The spontaneous exploration of musical ideas can be exciting, rewarding, and challenging for both the performer and the audience; jazz musicians demonstrate this constantly. Most of the participants in this recording project have had extensive experience in jazz. In their work here, they are exploring the conceptual similarities and connections between improvised music and concert music, an extension and development of both European and American traditions.
Each of the written compositions (Sometimes, Dialectics for Two Grand Pianos, Intermezzi, and Through This Vale of Tears) comes from an improvisatory stimulus. Of the improvised pieces, Four Chords from T. J.'s Intermezzi and Duetto for Clarinet and Piano are rooted in notated concert music (T. J. Anderson's Intermezzi), while the atmospheric ambience of Jazz Sets and Tone Rows was generated by Olly Wilson's Sometimes. There is a conscious attempt on this recording to relate the pieces to one another in a musical, conceptual, philosophical, and atmospheric way. This effort was made easier by the fact that three of the four written compositions were commissioned by or written for the performers.
Olly Wilson writes about Sometimes: “[This piece] was composed especially for William Brown, and is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Black spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.' I attempted to recreate within my own musical language not only the profound expression of human hopelessness and desolation that characterizes the traditional spiritual, but also simultaneously on another level, a reaction to that desolation that transcends hopelessness.
With Dialectics for Two Grand Pianos, Donal Fox, an innovative composer and virtuoso pianist, has abandoned traditional academic procedures and post-Romantic composing techniques in favor of an organization of sound. based on the interaction of instrumental media and their performing environments. His concern with a language of sound independent from traditional tones and definite pitch has caused him to develop new instrumental techniques and to involve the performer in many radical means of expression.
T. J. Anderson's Intermezzi for clarinet, saxophone, and piano is made up of six sections, each about a minute in duration. The sections have different tempo indications, time signatures, and dynamics for each of the three instruments. No score exists, so each performance yields a different conjunction of musical events. The three instrumental parts are played independently with no adherence to an overall concept of ensemble. Anderson likens it to an observer walking through a crowded room that is resonating with independent conversations; the listener focuses on each conversation separately but can also recognize a harmony resulting from the interplay of the individual parts (conversations).
Through This Vale of Tears, David Baker's song cycle for tenor, string quartet, and piano, is a tribute to, and commentary on, the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Videmus: Works by Anderson, Baker, Fox and Wilson
| MP3/320 | $17.00 | |
| FLAC | $17.00 | |
| WAV | $17.00 | |
| CD | $27.00 |
Track Listing
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Sometimes for tenor and tape
Olly Wilson
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Dialectics for Two Grand Pianos
Donal Fox
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Intermezzi
T. J. Anderson
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Four Chords from T. J.'s Intermezzi
Donal Fox
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Duetto for Clarinet and Piano
Donal Fox
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Through This Vale of Tears: I. "Thou Dost Lay Me in The Dust of Death"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears (1986): II. "If There Be Sorrow"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears: III. "My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears: IV. "Parades to Hell"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears: V. "Deliver My Soul"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears: VI. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"
David N. Baker
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Through This Vale of Tears: VII. "Now That He Is Safely Dead"
David N. Baker
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Jazz Sets and Tone Rows
Donal Fox
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