aworks :: "new" american classical music

EatDrinkGambleSex (1997). Philip Bimstein /ambient clutter via wire tapper/

My current project is to listen to all my Wire Magazine "Wire Tapper" CDs. For those not familiar, the avant-garde music magazine occasionally includes a CD of collected tracks from bands and musicians you mostly don't know. Not much relevant to aworks other than Albert Ayler, Angus Maclise, Chas Smith, Elodie Lauten, Nels Cline, Nico Muhly, Philip Bimstein, Phog Masheen, and Ran Blake.

Band names of note include @c, aMute, Crimetime Orchestra, Enigma Device, Formication, General Magic (wasn't that a much-heralded Silicon Valley startup from twenty-years ago?), I'm Sore vs. Noise Camp, Junkboy, LSD March, Picastro, Secret Mommy, and Tulipomania.

EatDrinkGambleSex comes from Bimstein's Casino. From a review:

Much of the "music" of "Casino" was made up of samples of the ambient clutter of casino noise most of us have learned to tune out. I was amazed at just how sweet sounding Bimstein managed to make clattering dice, clinking poker chips and shuffling cards. Intermixed with this was the friendly, matter-of-fact observations of Tom Martinet, a former minister and 20-year veteran of Vegas dice tables.

Criss-Cross (1951). Thelonious Monk /pay homage to this unique piece/

Gunther Schuller:

Thelonious Monk's "Criss-Cross" is one of the classics of jazz literature. To an extent never achieved before (except perhaps by Duke Ellington), it showed that jazz was capable of producing more than mere 'tunes'. "Criss-Cross" is a composition for instruments, meant to be heard, not danced or sung to. Brief though it may be, it is as complete in its concise statement and development of a given motive as a Scarlatti sonata or a Haydn quartet movement. I have long wanted to pay homage to this unique piece and its composer by basing a series of variations on it; and the aforementioned concert provided the ideal context.

The recorded version includes musicians Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans, Jim Hall, and Eric Dolphy.

The Best Of - Scott LaFaro

aworks unordered list :: december blogs and feeds

I've hit some limit on the number of subscribed feeds in Google Reader. As a result, Google Reader no longer loads in a browser (although I can still read my subscriptions in my iPhone, tedious as it may be). To workaround the problem, I am avidly resubscribing to blogs and feeds in a different Google account. As a by-product of that bookkeeping, here's a list of blogs and feeds that were particularly notable this month:

• hypebot.com: music. technology. the new music business.
• ArtsJournal: arts, culture, ideas.
• Calimac's Journal
• New Music Tipsheet: THE online resource for CD release schedules, music news, blogs, and more.
• billboard.biz: Music Business | Music Industry | Record Sales | Billboard Charts | BIllboard Hot 100
• Culture Monster: All the Arts, All the Time
• Life's a Pitch: For immediate release: the arts are marketable.
• Sound Mind: A Classical Music Blog
• The Taruskin Challenge: Two grad students blog their way through the most monumental musicological work in generations.
• disquiet: ambient/electronics

Caravan (1936). Juan Tizol /weirdly charming/

I just stumbled over the 1974 album Ode to Duke Ellington by Piero Umiliani. Umiliani was an Italian film composer who particularly liked the music of Ellington. El Reza describes the album:

It features Umiliani playing Moog and ARP keyboards transforming the usual Ellington tunes into hard grooving tracks that mix up jazz and electronics with weird sound effects.

Weirdly charming.

Ode to Duke Ellington - Piero ...

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Wikipedia: "Caravan" is a jazz standard composed by Juan Tizol and first performed by Duke Ellington in 1937. Tizol also composed "Perdido" for the Ellington band. The lyrics were written by Irving Mills, but as many versions are instrumental he is sometimes not listed. The song is variously seen as the first Latin jazz song or as a Mideastern influenced jazz song. Its "exotic" sound made it of interest to Exotica musicians...

Phrygian II (2008). Bill Dixon /delirious frenzy/

Sequenza21's Trevor Hunter likes the music from Bill Dixon's Tapestries for Small Orchestra:

For Phrygian II—which might be Tapestries' standout track, if not for the fact there are several other deserving candidates—Lomon, Filiano, and Smith go absolutely buck wild on their instruments while the winds envelop their delirious frenzy with a low, soft attack that nonetheless exhibits such pointed power as to completely overwhelm everything else.  

Although I still enjoy Dixon's prior album 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, Tapestries leaves me cold even with five trumpeters on the album. Fanfare music this isn't.

Tapestries For Small Orchestra...

