Branford Marsalis Quartet’s music is charming, full of pleasing technique, light and playful, so much so that it can be difficult to distinguish between melody and rhythm. The pace is often quick, with bristling energy, and yet the music is quite pretty. The sound is intimate and the bass notes create something almost meditative; and with sound that light and piercing, it is easy to think that the root is freedom, or joy.
Category: Music reviews
Infatuation, Intoxication, Regret: I Know What Love Isn’t by Jens Lekman
The album I Know What Love Isn’t is intelligent and intimate, mellow, and yet seems a serious encounter—probing, humorous—with a different culture and demanding relationships. It is a collection both arty and honest. “I think my dream is trying to tell me something,” Jens Lekman sings in “I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots,” a guitar and voice song.
Love amid Innovation: Violinist Tai Murray’s interpretation of Eugene Ysaye’s Six Sonatas for Solo Violin op. 27
Eugene Ysaye, himself a prodigy, was a composer, conductor, teacher, and advocate for new music; and Eugene Ysaye, according to the doctoral research of violinist Erin Aldridge (a student of Vartan Manoogian), combined the innovations of Nicolo Paganini—the use of fingered octaves and tenths and double harmonies—with Ysaye’s own preference for quarter-tones, double stops of whole tones, and lengthy arpeggios.
Modern, Dynamic, Intense, a Unity of Sensibility: George Walker’s Great American Concert Music
Mastering and being creative in the classical music tradition demanded courage, dedication, and discipline, as well as imagination. The music of George Walker has great dramatic force, and sometimes surprises—which seems a mark of its modernism. What can be the relation to a classical art that began in another culture, in another era?
Alexei Lubimov performs Claude Debussy and John Cage: Lubimov’s interpretation of Debussy’s Preludes and John Cage’s As It is
An admirer of Henry Cowell, Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, John Cage experimented with prepared piano, allowing new sounds. He encouraged appreciation of everyday noises, and unusual instruments, and chance, including the I Ching, as part of music; and Cage—who once declared that everything we do is music—could be said to be as much a philosopher of sound as a composer.
Dinner for Two or More: David Byrne and St. Vincent (Annie Clark)’s collaboration Love This Giant
“When collaboration works, you get this third thing. A third person appears, and it’s kind of their music, not yours,” surmised David Byrne, the author of the book How Music Works, to Jesse Dorris writing for Time (Sept. 17, 2012). Byrne is a man of whose vivid surfaces are inspired by depth; and true shallowness is a mystery to him.
Kill Your Limitations: Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry, Spp by Henry Threadgill with his band Zooid
Threadgill, interested in many of the arts, had a comprehensive bohemian sensibility; and, with a strong sense of musical conception, he is considered an eloquent and original composer in the field of creative, improvised music. He has spoken of not being confined by the European classical tradition, or the focus on the major/minor system of notation.
I Told My Wrath, My Wrath Did End: The Garden of Love, from the Martha Redbone Roots Project
It may be important now to recall that William Blake not only saw the poverty in British society, but that he died poor. Martha Redbone has found an author who belongs to the canon and whose work signifies in lives today; and music such as this helps a culture to live a little longer, transmitting subject and sound, experience and values.
The Popular Music of Stylish Young Chinese Men, The Honor: Selection 1 by The Honor
The repetition is intended to drive the lyrics into the brain, but the simplicity of the lyrics—as in “What’s Your Feeling”—can find a place there but they are not significantly resonant. They distract momentarily—like youthful engagement in a nightclub: just enough engagement to make a friend or find a lover, and get one into trouble.
Talk of Talented New Orleans Phenomenon James Booker, Pianist, in Britain: Manchester ’77
Emotion is ground and sky for artists, but artists can forget that their emotions do not have the same firmness as stone, and the human world is a harder place; and while artists, soft of flesh and sometimes soft in the head, go about chasing their passionate visions, the world is making plans both to exploit their work and to live without them. Greatness elevates, but it is not protection.