insisted it stay on the album, so he opted to put it at the very end. But perhaps the fact that it doesn’t quite work as a finale to Brian Wilson’s sprawling sonic landscape leaves SMiLE perpetually sounding incomplete, which perhaps makes following it with tons of out-takes from those sessions the best of all possible worlds. The completed SMiLE fills three LP sides and a three-sided record would have been unthinkable in 1967. (Such things inevitably happened later on, perhaps most notably Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s 1975 The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color!) So even the LPs include some out-takes. And, as stated above, the CDs include (almost) every last one of them.

These bonus tracks are admittedly, for the most part, not the kind of things that will wind up in heavy rotation even on my playlist, with the possible exception of a wonderful jazz jam involving some of the session musicians but ironically not Brian Wilson or any other of The Beach Boys, here named “I Wanna Be Around” most likely because some of it, or some other version of it, later was used as one of the ingredients in the aforementioned unusual SMiLE album track “I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”. But listening to every one of these fragments is revelatory nevertheless. There’s almost an entire disc devoted to various scraps that became “Heroes and Villains” and another collecting the bits and pieces from which Brian Wilson assembled “Good Vibrations” (though only about an hour’s worth, as opposed to the 80 hours that were said to have been originally recorded). These musical shards offer up many of the secrets of Brian Wilson’s recording processes, his aspirations, and his attempts (not always successful) to realize what he was hearing in his head with physical musicians in real time—there was no written score for any of this music and remember, in 1966 and 1967, there were no computer consoles and no ProTools. That more than 80% of the deluxe collector’s edition of this never-completed album is devoted to unfinished pieces of songs is perhaps the most appropriate way for this record to finally enter the official discography.

I Wanna Be Around…

A close up of a row of LPs on a shelf showing The Beach Boys' Smile alongside albums of Bartok, Basie, The Beatles, and others.

At least in my own home, the faux-1967 SMiLE LPs from The Smile Sessions have taken their rightful place on my wall of vinyl alongside the music of Bartók, Count Basie, The Beatles, and everyone else.

So will the release of The Smile Sessions and its carefully reassembled reconstruction of the lost SMiLE album finally earn Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys the same pride of place in American music history held by other great innovators like, say, Ives, Gershwin, Cage, Coltrane, James Brown, etc.? Sadly, probably not. But this has more to do with the vagaries of reception history than with actual history.

For many people, The Beach Boys will always be perceived as a light-hearted party band that drooled over “California Girls” while on a “Surfing Safari.” That image of the group has not been helped by the endless recycling of their greatest hits on recording compilations, their latter-day cover-band-version-of-their-former-selves concert appearances, and the lasting presence of these early songs as the soundtracks for countless commercials over the years encouraging revelers to have some “Summer Fun.”

I personally can’t remember the first time I had heard The Beach Boys. Their early pop hits were all around since before I was born, seemed ubiquitous when I was growing up, and have remained with us ever since. The first time I seriously thought about The Beach Boys was back in 1983 when a political brouhaha erupted after then-U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt cancelled an appearance by them at the National Mall claiming that their music encouraged drug use and alcoholism. Watt subsequently apologized after then Vice President George H.W. Bush claimed that The Beach Boys were his friends and that he liked their music, and then President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan claimed they were also Beach Boys fans. After all, they were the all-American band; what was Watt thinking? Maybe James Watt had heard Smiley Smile or knew about the Manson Family connection. Perhaps he even knew about SMiLE.