Related articles by Zemanta

• Firehouse 12 To Release Bill Dixon's New Three-Disc Set November 17th (avantmusicnews.com)
• Bill Dixon's Tapestries For Small Orchestra Released Today (avantmusicnews.com)

Drumming (1970-71). Steve Reich /ictus/

Comments on the Ictus version of Steve Reich's Drumming, which I find greatly superior to the old, overly insistent DG version:

• "Drumming itself is an odyssey: a meditative ritual of motion from low to high, from primitive to refined, and the musicians "traveling" the long line of percussion instruments at the back of the stage showed that Ms. De Keersmaeker and the Ictus Ensemble understood." (Daniel Felsenfeld/Andante) 
• 'The closer, "Drumming – Part I," is an athletic romp, an explosion of energy set to the imposing percussion of Ictus.' (David Johnston/nytheatre.com)
• "Precision, drive, and earnestness characterize this performance of Steve Reich's early minimalist epic Drumming in a way that misses the proverbial forest for the trees." (Jed Distler/Classics Today)
• "The breathtaking feeling of simplicity/complexity in this work is transmitted with an amazing skill by the Belgians."  (Sequenza21)

Now I need to re-listen to the So Percussion version.

Reich: Drumming - Ictus, Syner...

Related articles by Zemanta

• Steve Reich (guardian.co.uk)
• Minimal drum machines (makezine.com)
• Music Review | So Percussion: Drummers Map an Imaginary City (nytimes.com)

aworks ordered list :: "new" albums

• Christopher Rouse: Transfiguration (2009). Calder Quartet
• Reich: Drumming. Ictus, Synergy Vocals (2009)
• John Cage: Sixteen Dances (2009). Gil Rose, Boston Modern Orchestra Project
• Elliott Schwartz: Chamber Concertos I-VI (2009). Gil Rose, Boston Modern Orchestra Project
• New Energy from the Americas (2009). Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Eduardo Alonso-Crespo, Ralph Zitterbart, Keith Lockhart
• Made in the USA (2009). Andrés Cárdenes, Luz Manriquez.

I sometimes think "bombastic" when thinking of Christopher Rouse but that's not this quartet music (lala)...Drumming: not my favorite Steve Reich piece but worthy of a new recording (lala)...Sixteen Dances is austere and has nothing to do with the coming-of-age movie Sixteen Candles (lala | johncage.info)...The Schwartz is another Boston Modern Orchestra Project recording, of which lala has many (lala | schwartzmusic)...Are the New Energy recording of overtures and dances energetic enough? Also has a piano concerto by Nancy Galbraith. (lala | Nancy Galbraith)...Cardens is Cuban-born and on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. Manriquez is a Chilean pianist. This is American traditional music e.g. Copland's Hoedown (lala)...

Related articles by Zemanta

• BMOP's 2009-10 Season (avantmusicnews.com)

aworks unordered list :: recent "new" listening

Osvaldo Golijov via last.fm

• Summer Day: The Complete Works for Violin and Piano. Emma Lou Diemer (lala)
• Seven: Music by Don Byron. Lisa Moore (lala)
• Opus 1-10 'Fantasies & Delusions' Music For Solo Piano. Billy Joel. Richard Joo (lala)
• The Best of Chess Records Original Artist Recordings Of Songs In The Film "Cadillac Records" (lala)
• Thesis Statement. Silas Durocher & Everybody Knows (lala)
• Tetro. Osvaldo Golijov (lala)
• Collage New Music Performs Donald Sur (lala)

Ok, the Billy Joel isn't really new (or particularly interesting).

Royal Garden Blues (1927). Bix Beiderbecke /couldn't afford name acts/

Beiderbecke via Wikipedia

The always intelligent Renewable Music indicates his displeasure at recorded music in general and that Stanford students no longer appreciate high-fidelity, specfically.

For various reasons, the album, the CD and now the MP3 have been a great part of my life although that's not the interesting thing to blog about today.

What I would like to highlight is this recent quote from Elijah Wald in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll:

...the [Prohibition] liquor laws very likely account for one of the era's most striking musical anomalies: that many of its most exciting jazz groups never performed in public. To cite the most famous examples, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bix Beiderbecke all made their greatest recordings during these years with small bands -- Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, Morton's Red Hot Peppers, and the Beiderbecke-Trumbauer groups -- that existed only for those record sessions. In public, Morton was leading a larger dance orchestra, Beiderbecke and Trumbauer were with Whiteman, and Armstrong was doubling with Carroll Dickerson's Savoyagers and Erskine Tate's Vendome Theatre Orchestra.

Without being able to sell alcohol, smaller clubs couldn't afford name acts and so the music business steered towards larger dance halls and larger orchestras.

lala playlist of those artists (with the intro of West End Blues being a well-known highlight):

"a" works :: large and small j...

Soliloquy (on a Separation) (2001). Billy Joel /fantasies and delusions/

Image via Wikipedia

Billy Joel's Fantasies and Delusions is #7 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Albums chart for this decade. I admit I now own said album but it was in the name of research (and curiosity).

Check it out on lala:

Opus 1-10 'Fantasies & Delusio...

Also note I have blogged twice about his music, including three years ago when I didn't yet have the guts to buy it.

Update: I corrected the spelling in the title and the problem where the photo made the composer look unnaturally fat.