Show notes
New World Records We will be featuring New World Records in today's episode. New World started in 1975; they were given a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation with a mandate to produce a 100-disc anthology of American music. New world continues to preserve neglected music of the past and support the creative future of American music with over 400 recordings, representing up to 700 American composers.
Rick Benjamin from "Black Manhattan: Theater and Dance Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club" (New World Records) Buy at iTunes Music Store More On This Album Theater and Dance Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Member of the Legendary Clef Club The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra Rick Benjamin, director The Clef Club of New York City, Inc. was a fraternal and professional organization for the advancement of African-American musicians and entertainers; all of the composers on this recording were members or closely affiliated with the Club. The "Clef Club" was founded toward the end of 1909 in New York by James Reese Europe and his associates. Their mission to highlight the value, dignity, and professionalism of African-American performers was a great success and did much to change racial attitudes at all levels of white society. It quickly became a "who's who" of early twentieth-century black music and show business. With its reputation for reliability, gentility, and quality performances, the Clef Club soon gained the favor of the loftiest of New York's white society; it became the very height of fashion to announce that one had secured a genuine "Clef Club Orchestra" for an upcoming social event. The composers featured on this revelatory recording represent the cream of Black Bohemia's musical life-the movers and shakers who paved the way for the music of the better remembered "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s. And while their names are obscure today, all once enjoyed national reputations in white America as well, feeding its burgeoning interest in black music, theater, and dance. Taken altogether, the talent, persistence, cooperation, and courage of these pioneers is an amazing American story that deserves to be better known. The recording features nineteen works by ten composers and is accompanied by a 40-page booklet. In addition to those by Europe and Cook, highlights include works by Will Vodery, an acknowledged influence on Ellington, and the first instrumental rag ever published, Sambo: A Characteristic Two Step March (1896), by Will Tyers. Tom Varner from "Tom Varner: Window Up Above" (New World Records) Buy at iTunes Music Store More On This Album The Window Up Above: American Songs 1770-1998 Tom Varner, French horn; Pete McCann, guitar; George Schuller, drums; Lindsey Horner, bass; Mark Feldman, violin; Dave Ballou, trumpet; Steve Alcott, bass; Thirsty Dave Hansen, vocals "I wanted to do something different for this record. Instead of playing my own compositions, I wanted to simply explore a variety of songs that have an inner resonance, whether from family, religion, nation, or culture. " - Tom Varner What Tom Varner has attempted on The Window Up Above is nothing less than a survey of the whole American song book, a millenium review of the last three centuries-and he succeeds brilliantly. Every song he has chosen has that American "thing," and his approach to every song is patently jazz, even where he chooses to play the melody "straight" to let its qualities shine through. Highlights abound: The witty, off-center de- and reconstruction of the Revolutionary and Civil War smash hits "Stone Grinds All," "When Jesus Wept," "Kingdom Come, " and "Battle Cry of Freedom" will forever change the way you hear them; his understated, heartfelt renditions of "Lorena," "All Quiet on the Potomac," and "There is a Balm in Gilead" would make a stone weep; to say nothing of his splendid reimaginings of standards like "Over the Rainbow" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." Even Bruce Springsteen gets the treatment, his "With Every Wish" joining George Jonesís "The Window Up Above," Hank Williams's "Ramblin' Man,"(check out Mark Feldman's and Varner's hair-raising solos and closing duet) and Tammy Wynette's "Till I Get it Right" from the country canon. In Varnerís unique arrangements, every song on this collection emerges freshly minted. Once heard, not soon forgotten. Music Amici, Charles Yasskyfrom "Ben Johnston: Ponder Nothing"(New World Records) Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This Album Ponder Nothing, Septet, Three Chinese Lyrics, Gambit, Five Fragments, Trio Music Amici Ben Johnston's (b 1926) music shows the confluence of several traditions of music-making that have flourished within the United States. In the 1950s his output was characterized by the neoclassicism of his teacher Darius Milhaud. In the 1960s he explored serial techniques and, at the end of the decade, indeterminacy. From 1960 onward the overriding technical preoccupation of his music has been its use of just intonation, the tuning system of the music of ancient cultures as well as that of many living traditions worldwide. The six works represented on this disc span Johnston's journey through atonality, neoclassicism, serial technique, and finally, his pioneering use of just intonation. Septet (1956-58) for woodwind quintet with cello and contrabass, marks the height of Johnston's early neoclassic period. Debts to Stravinsky recurring structural figures, ostinatos that repeat pitches in unpredictable rhythms-are obvious. The more direct influence of Johnston's first important teacher, Darius Milhaud, is apparent in the bitonal textures. In his 1955 Three Chinese Lyrics, scored for soprano and two violins, Johnston has set three poems by the Chinese T'ang dynasty poet Li Po (701-762) in translations by Ezra Pound (his early mentor Harry Partch already had set seventeen of the poems; Johnston set the remaining three). Commissioned by choreographer Merce Cunningham, Gambit (1959) is scored for twelve instruments and consists of six movements, three of which-Interlude 1, Prelude 2, and Interlude 2-use twelve-tone rows. Gambit, a mixed-genre work, precipitated the crucial decision of Johnston's career, his switch to extended "just intonation." For most composers, just intonation implies tonality, but Johnston is unique for his works that fuse pure tuning with the twelve-tone system including Five Fragments (1960). Fragments 1, 2, 3, and 5 modulate systematically from one twelve-tone row to another and, here and in general, Johnston's early just intonation counterpoint moves carefully among consonant intervals. A much later work, Trio for clarinet, violin, and cello (1982), is a gem of Johnston's mature style, rhythmically engaging and harmonically subtle. Phrases return, sometimes with altered continuations, or transposed to different pitch levels, or using an undertone scale rather than an overtone scale. As a result, and typical of Johnston's late work, the Trio's lithe counterpoint falls sweetly on the ear; the complexity is below the surface. Ponder Nothing (1989), is a set of solo clarinet variations on the traditional French hymn "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence." If the hymn gives voice to Johnston's Catholicism, the title, taken from the hymn's third line-"Ponder nothing earthly minded"-refers to his interest in the no-mind meditation of Zen. Malcolm Goldsteinfrom "Malcolm Goldstein: a sounding of sources"(New World Records) Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This Album Malcolm Goldstein, solo violin; Radu Malfatti, trombone; Philippe Micol, bass clarinet; Philippe Racine, flute; Beat Schneider, violoncello As a composer/violinist/improviser Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s in New York City as a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble and as a participant in the Judson Dance Theater, the New York Festival of the Avant-Garde, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. His "Soundings" improvisations have received international acclaim for having "reinvented violin playing," extending the range of tonal/sound-texture possibilities of the instrument and revealing new dimensions of expressivity. Since the mid-1960s he has integrated structured improvisation aspects into his compositions, exploring the rich sound-textures of new performance techniques within a variety of instrumental and vocal frameworks. Goldstein has been labeled an "improviser" and a "composer-violinist" (or merely a violinist). What this CD once and for all shows is that he is indeed those things, but encompassing them all is the fact that, profoundly, he is a composer. As he points out, "At the core of Baroque music was the integration of composition and improvisation," and Goldstein brings the perspective and focus of a seasoned performer to this undertaking. In this way his music represents a further evolution of that compositional-improvisational dialogue begun in the early 1950s in the aleatoric, "chance" pieces of composers like John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman.
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