I did not, so I couldn’t stop wondering why this wholesome—and to my mind innocuous—music had triggered such a strong reaction from a mainstream social conservative since the music of The Beach Boys seemed to me to be everything that interesting rock music was rebelling against. They were not counterculture rebels; he was picking on the wrong guys, hence the embarrassing apology. Then I read Paul Griffiths’s book, ostensibly to learn more about Stockhausen, and wound up reading about Smiley Smile. I tracked down a then out-of-print LP. It blew my mind. It truly was revolutionary. I gradually picked up their earlier recordings—if they had made something this interesting, the seeds for it had to exist in their earlier work. I became more open to those early songs; there are a lot of interesting voicings in the music that accompanies even the most insipidly worded narrative about meeting pretty girls at the beach. I even fell in love with their 1964 Christmas Album, which I pull off my shelves and spin every December without fail. Eventually I tracked down Pet Sounds, which to this day I think contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful music ever recorded. But then I learned that there was other music that Brian Wilson created in between Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, music that was supposedly the most advanced music Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys had ever done. In an era before the internet, I scoured libraries and used record shops for more information, tracking down articles, and eventually a couple of bootlegs of attempts at reconstructing SMiLE, both of which sported the album’s planned Frank Holmes illustrated cover. I became one of those arcane musical cognoscenti, talking about the album whenever the subject of 1960s rock came up, or even whenever people talked about stylistic fusions between musical genres. To me, all the latter-day folks who thought that they were creating a new kind of music by fusing all of these disparate elements together were merely going down the path that Brian Wilson tried to take music to. But now, thanks to this ostentatious boxed set (or even one of the less complete manifestations of it now currently available from Capitol Records), you can be taken there as well.

Sounds Heard: itsnotyouitsme—Everybody’s Pain Is Magnificent

Caleb Burhans and Grey McMurray are two of the busiest and most accomplished musicians working in New York’s emerging experimental/indie community, equally at home in the role of composer, songwriter, producer, singer, or multi-instrumentalist. Their third release as electronica-laced violin/guitar duo itsnotyouitsme is the culmination of a long journey that began with their 2008 EP walled gardens, a loop-heavy debut with imaginative studio craftsmanship. By contrast, the duo’s second release, fallen monuments (2010), features live recordings, and now their third and most recent release finds McMurray and Burhans back in the studio with a double-disc of new tracks bearing the title Everybody’s Pain Is Magnificent.

For an album peppered with so many electronic sources, much of Everybody’s Pain sounds surprisingly earthy and organic (as suggested by Allegrea Rosenberg’s striking cover art, which features roots and branches framed in a kind of pixelated, psychedelicized landscape). It’s a good fit for an album in which electronic sounds and processing are frequently used to conjure textures that seem almost more “alive” than the sound of traditional acoustic instruments.

Some of the most interesting moments on the album likewise occur when the electronics come into contact with seemingly incongruous relics of the past. The album’s opening track (The Snake of Forever) explores a sound world influenced by early music, marked by slow-moving, chant-like violin lines suspended in a cavernous crypt of reverb. The simplicity of materials is balanced by a sense of space and distance. Recognizable elements—the grim sound of the harmonic minor scale luxuriating around its raised leading tone, a deceptive cadence to the warm, autumnal sound of the VI chord in minor—overlap, but these individual elements don’t line up as we have come to expect them to, lending depth and distance to a simple texture. Gardens of Loss is conceived in a similar vein and is one of the album’s standout tracks, a constantly evolving tapestry of ancient and contemporary sounds that expresses a fully imagined soundscape in only a few repeated brushstrokes.

Old Friends, Lost Relatives (the album’s third track) begins with equally unadorned acoustic guitar chords—just right for the track’s rootsy flavor, and another example of an implied distance from a few pungently connotative gestures. Bluebird (In My Heart) provides for a more extended exploration of acoustic guitar textures, with a simple but irregular strumming pattern set against a mounting backdrop of feedback. Meanwhile, Mammoth Super Column to the Towers Of begins with perhaps the most overly “electronic-sounding” stretch of music on the album, with glitch skips and snatches of heavily processed sound.

Vocals don’t emerge until the end of disc one (which is labelled—in what is undoubtedly a vinyl homage—”side a”), and their appearance in Little Wish feels less like the intrusion of a new element than simply another timbre to be incorporated into the instrumental texture. In the album’s final track, Always Look Up (Always Look Up), these subdued vocals mount a slow rise that hangs out over a tonic drone that pulses with affirmative constancy, finally revealing an organ-like sonority with a whiff of a plagal cadence and its host of benedictory associations.

