Category: Listen

Here’s something to get you in the holiday spirit. (We figured since chain stores have started the Christmas season in October, we’d have to run this in September to stay ahead of the Joneses.) Wayne Peterson’s unaccompanied choral setting of a nativity anthem by the obscure Elizabethan poet William Austin adds a few twists to the annual rituals. For one thing, which will put a smile on the faces of secular humanists in the audience who still appreciate the spirit of Christmas if not the dogma, the poem never mentions Christ’s name. And, since the composer is Wayne Peterson whose music is unrepentantly atonal and rigorous, we are spared the usual triad clichés and our ears are bathed in gloriously unresolvable sonorities. I’m ready for the wreaths and mistletoe, bring it on!

—FJO

Definition of a Toy is the physical record of a quintet—Dylan van der Schyff (drums), Michael Moore (clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone), Brad Turner (trumpet), Achim Kaufmann (piano), Mark Helias (double bass)—that came together to mix up the brainpower of the composers involved. Set up by van der Schyff, each man brought a composition to the table, or shares billing on a track. Though each carries its own character, of course, I really could have selected any one of the tracks they’ve created together and gotten the point across. The disc is cohesive enough to feel like a whole experience, but the various authors keep the ear moving. In the end, I settled on the sultry Queen of the Box Office credited to Turner. Maybe it’s just the title planting thoughts in my head of sequins and cigarette smoke, but it works.

—MS

I haven’t a clue what Joseph Klein’s music has to do with philosophy beyond titling this chamber piece Occam’s Razor, but it really doesn’t matter. The music just sounds good. I’m afraid if things get any more cerebral, it will spoil all the fun. Like a sonic tickling with counterpoint gone awry, the first movement is a dizzying euphoria that’s actually enjoyable to listen to. Of course composers will be composers and if you’re into the head-trip, go right ahead and read Klein’s liner where he gushes all about the math behind the music. You know you want to…

—RN

The opening minute of this Billy Childs track is lullingly cinematic, but there’s a bit more to this particular old man’s story. Lines go where you expect they will, but sometimes they don’t. Plenty of side trips, new styles tried. It’s a life, and from the sound of it, one well lived. Musically, the piece straddles the jazz and chamber music worlds—lush string and horn writing around one corner, piano-bass-drum explorations around another—to make a hybrid genre that isn’t over-conscious of itself. It’s a characteristic of the entire album, for that matter, producing a sound characterized by Childs as “not dazzlingly in-your-face, but meant to get under your skin.” Another worthy offering on the Artistshare label, this CD is only available online at www.billychilds.com.

—MS

Here’s one for radio stations afraid of playing new music, a 2002 mini-opera actually created for the radio medium which conjures up the sonic milieu of World War II through simulating a 1940s radio broadcast and musicalizing it. Based on a text by Kurt Vonnegut, the performance is given extra authenticity by actually featuring Vonnegut as the voice of the General in addition to casting iconic WKCR jazz DJ Phil Schaap, as, you guessed it, the voice of the radio announcer. The instrumental ensemble conjures up an appropriate swing-era sound world with some unexpected orchestrational twists admittedly borrowed from Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat: the obligatory trumpet, trombone, and clarinet frontline is joined here by bassoon and violin, and there is no keyboard, the usual grounder of swing, which allows the music to float beyond time.

Printed on the disc is a parental advisory warning of explicit content. Let’s hope this will attract the attention of younger audiences

—FJO

Tessa Brinkman & East-West Continuo

Paintings by the playful Catalan modernist Joan Miró (1893-1993), previously the inspiration for Bobby Previte’s greatest work to date, are also the muse behind Mark Fish’s more intimate 2004 Pictures of Miró scored for flute and string trio whose 11 movements total less than 20 minutes. In the fourth movement, “Girl Practicing Gymnastics,” the flute convincingly imitates a slide whistle before the trio launches a groove reminiscent of a Viennese waltz over which the flute cheekily intones a hook-filled melody.

In addition to being a highlight of Portland, Oregon-based flutist Tessa Brinkman’s exciting collection of recent music for flute and strings (with the widest interpretation here, there’s a track featuring a koto), Fish’s Miró pictures are also a great excuse to feature Geoffrey Fairburn’s gorgeous Miró-esque painting Eclipse II 1984 on the cover although I wish the CD booklet could have also reproduced the 11 Miró paintings that triggered Fish’s music. Since they didn’t, here’s a link to the Miró painting Girl Practicing Gymnastics.

—FJO

Deep in the pile of new sax/bass/drum improv-based recordings, a shake up occurs: sax, percussion, and….wait for it….guitars! Yay! Lingua Franca delivers the new sound palette the ears are thirsty for. It’s a little bit global, but in a way that even the world-music-phobic won’t have cause to cringe over. “Here & There” piles up the international influences, the timbres, and the musical ideas of Peter Epstein (alto and soprano saxophone), Brad Shepik (guitars), and Matt Kilmer (percussion). The impression is not Around the World in 80 Days, but much more like sitting out on the stoop on the hottest night of the year in some international city, a night when everyone in the building comes outside to get in on the jam.

—MS

Who would have guessed that drum machines—those old clunky plastic boxes of preordained sound—would become fetishized a few decades down the line? It goes way beyond the likes of Ikue Mori and Micky T’s Drum Machine Museum. The whole electroclash scene would never have happened without those infamous synthesized beats, now would it? Time to add another artist to the TR-808 fan club. Meet Matt Davignon, known on the Bay Area’s improv scene for, you guessed it, twiddling drum machine knobs. If you’re not a Left Coast dweller, you can catch a glimpse of Davignon’s sound with this free MP3 download “96 Clocks.” Sampled from an album called Bwoo—meaningless onomatopoeia?—”96 Clocks” doesn’t suffer a bit from the over-slick sheen oozed by a lot of electronic music these days. In fact, the track resembles the sound Barbarella’s submarine might make while trudging through the matmos.

—RN

Tasha Dzubay, clarinet
Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor

In his somewhat confessional notes for his 2004 clarinet concerto, American Midlife, Indiana School of Music-based composer David Dzubay says that he wrote this music “during the year I turned forty while trying to save a failed marriage.” Innova’s new recording of it features his wife Tasha Dzubay as the clarinet soloist, so one can only hope for the best! Divided into three movements Present, Past and Future—the concerto, much like a real midlife crisis, travels through numerous mood swings. Perhaps it says more about me than the piece, but the movement I most connected with is the second, “Past,” which contrasts a general mood of contemplation with occasional bursts of less stable emotional ground. Midlife indeed.

—FJO