Jazz Articles
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John Clark: The Odd Couple Quintet +1
by Budd Kopman
Yes, it is true that French horn and bassoon are not commonplace instruments in jazz. Attempts have been made to use them, of course, most recently by Julian Schneemann on Roundabout, but in that work, they were used more as colors in the mix.What is unusual is for these instruments to be in the front line and soloing as if to say, “Why not?." This, however is exactly what John Clark and Michael Rabinowitz, both virtuosos on French ...
read moreJohn Clark: The Odd Couple Quintet +1
by Jack Bowers
"And now," as John Cleese used to intone on the Monty Python television series, “for something completely different." In this case, a jazz quintet (+1) sporting a front line of French horn and bassoon and performing, among other things, two horn concertos by Mozart. An odd coupling? At first blush, it would seem so. Far less eccentric, however, once one apprehends the remarkable interplay between John Clark's French horn and Michael Rabinowitz's bassoon, enhanced by Clark's impressive charts and the ...
read moreGene Pritsker: William James's Varieties of Religious Experience
by Raul d'Gama Rose
William James's Varieties of Religious Experience is the long-awaited companion to Gene Pritsker's Varieties of Religious Experience Suite (Innova Recordings, 2010). On this album, the guitarist has almost completely re-imagined William James' 1902 book, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, as a chamber opera. The opera describes the spiritual experiences of several individuals near the end of the 19th Century as described to James, the celebrated philosopher and brother of the writer Henry James. The philosopher presented ...
read moreBorislove & Noizepunk: Cello Lounge
by Raul d'Gama Rose
There are so few composers of contemporary music who have expanded its idiom and its language that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among those few, the shape-shifting guitarist/electronics manipulator Gene Pritsker is one of the only composers who continues to break down the barriers that still exist in the sometimes water-tight compartments that industry marketers revel in. On Cello Lounge, with the equally fearless cellist Borislav Strulev, the iconoclast in Pritsker once more comes to ...
read moreThe International Street Cannibals: The Chamber and Electronic Music of Gene Pritsker
by Raul d'Gama Rose
Gene Pritsker is a remarkable contemporary composer. His short repertoire, represented on Solo-Duo-Trio-Quartet-Quintet: The Chamber and Electronic Music of Gene Pritsker (Composers Concordance Records, 2011) testifies to this fact. He has an acute sense of his own place in the history of music and this is marked by the contemporariness of his work, that is derived from an association with Darius Milhaud. He is inspired to delve into dissonance by composers such as Paul Hindemith, with whom he enjoys more ...
read moreInternational Street Cannibals Ensemble: Ballets & Solos
by Raul d'Gama Rose
If Ballets & Solos is any indication, then at least five young composers in the US are breaking barriers between genres and idioms. These young folks are brimful with ideas, humor and humanity, their compositions performed with wildly interesting and improvised cadenzas. The absolute command of melodic and harmonic invention is even more interesting. More than that, the sublime understanding of the tonal palettes of strings, middle register brass and lower register woodwinds--and, of course, the oceanic capability of the ...
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