Clocking in at 88 minutes, Everybody’s Pain manages to fuse a variety of influences to itsnotyouitsme’s essentially ambient/postrock sensibilities and succeeds as a mature and polished successor to the duo’s first two efforts. It is highly particular music, with a focused aesthetic point of view and an ear towards eccentricity, which could be either appealing and discouraging depending on one’s preconceptions and taste. Yet it’s hard to deny that Everybody’s Pain is an impressive culmination of Caleb Burhans’s and Grey McMurray’s musical vision, with lessons gleaned from the stage as well as the studio.

Sounds Heard: Gregory Spears—Requiem

Like walking along the stone floors of cathedrals built ages ago or gazing at the portraits of kings whose reins have long since ended, Gregory Spears’s Requiem offers its audience a similarly blurred aesthetic experience, dissolving the present moment into an imagined history suggested by the trappings of style and language.

For indeed, if you tuned in mid-broadcast and heard a few measures of this 2010 Requiem on your local NPR channel—catching a snippet of recorder, a strum across a harp, or that beautifully piercing soprano—you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a particularly entrancing early music performance. But stick with it a few minutes, and there would be no confusing Spears with a composer of centuries past. Requiem is not an exercise in historic recreation, but rather a melding of techniques and plotlines which combine to deliver an attention-grabbing meditation.

It is a meditation not strictly given over to God, however, but an alchemy of religion and bedtime story. Spears’s work mixes sacred Latin passages with bits of found Breton text and a 16th-century poem linking purity, death, and the image of a swan. It was originally commissioned by choreographer Christopher Williams to accompany his production Hen’s Teeth, and in a synopsis of that work he references the role of the “Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth” as well as the Breton fairytale “Pipi Menou et les Femmes Volant,” which helps explain why Spears’s piece is divided into two parts, “Swans” and “Witches.”

In this incarnation, the work was recorded in the lovely acoustic environment of Corpus Christi Church in New York. The composer himself conducted the skilled roster of Baroque and Renaissance performers, an ensemble which includes Ruth Cunningham and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek (sopranos), Ryland Angel and John Olund (tenors), Lawrence Lipnik (tenor, recorders), Kurt-Owen Richards (bass, chimes), Jacqueline Kerrod (pedal harp), Christopher Williams (troubador harp), Daniel Thomas Davis (electric organ), and Elizabeth Weinfeld (viola).

Though a requiem, it’s not a particularly morose contemplation. Instead, its transportingly solemn moments are balanced with the fluttering ornamentation of the vocal lines in one place and with a turn towards animatedly percussive delivery in another. Sharply pulled chord clusters ring out from the harp to open the piece, the drone beneath hinting that something ominous might be ahead. It’s a method of punctuation that reappears and pulls a sonic thread through the work, though when it returns the road traveled seems not to have been as dark as it first appeared. Rather, like a Grimm’s fairytale, the cast of characters may not have found their happily ever after, but they sure learned a few things along the way. If only the current spate of fantasy storylines on network television were as emotionally complex.

Sounds Heard: Christopher O’Riley/Matt Haimovitz—Shuffle.Play.Listen

It’s not such a crazy idea anymore for performing musicians to mix arrangements of pop and rock songs with classical fare in a concert setting—after all, one can hear Sybarite 5 playing Mozart and Led Zeppelin, Alarm Will Sound performing arrangements of Aphex Twin tracks and Conlon Nancarrow, or rising star cellist Joshua Roman playing Dvorak one day, and then rocking a Radiohead song with DJ Spooky later that week. Given this state of affairs, it seems perfectly natural that cellist Matt Haimovitz, who in the very early 21st century moved the Bach cello suites out of the concert hall and into what were at the time “alternative” performance spaces such as bars and nightclubs, would join forces with pianist Christopher O’Riley, who has created his own piano arrangements of songs by Nirvana and Radiohead to name just a few. Their joint effort is Shuffle.Play.Listen, a two-disc set containing an assortment of classical works on one CD, and arrangements of rock tunes by six different bands on the other CD.

