Category: Tracks

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

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