This is the first time I've heard Revelation in the Courthouse Park but so far, I find it too odd and disturbing for my taste, and I'm not overly fond of this YouTube clip either....
I'm listening to Sun Ra play the Ellington standard, Take the "A" Train (rdio). Mostly a traditional reading except for some cascading sweeps of the piano towards the end.
Nance’s solo on ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’ was so integral to the composition that he repeated it nightly verbatim. When he left in 1965, Cootie Williams continued playing his successor’s solo....Overall this is a challenging tune that requires both breath support and comfort with wide jumps and chromatic scale.
I was friends with all the dedicatees of the enclosed set of pieces – some were closer friends than others – and I have very personal memories of my dealings with them that I don’t want to fade. Each of these little pieces highlights some aspect of my relationship with each friend. I hope this will help me hold on to these memories just a little while longer.
In my listening career, I've probably not heard as much Art Ensemble of Chicago as I might have, given I generally like the music, the instrumentation, the fun, the midwestern residence, the general exploratory attitude...
The Allmusic review by Ron Wynn states "A classic, with spicy and frenetic solos one moment, comic overtones and clever melodies and rhythms the next. The Art Ensemble at this point were becoming stars overseas, and finding the going increasingly tougher in America. It's outside or avant-garde jazz with soul, heart, and funk"
Chicago Beau was born on the south-side of Chicago on 13 February 1949, into a house of music. The recordings of Dinah Washington, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and others inundated his senses from the beginning.
Our daughter responded early to the music of John Cage, Philip Glass, and Miles Davis but the ultimate result may be latent.
Philip Glass' "Akhnaten," which follows the rise and fall of the Egyptian pharaoh, will be performed March 19 and 27 at the Terrace Theatre in Long Beach in what the company says is the West Coast premiere of the 26-year-old opera in its original form.
Also, works by David Lang, Cherubini, and Shostakovich.
Here and throughout the work Mr. Johnson’s music is playful and engaging; only gradually do you realize “Americans” is also a sophisticated examination of the way immigrants negotiate cultural isolation and assimilation. Intentionally or not, the piece also shows how the electric guitar maintains its own character and connotations even when completely integrated into a mixed ensemble.
I recently purchased this CD, for some reason thinking I was buying the music of Tom Johnson. I suppose neither Johnson has been over-recorded.
A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.
While I will acknowledge the potential power and glory of live music, for me, it's the opposite -- concerts supplement recordings. I suspect that's because I have a strong need to discover new and good music, rather than fully immersing myself in music I've already heard, as fine as it may be. On the other hand, there's nothing better in life than hearing a track and being able to hit the repeat button to savor it again.
Maybe it's just an efficiency issue. I went to the Three Trapped Tigers recorders concert earlier this month in Berkeley. 2 hours for transportation, 90 minutes of the concert, 60 minutes of hanging around in town before the concert; all for maybe 6 or 7 works. 4 hours in total, the concert was enjoyable and the modern music by Cage, Oliveros, and Tom Bickley was certainly interesting. But spending that time at home with my new favorite toy, rdio, would have meant hearing maybe 40 tracks, seeing what other listeners I respect are paying attention to, and getting to re-listen to the best of all that.
Daniel Wolf is also less than enthusiastic about Santa Cruz's yearly Cabrillo Festival. That used to be a great source of new music for me 15 years ago, and I enjoyed the feeling of immersion. Somehow it now has less appeal. There is at least one concert this year of interest with Kronos Quartet and eighth blackbird although I suppose that's not a regional orchestra, as in Teachout's speculative scenario. Maybe I just miss seeing the composer Lou Harrison.
eighth blackbird will play, among other pieces, Missy Mazzoli's Still Life with Avalanche. The composer:
There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.
So that Ruggles YouTube clip leads to a video of a work by Ruth Crawford Seeger. Based on a movement from her String Quartet, this string orhcestra version is more intense than I was expecting.
...the third movement is a sound mass composition in which a single composite melody line consists of successive tones from the different instruments. This is accomplished through the equality of the instruments, indicated by their cramped register and the frequent vertical crossing of their parts, legato bowing (with dotted slurs indicating preferably inaudible bow changes), and the gradual crescendos and decrescendos which are staggered among the instruments, meaning that one instrument is at its loudest while another is at its quietest.
Congratulations to composer Erling Wold on his recent marriage. And thanks for his pointing out a prior wedding ceremony that included the audience learning Carl Ruggle's Exaltation.
Text from a work newly composed by Wold for the ceremony, quoted on his blog:
We find a soft place of each other it's just over there so pretty
when you find it a careful softness just there each falls into
or, one becomes the other the swapping of cares of life
of happiness on which each builds their life
He has also written a fine piece called Marriage, for two trumpets and bass or slide guitar and bass. (MP3).
His most recent recording, Mordake, is available for purchase at Amazon.
Ruggles' Exaltation, complete with scary images of Mr. Ruggles, follows...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