Although the title of the recording suggests that the music can be mixed and matched at the whim of the listener, the obviously thoughtful ordering of pieces on both of the CDs suggests otherwise. The five movements of Bernard Hermann’s Vertigo Suite are carefully sprinkled throughout the first disc, framing spirited performances of Janacek’s Pohádka (Fairy Tale), Variations on a Slovak Folksong by Martinu, Stravinky’s Suite Italienne, and Le Grand Tango by Piazzolla. The second disc contains arrangements by O’Riley of songs from Arcade Fire, Radiohead, jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, Blonde Redhead, A Perfect Circle, and—an interesting choice that I was glad to see, having been an avid listener in the ’90s—Cocteau Twins. According to the booklet that accompanies the CDs, which contains an interview with O’Riley and Haimovitz by author Daniel Levitin, the hope for this project is that audiences for each style will have a listen and realize that there is much to be absorbed and enjoyed in all of the music represented here.

Although the musical material on each disc is substantially different, several elements serve to smooth the leap between genres. That everything is molded to fit the cello and piano duo lends consistency to the two CDs, as does the idea that all of the works on both discs are, in essence, translations—from film, ballet, or song formats that employ visual and/or text material, to purely instrumental content. O’Riley claims that he chooses what songs to arrange based on the level of complexity they present—intricacies that are both musically compelling from the standpoint of a classical musician, and that can be effectively arranged for a duo format. The pieces from disc one already employ folk or popular influences as musical stepping stones, and so with disc two the musical view is simply shifted to place the spotlight directly on the songs themselves, all of which are constructed with musical material that can be traced to the classical tradition. Whichever way one chooses to listen—be it shuffled or linear—the implication that classical and rock music, when interpreted by capable ears and hands, are not so very disparate, is well-communicated in this recording.

Sounds Heard: Odyssey—Mimi Stillman & Charles Abramovic

Eclectic ensembles that often employ state-of-the art electronic gadgetry, and/or amplification, seem to be receiving the most media attention lately as the instrumentaria of choice for the chamber music of our time. But centuries-old configurations still inspire a great many composers out there. While everyone knows that the string quartet is far more than alive and well by now, other time-tested combinations have also continued to inspire a broad range of music. Take, for example, the so called “piano + one” model which has been around since the 18th century, engendering countless works involving every conceivable instrument from the still ubiquitous violin and cello to the banjo and even the Chinese pipa and the Basque txistu. Among the more effective “piano + one” possibilities is piano plus flute which goes back to at least Mozart and counts among its enduring repertoire works from Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Cecile Chaminade, Serge Prokofiev, York Bowen, Samuel Barber, Paul Bowles, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Aaron Copland, and even John Cage. And in recent years, several recordings have shown that the combination of flute and piano continues to be intriguing. The Utah-based flutist Laurel Ann Maurer has released numerous discs featuring recent American works. And two years ago, as a result of a Meet The Composer project with New Zealand-born flutist Marya Martin, a collection of eight new American works were released on Naxos with their scores simultaneously published as a set by the Theodore Presser Company. Now added to that already significant discography is a generous 2-CD collection of 11 heretofore unrecorded American works on Innova performed by flutist Mimi Stillman accompanied by Charles Abramovic, both of whom are also founding members of the Philadelphia-based Dolce Suono Ensemble.

