Playlist

Live

November 4, 2016

Seattle Composers' Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jeremy Shaskus - Who's Who Cues - Porter Jones, trombone; Jim Knodle, trumpet; Jeremy Shaskus, tenor sax

statements

comments

bare statements

bare comments

comments bare

statements bare

statements bare comments

comments bare statements

right down the middle for a beautiful strike

Neil Welch - Exit Cycles - Danielle Sampson, voice; Neil Welch, tenor sax

A dance on perilous glass

a dancer on each side (up/down) of the perilous glass

leaping landing sliding stopping

just so

against each other's

stopping sliding landing leaping

to quiver the plane of the perilous glass

Daniel Webbon - St. Helena - Daniel Webbon, drums and electronics

a chorale goaded by drums, its notes shoved into place

Keith Eisenbrey - Corollaries - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

four telemetry readouts from a probe launched through a twisted conceptual void.

Recorded

November 1, 2016

2 Nocturnes op. 62 - Chopin - Claudio Arrau

staring down stillness

the center holds

tonality here is an image of how the body shifts its center haunch to haunch

Poor Mourner - Fisk University Jubilee Quartet [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

This music is older than the blues,

like psalm tone singing, or as though Gregorian chant or pre-Gregorian chant had been passed down separately from euroculture, received from an older source.

There'll Be Some Changes Made - Ethel Waters [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Big soft beats, ictus cushioned in warm felt.

November 3, 2016

Comet Chop Suey - Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five - Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Lil Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr

Where is it exactly that LA's cornet playing lives?
In the fraction of time between when the embouchure forms the pitch and the valve forms the pitch.

Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader - Skip Johnson [from Goodbye Babylon]

Sings on three levels: first, the center tone; second, several subsidiary centers that are pulled back into the center tone; third, the slithery scoops decorating each center tone.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 31, 2016

Banned Rehearsal 921 161031 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Recorded

May 29, 2016
Long Gone - Sissle's Sizzling Syncopaters [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Slippery with legato, sempre portamentissimo. Beats are slid onto, slid off from, wide and ample.

I Found a New Baby - Ethel Waters [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Ethel Waters

Hearing the room, the space around the sounds.

String Quartet - Ruth Crawford Seeger - Schönberg Ensemble

The distances among the voices are precisely drawn as they answer from each other and from us: light and time, an open land. We hear foreshortened images of instrumental voices across and behind each other, not pulsing but throbbing slow like breathing.

Violin Concerto - Schönberg - State Academic Orchestra of the USSR, Alexander Lazarev, Liane Isakadze

We follow through rooms behind our host. The space is not friendly to the gracious rounding of phrases. Speech is muttered, incomplete, fragmentary - hints not statements. Remembering where you came from won't help, grimly slant.

Nowhere - Charlie Barnet [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

There is a thread of cowpoke rhythm (think Grofé) that runs through the whole of it, rehearing itself as a part of each new thing that comes in - and oh do they come in those new things - until it rehears itself abstractly, as the resultant hocket of independent voices.

I'm Scared - Sarah Vaughan, John Kirby and his Orchestra [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

Affectual non-sequitur: the way Sarah's voice comes in at the opening, like the soloist's entry in a late Mozart Concerto.

Frank Martin - best crinkles ever

May 31, 2016
Violin Concerto - Martin - Symphony Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg, Frank Martin, Wolfgang Schneiderhan

It opens with the orchestra cycling through several concertos full of possibilities. The melodies are long, but motionless, exactly and ever just here, like monk-chant. They don't move us, rather they carve us out where we sit.

Drown In My Own Tears - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Transparency. Full and overfull, but absolutely plain, clear. Nothing is obscure.

Atlas Eclipticalis - Cage - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Jame Levine

Performed as a Romantic tone-poem of the immense isolation of the stars, and of the forest dwellers peeping out and up in fear and dread. One could regard the notion of program music to be any music that maps an aspect of the extramusical realms into the musical, so this is really not so far off.

June 1, 2016
Standing In The Shadows of Love - The Four Tops [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Boxes in sequence. Bits if what it is are in them. Structurally decorated, circling the predicament.

Trans (Studioaufnahme) - Stockhausen - Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbracken, Hans Zender

Vertical bands of pitchstuff and hollowness. He's never shy of the obvious gesture, witness the opening band accumulating from the top, inversely echoed by the closing band that evaporates from the bottom.

Book of Rules - The Heptones [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

There are sustained tones here and there, doled out with circumspection.

Simple Gifts - Kia Sams - Prospect Choir

A dynamite little arrangement for children's and adult's choirs, clever and straightforward at once.

Begin The Begin - REM [from Life's Rich Pageant]

Thick vegetation on a hot day.

Riding On The Train- Ashtray [from Rescued Records]

The walls are close.

In Session at the Tintinabulary
May 30, 3016
Gradus 290 160530 - Neal Kosály-Meyer