The piano has so many possibilities: Beethoven, Cecil Taylor, Alvin Curran, Stephen Scott, John Tesh, Nam June Paik. In the hands of Geoffrey Keezer, the instrument is allowed to explore all these territories. Joined by Jim Hall’s sometimes melodic, other times atmospheric guitar, the duo improvise tuneful vistas and then cover a Ryuichi Sakamoto tune. The disc, Free Association, isn’t such a bad way to underscore around 40 minutes of whatever the day brings.
–RN
The news coming out of the Middle East these days has me casting about for answers to political issues with no real expectation of finding them. I’m not so naïve as to expect solutions to appear out of musical works, at least not exactly, but all the same listening to the mixing of Christian and Judaic text in Beveridge’s Yizkor Requiem: A Quest for Spiritual Roots makes the concept appear to be a much more graceful possibility than recent headlines have inferred. The piece began as a memorial for Beveridge’s father, an organist and choirmaster at Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel, but this expansive, nearly hour-long work took him much deeper into a scholarly and philosophical exploration of the roots of faith. It was a process that mirrored the interests of his father. The booklet notes include the anecdote: “If I had not [already] made so many changes in my life,” [Lowell Beveridge] mused to his son at one point, “I think I might become a Jew.”
–MS
Former Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra tenor saxophonist Eddie Daniels, who has been carving out a successful career for himself in both jazz and classical music since the 1960s, here offers an intimate, chamber music approach to his jazz side: a quartet balancing his sax and clarinet playing with the standard back up of piano, bass, and drums. His sidemen—Hank Jones, Richard Davis, and Kenny Washington—are all standard bearers of their instruments in the jazz community, and all 12 titles on the album are, well, standards. But Daniels’s approach is anything but. I thought I heard everything anyone could ever come up with for “It Had to Be You,” the 1924 song by Gus Kahn and Isham Jones. But Daniels’s probing clarinet solo on it here—a sometimes angular though always inevitable-sounding melodic cascade—reveals all sorts of possibilities lurking within its all-too-familiar tune and chord changes.
–FJO
While I don’t foresee the new film United 93 or the debut episode of Lost coming soon to an airplane near you, Albany has released the perfect concept album for any airline’s in-flight entertainment system. A Celebration of Flight brings together skyward-inspired works by William Bolcom, Robert Xavier Rodríguez, Michael Schelle, and Steven Winteregg. As you might expect, these are big, expressive pieces. Take Bolcom’s Inventing Flight, for instance, which mythically opens with a movement inspired by Daedalus and Icarus. The composer’s sonic drama plays out predictably as Icarus falls earthward, time to usher in the descending scale passages.
–RN
If too much talk about genres and categories and who’s on what side of various imaginary geographies is leaving your ear longing for actual notes, you might take a spin through The Nitrate Hymnal. The multimedia opera, penned by Bob Massey and David Wilson, muddies up the water between avant-classical and post-punk with a mix of sound drawn out of the Anti-Social Music kids and the Gena Rowlands Band. They all got together to stage the video-with-live-score show three years ago in D.C. and then recorded it over three caffeine-fueled days in Brooklyn in 2005. Though cut into “songs” to make a manageable album, the tracks are best served as a cohesive whole. You could uncomfortably file this record in a lot of different bins in your favorite record store, but it will probably fit a little neater in your house once you’ve heard it for yourself. I’ll be keeping my copy right next to Hood, but for all I know you could be filing yours next to Slow Six.
—MS
Aside from having the best title of any track I’ve come across this month, this Asheville, North Carolina-based power trio’s quirky cross between new music composition and raw punk energy will have the self-appointed genre limiters scratching their heads for the rest of the year. The rest of us can just enjoy it and hope there’ll be more in the not-too-distant future.
—FJO
Is this the soundtrack to Chinatown gone awry? Was that a Fred Astaire quote? “Heaven, I’m in heaven…” Nope. Just the opening track of Lung Tree, the latest deep exploration into timbre and improvisation by extended Fender Rhodes pioneer Eric Glick Rieman in collaboration with trumpeter Lesli Dalaba and Stuart Dempster, here playing everything but trumpet. The tune, appropriately titled “Opening credits/resolve,” establishes a narrative-sensitive approach as themes or, more appropriately, sonic situations eventually windup being self-referential as the album unfolds. The track listing even suggests a specific timeline which begins after midnight—12:41 a.m. to be precise—with its conclusion taking place at 6:11 a.m. In between there’s a vast landscape of aural territory covered by the trio, perfectly complementing the dream-state most of us experience during such hours of the night.
—RN
Miss the tuba in jazz? Okay, admit that you’ve never even considered the issue before now and then check out “Coyote Cowboy”. Johnnie Valentino is “commemorating the 100th anniversary of the tuba’s demise as the keeper of the bass line in jazz,” a milestone that might have otherwise gone unremarked were it not for this disc of the oddly funky tuba-organ quintet tracks (filled out with percussion, clarinet, sax, and guitar). Valentino seduces the listener into a groove, forcing out a few sultry shoulder shrugs and toe taps at the very least and inspiring the more coordinated fans in the crowd to get up and join in a full-on, across-the-dance-floor parade. Each musician throws in a thoughtful take on the material; you’ve got eight minutes to find the beat and compliment them with a few moves of your own.
—MS
“Bitches Brew” always seemed to me like an un-reproducible masterpiece—the once in a lifetime result of capturing a bunch of really creative musicians in the studio. But just as Bang on a Can’s braintrust proved a few years back that Brian Eno’s previously unnotated studio-created Music for Airports could be transcribed and played back live by a group of musicians, the intrepid avant-rocker Henry Kaiser in an unlikely collaboration with free jazz guru Wadada Leo Smith has recreated Miles’s nearly half-hour of blessed-out funk. They show remarkable reverence and still find a few new things to say with it.
—FJO
I have an aural vision of Jewish-tinged music, and excepting a few raucous turns in the Hava Nagila at wedding receptions, “upbeat” is not generally one of the descriptors that comes to mind. But Paul Shapiro’s It’s in the Twilight dismisses all the lamentation lodged in my ear and clears the floor for some wine and celebration. He keeps up the beat though six original tracks and two traditional tunes, leaving not an inch of space for Babs or Itzhak to induce me to tears of melancholia. The bass and drums lay down a percussive foundation on Children of Abraham that sets the stage for a classic cartoon chase sequence, really, with an ever-changing leader and a good share of friendly intersections and re-routing along the way. It all fosters enough of an adrenaline surge to keep everyone’s enthusiasm up as the players dash towards the finish line.
—MS
