Category: Tracks

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

A tribute album is a convention much more common in the pop world, but it is one warmly taken up here in gratitude to Andrew Imbrie on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The disc features a mix of works—some penned by Imbrie, others in his honor. John Harbison’s Chaconne for piano and four instruments is among the pieces carrying a dedication to Imbrie. Taking a small pattern, then turning it over and developing it during the course of the work’s five-minute run time, Harbison’s ear seems to have been born aloft by a leaf caught up in the wind, the sort that never quite comes to rest on the ground. An overly sentimental image perhaps, but a simple one fitting to this wistful, almost nostalgic piece.

—MS

Cold shower? A cup of joe? Maybe a slap in the face? Nothing is more effective than the opening of Elliott Carter’s third string quartet—guaranteed to wake you up faster than smelling salts. The Arditti Quartet manages to capture every bit of potential energy contained in Carter’s score—feel the wallop! Of course Carter is no one trick pony, so the music evolves, tensions get released. You bet you’re going to be lulled and jerked in a million directions at once. Rollercoaster enthusiasts take note: this CD is for you.

—RN

Though having forsaken the Boston jazz scene for Rome last year, Greg Burk teams up with the one-two punch of Steve Swallow (bass) and Bob Moses (drums) for his first release on Chicago-based indie label 482 Music. Without in any way ignoring the strengths of the trio, the disc’s second track leaves Burk alone at the piano to rewarding result. Labeled “Prelude to Surrender,” Burk does not go gently. More like a very precocious six-year-old, he argues, debates, drags his feet, begs, and promises before eventually consenting to go to sleep.

—MS

In the never ending avalanche of John Cage CDs on Mode comes the 6th volume of the composer’s piano works. The disc’s centerpiece, Music of Changes, is preceded by the economical Seven Haiku, which clocks-in just under two minutes. Although not intentional—we’re talking Cage after all—the side-by-side pairing lends the Haikus a sort of Cliff’s Notes air. Can nearly 45 minutes of chance be summed up into a few select gestures? Listen to both and find out.

—RN

Performed by Alarm Will Sound

It seems like a composition assignment from that really cool young prof. who’s intent on shaking up the department: Take an Aphex Twin track (which is to say one created by electronic-pioneer Richard James) and translate it into the acoustic. The project is actually not all that unprecedented (Philip Glass arranged an orchestral version of “Icct Hedral” released in 1995).

Alan Pierson and Alarm Will Sound have more than earned their concert hall and their street cred with challenging and well-executed programming, and those unfamiliar with Aphex Twin in the original will likely enjoy the same spirit here. Fans, however, may find the whole experiment a little silly, along the lines of the Chris O’Riley/Radiohead project. Of the arrangements turned in here by twelve composers working alone and in teams, Caleb Burhans’s “Blue Calx” is the least giggle inducing, but that’s because it sounds the least like a traditional chamber ensemble.

—MS

How much new music, or any music for that matter, can you think of that is scored for bass trombone and piano? Not even Hindemith wrote a sonata for the combo! But, now, thanks to bass trombonist Charles Vernon and pianist Eric Ewazen, there’s a whole disc of this stuff out there. The disc features everything from Halsey Stevens’s Sonatina and Alec Wilder’s Sonata, both mid-century I-would-imagine-bass-trombone-and-piano-repertoire-staples (if such things could be said to exist) to two short lyrical pieces by Robert Spillman, known primarily as the conductor of the Boulder Bach Festival in Colorado.

The highlight, however, is believe it or not, a “concerto” for bass trombone, presented humbly here without the orchestra, by John Williams, undoubtedly known to most of you primarily for his more than 80 film scores and conducting the Boston Pops. Stripped to a piano reduction, Williams’s concerto is transformed into a formidable piece of chamber music, a remarkably exciting and virtuosic dialogue between two very dissimilar instruments.

The pianist Eric Ewazen is also represented on this disc as a composer by an orchestra-less version of his bass trombone concerto. It’s one of five works he’s composed thus far for the instrument, all of which have been previously collected in fully orchestrated versions on an earlier Albany CD, cheekily titled Bass Hits.

—FJO

This haunting track by Chicago-based Joshua Abrams evokes a tactile dreamland where giant church steeple carillons melt into millions of discombobulated music boxes which continue to chime the passage of time. In this strange darkened landscape of infinite fireworks displays, tiny digital purrs saturate the air, stirring the gossamer aura of this tranquil nightmare. Abrams beautiful juxtaposition of electronic tweaks and field recordings made on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is pregnant with foreboding disaster, with just enough hypnosis thrown in to simulate utter apathy. Yeah, I know, the sky is falling…isn’t it pretty though?

—RN