Perhaps it is a tad misleading to say that Odyssey, the name of Stillman’s collection, contains 11 new American works for flute and piano. Three of the works—the title piece Odyssey by Gerald Levinson, Daniel Kellogg’s Five Sketches, and David Bennett Thomas’s Whim—are solo flute pieces (another grand tradition with illustrious antecedents in Bach, Debussy, and Varèse). And two are actually transcriptions. Michael Djupstrom’s 2007 Sejdefu majka budaše, originally for flute and guitar but re-arranged for flute and piano by pianist Charles Abramovic for the present recording, is a loose setting of a Balkan folk song. The duo’s version of the aria “A Quality Love” from Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner, his 2005 operatic collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, is one of the only transcriptions Danielpour has ever permitted of his music. Five Sketches alternates between completely chromatic and diatonic movements, albeit with occasional blue notes thrown in for good measure. Whim (2009) is a delightful exploration of skewed rhythmic groupings whereas Odyssey explores the instrument’s entire range not only in pitch but in timbre as well. Curiously Odyssey, the oldest piece in this collection, was composed all the way back in 1973, which is before more than half of the composers featured herein were actually born! Stillman has finally righted a discographical wrong by being the first person ever to commercially record it as well as Andrew Rudin’s 1979 Two Elegies for flute and piano. The latter is an extremely emotional and highly engaging work from a composer who is probably most known for his pioneering electronic composition Tragoedia, which was issued by Nonesuch in 1968 and is one of the earliest widely released recordings featuring the Moog synthesizer.

The remaining flute and piano works in the collection offer a fascinating cross-section of what American composers have been exploring for this combination over the past decade. Katherine Hoover, who in addition to her activities as a composer is also a flutist and has composed extensively for her instrument, is here represented by a work from just two years ago, Mountain & Mesa, which Stillman premiered at the National Flute Association’s national convention in the summer of 2009. I was particularly drawn to the final movement, “Dizi Dance,” which is Hoover’s personal impression of Chinese traditional music. Chinese music also serves as the departure point for the Duet for Flute and Piano by Zhao Tian. Composed in 1999 and revised in 2005, here Dai minority folksongs from China’s Yunnan Province are only one of the influences—the other is the jazz piano playing of Chick Corea. Quite a world apart from these pieces is David Ludwig’s 2002 Sonata, a formidable three movement work which shows some influence of Argentinian music, and Elements, a 2000 piece by Mason Bates, which will surprise listeners who only know of his electronica infused compositions. I was perhaps most surprised by Benjamin C.S. Boyle’s Sonata-Cantilena, a work composed just two years ago that sounds like it could be part of the standard repertoire for flutists for years to come. That it is unrepentantly tonal—its role models are Barber and Poulenc—is nothing to be apologetic for in the 21st century when all aesthetic positions are equally valid and when all continue to yield captivating music.


Video courtesy Mimi Stillman

Sounds Heard: Benjamin Broening—Recombinant Nocturnes

Benjamin Broening’s catalog is rich in electroacoustic works, and as founder and artistic director of the University of Richmond’s Third Practice Festival he has likewise affirmed that the marriage of experimental sonic expressivity with an almost vocal sense of line is not merely one of convenience, but rather a deep source of inspiration. With the composition and support of electroacoustic music taking such a central role in Broening’s work, one might expect electronic timbres to predominate in his compositions. Instead, Broening often lets his electronics sing in the subtlest and most unobtrusive of tones, rarely the focal point but always imbuing the music with nuance and expressive shading.

Nowhere is Broening’s tendency toward the refined, elegant, and expressive given better voice than in this new disc of piano nocturnes, a fitting moniker for these moody, introspective works that luxuriate in atmospheric filigree akin to the piano works of Chopin and John Field. Broening’s nocturnes play out as both starkly spare and lovingly ornamented. The music floats freely above cavernous spaces, trembling over resonant harmonies reminiscent of a spikier, French-influenced palette of rich, occasionally romantic sonorities. Pianists Ruth Neville and Daniel Koppelman give impressive readings of Broening’s works, managing to sustain interest across passages of extremely quiet music and exploding in the album’s few moments of fury with an assured sense of ensemble.

This kind of “slow music,” occasionally rhythmic though rarely constant, is captivating when handled by a composer with the skill and imagination to approach each moment with renewed freshness; Broening is more than up to the task and listeners will likely want to revisit the disc many times to dwell in the particular, fully imagined moments that remain especially poignant.

