Changes Charles Bradley Daptone Records 041 CD/LP Those who discount Charles Bradley as a retro act imitating James Brown are missing out on something very special. The sixty-eight year old singer’s latest full length recording, Changes, reveals a mature artist whose vocal powers are undiminished but whose interpretive skills are ever more sharply refined. His accompanists, the Menahan Street Band and Budos Band, create spot-on charts to support Bradley’s singing, at turns muscular and lyrically soulful. Most of the tracks are originals, and strong ones at that. “Ain’t it a Sin” rollicks rebukingly. “Nobody But You” is a smoothly delivered ballad that explores Bradley’s sweet mid-register before swooping higher to
Read moreAnthony Braxton 3 Compositions (EEHMH) 2011 Firehouse 12 3xCD/blu-ray/digital Anthony Braxton: composer, sopranino, soprano, and alto saxophones, iPod; Taylor Ho Bynum: cornet, flugelhorn, trumpbone, iPod; Mary Halvorson: guitar, iPod; Jessica Pavone: violin, viola, iPod; Jay Rozen: tuba, iPod; Aaron Siegel: percussion, vibraphone, iPod; Carl Testa: bass, bass clarinet, iPod “As a culture, we are slowly moving away from target linear experiences that are framed as stationary constructs that don’t change on repeated listening, to a new world that constantly serves up fresh opportunities and interactive discourse. American people have made it clear that the new times will call for dynamic
Read moreInterview with Carson Cooman Sequenza 21: The latest CD of your compositions, Liminal on Divine Art, features three works, a short orchestra piece, Shoreline Rune, Liminal, your Fourth Symphony, and Prism, an older work for organ. How did you decide on this grouping? Carson Cooman: A number of recordings of my music have been released, and the music on them has been grouped and organized in different ways, depending on the repertoire at hand. For this release, I wanted to try a “mini-album” (shorter length than a full CD and priced accordingly). So the symphony was the main affair, and
Read moreElliott Sharp may sometimes be characterized as a cellular composer, but he is by no means a cellular thinker. Rather, he seems to conceive of things in large swaths of creation, only then removing skins and reconnecting veins until each organism revives by means of unexpected blood flow. The Boreal collects four somewhat recent examples, of which the 2008 title composition, performed here by the JACK Quartet, employs awesome extended techniques, including bows strung with springs and ball-bearing chains, in addition to standard hair. But through this recording it’s not so much the craft as the art that shines. Like
Read moreOn Thursday, October 22nd at the new downtown New York venue the Sheen Center, an acoustically generous and attractive performance space, we heard the second of three concerts presenting selections from Anthony de Mare’s ambitious commissioning project Liasons: Reimaginings of Sondheim from the Piano. De Mare has recorded the 36 commissioned pieces for ECM Records, which has released a generously annotated 3 CD set of them. De Mare is an ideal advocate for this music. His touch at the piano is at turns muscular, dexterous, and tender, well able to encompass the many demeanors the commissioned composers adopted
Read moreThree cheers for the home team! Jay Batzner, a Contributing Editor to Sequenza 21, has a new recording out on the Irritable Hedgehog imprint. as if to each other …, a 25 minute long EP played by pianist R. Andrew Lee, is now available via their website.
Read moreAt the risk of sounding like an Internet meme, one does not simply perform Olivier Messiaen. A performer must take certain risks, and prepare for the very real possibility that the performance may not show the mysteries of the piece. Minnesota-based pianist Matthew McCright, a member of the piano faculty at Carleton College and pianist for the new music group Ensemble 61, has proven to be an intrepid explorer of new music, and knows where to go to find the inner machinery of Messiaen’s works. In his fifth CD release, Contemplations: The Music of Olivier Messiaen (available from Albany Records),
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Brooklyn, CDs, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, jazz, Minimalism, New Amsterdam, New York, Orchestral
If you’re a fan of new music, be it “indie-classical” or whatever it’s being labeled this week, then you must check out the music of composer and conductor Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. Phillips’ music, composed and arranged for his ensemble Numinous, a large chamber group (or small orchestra?) of woodwinds, brass, strings, tuned percussion, electric instruments and vocalists, is a complex, finely detailed amalgam of classical, minimalist, South American, Asian, and African American influences, with a distinctive “sound” that is instantly identifiable, yet full of surprises. (You know those descriptive terms “Brahmsian” or “the Mingus effect”? It’s like that.) Phillips’
Read moreComposition-intensive post-rock … Mogwai Rave Tapes Sub Pop Mogwai’s eighth studio album, Rave Tapes, has to be taken with a handful of ironic humor. The thought of the Glasgow collective hosting raves leads one to imagine the horrified attendees, mellow thoroughly harshed, streaming away en masse in search of various 12-step program meetings. That said, Rave Tapes does incorporate a few elements that resonate with rave culture, albeit thoroughly re-purposed. Analog synth sounds abound, as do heavy beats, amalgamated into doom-laden grooves. Thus, Mogwai’s brand of “rave” doesn’t channel or celebrate the ecstatic. Rather, it extols resilience and seems tailor
Read moreFile Under ?’s Best Recordings of 2013 (in no particular order) Yvar Mikhashoff, Panorama of American Piano Music (Mode) Robert Levin and Ursula Oppens, Piano Music 1960-2010 – Bernard Rands (Bridge) New York Polyphony, Time Go By Turns (BIS) Julia Holter, Loud City Song (Domino) Jennifer Koh and Shai Wosner, Signs, Games, and Messages (Cedille) Christopher O’Riley, O’Riley’s Liszt (Oxingale) Boards of Canada, Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp) Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus Seven (Warp) Lewis Spratlan, The Architect (Navona) Julianna Barwick, Nepenthe (Dead Oceans) Stile Antico, The Phoenix Rising (Harmonia Mundi) Gloria Cheng, Calder Quartet, The Edge of Light – Messiaen/Saariaho
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