Category: Listen

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note up front that I don’t think Ingram Marshall has written a piece of music that I didn’t feel attached to in some way. Just as there are authors who never seem to write a line I don’t enjoy and painters who always intrigue my eye, Marshall can stretch himself many different ways musically, and I enjoy following along for what the ride might offer. In this case, several elements meet to create an especially striking sonic experience—sacred and secular texts set to recall tradition while sounding fresh, the striking performance from the Tudor Choir accompanied by an electronic track with violin and viola obbligato, all recorded live in a cathedral in Seattle. Maybe in the current political climate it means even more if you know the composer was influenced by the First Gulf War, but then again, maybe the specifics don’t matter. The title references a battle in the Roman campaigns against the German tribes. Marshall’s piece is presented to a modern world that still turns often to war, and maybe the reminder of that past horror (…hard by lay splintered spears and limbs of horses, while human skulls were nailed prominently on tree trunks…) and well as the eventually found peace (…no man knew whether he consigned to earth the remains of a stranger or a kinsman, but all thought of all as friends and members of one family…) is the truer necessity.

–MS

An American art song sung in Yiddish!? Sounds like it could be the punchline of an early Woody Allen stand-up routine, but the work of Lazar Weiner (1897-1982) makes a serious and compelling case for an unlikely geographical reality. According to the Milken Archive’s thorough booklet notes, Weiner’s devotion to Yiddish poetry was a result of his discovery of it after arriving in America. The tunefulness and lush harmonies of his 1939 song “Yosl Klezmer,” in particular, show just how effective a muse these poems can be. And, in the voice of Rafael Frieder and the hands of pianist Yehudi Wyner, a famous composer in his own right who also happens to be Weiner’s son, this song has the ideal interpreters.

–FJO

Prog rock goes back to the future with a synth-laden big band sound backed by a rock steady beat and some fancy chord changes. But these aren’t your regular ol’ keyboard-driven synthesizers. Electropolis features wired winds: electrumpet and electrosax. No explanation is provided—liner notes are absent—but you can instantly hear what these plugged-in hybrids are capable of throughout this self-titled debut. Think grungy, distorted electric guitar with a vulnerable edge, personalized by breath, lips, and reeds.

–RN

Do you remember those jewelry boxes for little girls that featured a small plastic ballerina which popped up and twirled steadily before a gilt-edged mirror until the lid was shut again? If it’s where you kept your sparkly treasures, be prepared for a flashback as Peter Griggs’s Through the Looking Glass unfolds. The music of Indonesia has served as a pinnacle of the exotic in the ethnomusicology departments of countless American universities, but the gamelan construction presented in Through the Looking Glass—two groups of identical instruments playing melodic figures in canon—is lovely and affecting in ways that can exist independently of the music’s heritage. The listener, invited to meditatively let go in the cyclic metallic hammering, might just as easily wander down paths close to home as be carried across oceans. Griggs’s work takes me back to childhood, when glittery pieces of cut glass stood in for the glamour of an adult world we did not comprehend.

–MS

While almost every music critic in the biz as well as the folks who adjudicate the Grammy Awards were overjoyed about the CD release of Bill Bolcom’s massive Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I’m even more thrilled to see his four sonatas for violin and piano finally made available on a single, complete, and authoritative recording. The four works, which span most of the second half of the 20th century (1956 to 1994, to be precise), offer all of Bolcom’s polystylistic gambits, but the consistency of the timbral combination of violin and piano makes the inter-relativity of his disparate influences all the more seamless. Perhaps singling out a snippet from just one movement here doesn’t demonstrate how effective these juxtapositions are in an audibly convincing way, but nevertheless “In Memory of Joe Venuti,” which effortlessly morphs from an atonal figuration to a salsa charanga and back without skipping a beat, should give you some idea.

–FJO

The almost cute amoeba-cum-paisley, sea urchin-esk cover art is the first clue that you’re about to enter an altered state. Emily Hay is your wordless tour guide, scatting and blabbering, sometimes laughing her way through her prepared remarks about the landscape, points of interest, and tourist traps. This is the album Björk would make if she had the gumption. Too late now, Hay and percussionist Marcos Fernandes already beat her to the punch with the drifty We Are. After a listen to the disc’s title track alone, you’ll be left wondering how on earth the pair manages to pack such breadth into six minutes. There’s no doubt their creativity is far from drying up.

–RN

I’m not sure why Francisco Pais feels compelled to hide from his listeners. He’s got his back to us in the CD case photo, and a booklet image finds him peeking out from behind his guitar—just a bit of nose and two eyes. Even more significantly in the music on his recent Fresh Sounds/New Talent release, he keeps himself down in the mix. In may be the Francisco Pais Quintet, but musically they all get equal time and attention.

I’m a fan of the ensemble feel this arrangement allows. The opening track, Water From the Moon, shows off the range of exploration this set-up allows a jazz group unhampered by the need to wait while each guy takes a solo. Instead the group can move and develop the work en masse, a striking idea or a well-played riff serving as a spice rather than a stand-alone course. Now Francisco, come out from there, at least to take a bow.

–MS

With class acts like eighth blackbird and Paul Moravec releasing on Naxos, it’s become clear that the budget label is playing in the same sandbox with the majors. Now, if they can just let go of the horrid design template. Take a look at the packaging of eighth blackbird’s last release on Cedille: straightforward and clever, with alluring colors. Coincidentally, this description also matches Moravec’s music on The Time Gallery. The composer combines simple melodic passages and blurs the edges with carillon-like soundscapes of bells and chimes. eighth blackbird’s confident rendition of the composer’s meditation on time isn’t for clock-watchers per se. The music does materialize a bit slowly, but then it demands attention too often to ignore, must be all those subdominant minor chords.

–RN

Not too long ago, I spent a few months working on a project that required me to drool over the Bartók quartets and consider their role in the development of the form. Yeah, I know, what a hardship. But ever since, whenever I hear a quartet, another step in that development is what I’m listening for. The musical world frequently likes to frame the conversation as a discussion of how Bartók pushed past Beethoven. Maybe Crumb pushed past him? We could continue on like this, but what strikes me while listening to the quartets of Sebastian Currier on this New World release is that rather than push at the outside edges looking for the new, he’s made a less obvious and perhaps more dangerous decision to look closer at normative paths in quartet writing, and then adds his own twist and a kick. Quarterset’s middle movement, “Scatterbrained,” is a great aural example of how this plays out in sound. The Cassatt Quartet flits over scratchy snatches of a waltzy dance tune and then crashes into moments of aggressive sawing—and everything sounds almost normal, but not quite. It’s a bit like you’re on the other side of the looking glass and the chairs are all on the ceiling.

–MS