Fortunately, Broening has encouraged just this kind of re-engaging. The pieces on Recombinant Nocturnes all share the same musical DNA, with melodic and rhythmic ideas from Nocturne/Doubles (the earliest work on the disc) showing up in the other compositions as well. Broening encourages playing the disc on shuffle mode in order to uncover new relationships between movements and pieces, with the core material constantly recombining in new and surprising ways—one of the featured pieces, Double Nocturne for two pianos, is literally a superimposition of the two solo piano works also recorded on the disc. I spent a good part of the weekend with the album endlessly shuffling, and it’s a testament to Broening’s musicianship that the material manages to sustain interest and yield new insights through so much repetition. The modular nature of the album is above all an expressive tool in service of the musical material, exposing the listener to an unconventional sense of time that’s just right for the dreamlike nachtmusik and its lonely wanderings.

Recombinant Nocturnes is a gorgeous disc of music, and Broening never allows this core fact to be usurped through the kind of technical or conceptual conceits that might have distracted from the magic. It is adventurous, experimental music that is not so caught up in being experimental that it cannot also be thoughtful, eloquent, and disarmingly direct as well. It’s one of the most persuasive accounts of a contemporary composer engaging a tried-and-true form—the piano nocturne—with both an individual imagination and just the right amount of affectionate familiarity.

Sounds Heard: Mehldau-Hays-Zimmerli—Modern Music

Hybrid musical genres are hardly earth-shattering in the second decade of the 21st century. I would even posit that they are normative. But every now and then some music comes along containing a clash of sensibilities that forces listeners to confront head on the limitations of listening to music within the context of a genre, whatever genre, as well as attempting to listen beyond genre. Take, for example, the seemingly innocuously titled Modern Music, recently released by Nonesuch. While it is ostensibly a series of duets performed by jazz pianists Brad Mehldau and Kevin Hays, the disc’s digipack cover and spine contain the additional credit “composed and arranged by Patrick Zimmerli.”

Brad Mehldau has established himself as one of the leading jazz pianists of our time. But he has also accompanied classical vocalists such as Anne Sophie von Otter and Renée Fleming. While his Trio performs his original compositions as well as skewed takes on jazz standards, they’ve garnered a great deal of attention for their interpretations of music by Radiohead, Soundgarden, and other rock bands. Kevin Hays’s career to date, on the other hand, has hewn closer to jazz traditions. He has worked with such living legends as Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson, Ron Carter, and Jack DeJohnette. In addition, he has recorded three albums as a leader for Blue Note Records, which for generations has been something of a jazz seal of approval.

Patrick Zimmerli, whose role on Modern Music is more amorphous, perhaps requires a slightly longer introduction. An impressive saxophonist and band-leader, Zimmerli’s quartet session Twelve Sacred Dances, released in 1998, was one of the discographical highlights of the Chriss brothers’ late lamented A&R tenure at Arabesque Records. While the compositions on the album were clearly platforms for a heady interplay between Zimmerli’s tenor sax, percussionist John Hollenbeck and two thirds of The Bad Plus (pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson), the music’s harmonic vocabulary—as well as its frequent contrapuntal layering of timbres—might occasionally fool less-than-completely-attentive listeners into thinking they’re hearing a new music ensemble reading through a complex contemporary score. A later Arabesque release featuring two piano trios (that is, the classical piano trio of violin, cello, and piano as opposed to the jazz piano trio of piano, bass, and drums) reveals Zimmerli’s thorough adeptness at bona fide score-based composition for performers other than himself (on the recording Scott Yoo, Michael Mermagen, and John Novacek). On close listen, though, the music has a recognizable jazz tinge; in fact, at times it’s ironically more overtly swing-oriented than Twelve Sacred Dances. But if those two albums revealed a creator who was at the same time a jazz-inspired classical composer and a contemporary classical-minded jazzer, the lines get even more blurry on Phoenix, a Songlines disc from 2005. Therein Zimmerli combines his saxophone (this time a soprano) with a jazz piano trio (the one that’s piano, bass, and drums), a string quartet, and electronics to boot, creating music that’s at times contemporary jazz, at times a chamber orchestra, and at times techno-sounding.

As with the aforementioned album of piano trios, Zimmerli does not play at all on Modern Music. Rather, every note uttered herein has been performed by Mehldau and Hays, who are both formidable improvisatory pianists, and that’s where Zimmerli’s exact role starts to get confusing. Unlike in classical music where the composer of the music being played remains the auteur even if he or she (sadly more usually he) has been dead for hundreds of years, jazz inverts the paradigm: the performer is the auteur no matter what he or she is playing. No matter how much larger Herbert Von Karajan’s name looms over Beethoven’s in his endless series of recordings of the latter’s music, listeners to these recordings are still supposedly hearing the music of Beethoven, whereas John Coltrane’s performances of “My Favorite Things” ultimately have very little to do with Rodgers and Hammerstein. So what exactly is the role of a non-participatory “composer” on an album by two jazz improvisors? For starters, this particular project was instigated by Zimmerli even though Mehldau and Hays—who had never previously appeared on record together—have traveled in the same circles since the late ’80s and wanted to collaborate for a very long time. In addition to producing the session, Zimmerli also determined what repertoire Mehldau and Hays recorded, although to describe his contribution above all else as the person who “composed and arranged” the music seems slightly misleading to me. Originally the idea was for Mehldau and Hays to perform arrangements by Zimmerli of pieces of modern classical music. The project began with them performing an arrangement of Richard Strauss’s late composition Metamorphosen. Other pieces originally intended for similar treatment were Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. In addition, a jazz standard was chosen (Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”) and each of the pianists were also asked to contribute an original piece. In the end, the Strauss, Pärt, and Gorecki wound up on the proverbial cutting room floor, and Zimmerli composed a total of four originals for the project. However, since there are a total of nine tracks on the final album, that means that most of the music herein was not composed by Zimmerli.

But if one is to assign an auteur to this project it would probably still have to be Zimmerli since the curating of the repertoire is perhaps the single most important ingredient here. There is a remarkable consistency of compositional voice throughout, despite there being six composers involved in total. Zimmerli’s own compositions, in particular the title track and the disc’s opener (“Crazy Quilt”), prove that a musical goldmine can result when minimalist compositional processes are subjected to improvisational whimsy. Although perhaps there’s no more undeniable evidence for that than to hear what Zimmerli gets Mehldau and Hays to do with the opening chord sequence of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. Robert Fripp once commented that while he enjoyed Reich’s music, its preconception lacked “the random factor, the factor of hazard.”

By further blurring the lines between composition, performance, and authorship, Mehldau, Hays, and Zimmerli have certainly added that hazard factor. Whose music it is will ultimately depend on what context you bring to it, but wherever you’re coming from it will change the way you think about things.

Sounds Heard: Terri Lyne Carrington—Mosaic

When I am old, I would like to form an all-female salsa band, and we will tour the world, performing in senior citizen homes everywhere. A girl has to have something to look forward to in her later years, right? Well, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who is by no means an old lady and has been playing since an incredibly young age, is not waiting around to form her “dream team.” With her latest CD, Mosaic, she has assembled a jaw-dropping lineup of musicians who happen to all be female, including Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spalding, Nona Hendryx, Tineke Postma, Sheila E., Geri Allen, and many others. The intention of the project, as the liner notes describe, is to “comment on historical, current and appropriately feminine themes with the intent to offer an informative, enjoyable listening experience, driven by creativity and consciousness.” It’s not just for girls, though—the music, which is firmly rooted in jazz but touches upon numerous other styles such as funk and hip-hop, speaks just as strongly as one might expect from any world-class lineup of performers.

Several of the compositions on Mosaic were written and/or arranged by Carrington, such as “Magic and Music”, “Mosaic Triad”, and “Insomniac”, while other tunes were penned by different members of the project. Accordingly, each song is musically distinctive, and literally has it’s own voice since Carrington handpicked a singer for every one. The very first track, “Transformation”, hooks you immediately. Written and sung by Nona Hendryx, this funky opener highlights saxophonist Tineke Postma and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, who contributes a solo on flugelhorn that reaches some searingly high notes. The sparkling mix, which allows for all the parts to be clearly heard, such as Linda Taylor’s electric guitar track that peeks out from the background at just the right moments, is typical of the entire recording. Gretchen Parlato sings unusual and intimate versions of Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost In Her Arms” and “Michelle” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, which follow one another without pause.

“Echo”, with the most direct and politically charged message, is intended to serve as the cornerstone for the recording. It is written by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey In The Rock fame, and features a spoken-word text written especially for the song by civil rights activist Angela Davis. Carrington is quoted in the press release as saying that the song is a tribute to Reagon’s influence and friendship.

“Unconditional Love” by Geri Allen opens with a mambo rhythm played on congas, processed with a bizarre yet compelling tinny reverb, while bassist Esperanza Spalding sings a winding, wordless melody that pairs nicely with the solo saxophone lines that accompany her. Spalding also sings on her own “Crayola”, which is perhaps the most original, quirky tune on Mosaic, with its rapidly contorting melodic lines.

Terri Lyne Carrington is a fantastic, strong drummer with a penchant for asymmetrical meters, as one can hear in “Soul Talk”, with its loping 11/4 bass line. Apparently this tune caused a bit of angst for vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, who states in the video below that she had a terrible time getting the changes straight. In the end, the arrangement sounds like it was a piece of cake to perform, and Bridgewater sums things up with the statement, “That’s what Terri Lyne does to you. She will take you places you think you can’t go—she’ll challenge you.”

Sounds Heard: Steve Mackey—It is Time

If you can’t convince the members of So Percussion to stop by your house and play a show in your living room, their latest release, It Is Time, just might offer the next best thing.

The disc contains only a single work—Steve Mackey’s five-movement, 38-minute It Is Time—which was composed expressly for the quartet. It comes bundled, however, with a 5.1 surround sound DVD of a complete performance that allows the viewer to get up close and personal with each of So’s members and peer over their shoulders as they work their way through the piece. The black box-like theater setting in which it was recorded keeps all the focus on the men in black and the myriad instruments the piece incorporates—from a single metronome to a full compliment of drums, bells, whistles, and assorted noisemakers—all played against a backdrop of video footage that imitates or accents the percussive action in the foreground.

While the almost-concert-at-home performance was a great bonus, I actually found myself more strongly attracted to the audio-only portion of the recording package. Where the video allowed me a peek at the performers in action (a treat I missed when the work was premiered at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March of 2010), the range of sound employed in Mackey’s music is so rich that it rewards focused attention. A continuously shifting timbral palette manipulates the pace of passing time. Of the many striking moments, the microtonal tuning of the steel drums was a particularly ear-catching highlight.

Sometimes the time references are ticking and ringing right in your face, but at other turns Mackey suspends them. In the press materials that accompanied the disc there is a quote from Mackey attributing his inspiration for the piece to the experience of being an older father to his toddler-aged son, and the reflection on time this has led him to engage in. “It Is Time fantasizes that we might have agency with respect to time,” he explains. “An African poet named Isaac Maliya wrote a poem called Time is Time. The first stanza—’Time sits, Time stands, Time is Time’—suggested a terse melody that became a dominant lyrical element in the piece. It is first unveiled in the ‘Steel Drum’ movement but shards of it permeate much of the music.” Indeed, there are plenty of sharp, concise musical statements incorporated, but also languid moments to float down and slide over.

Structurally, Mackey has divided the work so that the first four movements (“Metronome,” “Steel Drums,” “Marimba,” and “Drums,” respectively) move almost seamlessly from one to the next and allow each of the quartet’s members to take a featured turn in the spotlight. “Epilogue,” the brief two-minute closer, balances on the lethargic but not melancholy tones of the bowed saw, and sets up a stunningly punctuated end to this sonic ride.