Spending some "Time" with Dave Brubeck, to end the year (1959, 1961, 1966)

And yep, it's SGTG breaktime once again. Thanks for all your comments, and for enjoying all the music.  As to where this blog goes from here, I think it'll definitely just be occasional posts, when there's an interesting radio concert to share, or the results of a quirky charity shop haul.  The whole 'sharing a massive CD collection and writing about it just because I wanted to' thing that sparked this off is pretty much done & dusted now, and has been hugely satisfying.  Thanks everyone for being part of it.

To leave things for now, here's a triple header by an artist I took far too long to give some serious time to, starting in the annus mirabilis of album jazz: 1959.  The Dave Brubeck Quartet had made a name for themselves in West Coast cool jazz over the course of the decade, and were becoming influenced by folk forms experienced on a tour of Eurasia, as evidenced by a 1958 album.

Their smash hit album a year later took the 'quirky time signatures' USP and just ran with it, creating indelible instant classics like Blue Rondo A La Turk and Paul Desmond's Take Five.  Beyond these standouts, the Time Out album contains absolute loveliness like Strange Meadow Lark and Kathy's Waltz, and my personal favourite, the effortlessly cool elegance of Three To Get Ready.

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The success of Time Out led to a handful of sequels, so here's a couple of them.  First up, from 1961, is Time Further Out - subtitled Miro Reflections as a nod to the cover art.  The album's running order is structured so as to progressively add more beats to the bar, starting off with a pair of waltzes and featuring another couple of pieces in 5/4, as well as the 7/4 of its best-known track Unsquare Dance.  Brubeck's dexterous pianism and the rhythm section's ability to play absolutely in-the-pocket regardless of the meter continue to be absolute joys, as is the breezy melodic sensibility of this coolest of quartets.

 

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The 'time' albums then concluded five years later with Time In, credited to Brubeck only on the cover but still featuring the classic quartet within.  This gorgeous record makes more sparing use of quirky time signatures, and after the full-tilt Lost Waltz that opens the album tends towards breezier mid-tempo tunes that hone in on the quartet's effortless interplay.  Not sure if it's because Time In was the least familiar to me of these three albums (that were found together in a box set), but I've been returning to it the most for sheer enjoyment.  And that feels like as good a place as any to leave SGTG for the moment.  Happy new year when it comes, everyone!

 

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Bruce Cockburn - Further Adventures Of (1978)

Always love a bit of late 70s Bruce Cockburn around the turn of the year, so after posting the masterpiece a few years back (link below), here's the one just before it.  More jazz-inflected arrangements, lyrics taking in the expected singer-songwriterly personal reflections with a heavy dose of Christian mysticism, and that incredible guitar playing.  A couple of more muscular tracks, Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth.... and Feast Of Fools, provide a good contrast to the lighter-hued material, and Red Ships Take Off In The Distance is one of his most dazzling instrumentals.

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Dancing In The Dragon's Jaws

BBC Singers - A Christmas Carol (Milton Court, London, 14th Dec 2022)

Have a wonderful Christmas weekend, everyone.  Here's a concert recording that gives a fresh setting to a classic seasonal tale that I've been enjoying since its broadcast a week ago.  The BBC Singers first give a spirited half-hour of Christmas arrangements and carols old and new, and are then joined by Mel Giedroyc to narrate the rest of the concert.  It's a musical arrangement of Dickens' A Christmas Carol by composer Benedict Sheehan, weaving well-known carols into Sheehan's own music to set the story in a delightful new context, here receiving its UK premiere. 

Merry Christmas!

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Tomasz Stańko Quartet - Lontano (2006)

Recorded in November 2005, Lontano was the conclusion to a trilogy of albums recorded by the Tomasz Stańko Quartet: the trumpeter, now in his sixties, backed by a trio of fellow Poles half his age, who'd continue to produce great music in their own right.  The quartet's expansive, cinematic feel for space and patient, at times near-ambient improvisational pace reached their apex in the diffuse, impressionistic music on this aptly-titled album.

At the album's core are its title tracks, numbered I, II and III, a total of 40 minutes of free improvisation credited to the full group.  Whether they were all recorded as a single session or as three separate takes I'm not sure, but the Lontano tracks provide the deepest expression of this quartet's spacious sensibility, the shorter pieces that surround them highlighting the spare beauty of Stańko's writing and more sublime playing.  Stańko reaches back to his first ECM appearance for a fresh take on Tale, and even further to his first appearance on LP, the muscular version of Komeda's Kattorna giving an upbeat contrast to sublime ballads like Song For Ania and Sweet Thing.  A masterpiece of an album that keeps on giving with every listen.

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Tomasz Stańko at SGTG:
Jazzmessage From Poland
Purple Sun

TWET 

Balladyna
Freelectronic in Montreux
Bluish
Bosonossa And Other Ballads
Matka Joanna 

Suspended Night

Neighbourhood (Manu Katché) 

Wolność W Sierpniu - Freedom In August
Dark Eyes
Wisława
Polin

Tribute To Tomasz Stańko, London Jazz Festival 2022

Echoes Of Nature - Wilderness River (1993)

The charity shop oddities just keep coming at the moment - here's an addition to that small corner of SGTG that features no music at all, but just captures a variety of natural sounds and presents them in album format.  This one, on the budget LaserLight label's Echoes Of Nature series from the 90s, offers exactly an hour of riverside recordings across four continuously-mixed tracks.  

 

The self-descriptive titles - Big River, Streamside Songbirds, Small Rapids and Crickets & Water - are pretty much all you need to know, other than it's all well recorded (that DDD coding is making me picture someone with a DAT machine in their backpack and a couple of microphones dangling over a bridge), and it does the job if you want to relax with nature for a bit.

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Arvo Pärt - Miserere (1991)

It's definitely Pärt weather now, so dropping in on the great Estonian composer today at the turn of the 90s.  Settled in by this time to a fruitful relationship with ECM New Series, the three works featured here were recorded in late 1990 with the Hilliard Ensemble, Western Wind Chamber Choir, Beethovenhalle Orchestra and others.

The 34-minute title piece comes first, with its stark choral liturgy interspersed with orchestral swells and the organ playing of Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.  Miserere remains one of Pärt's most immersive works in its controlled power, and it sounds sublime in this first recording.  A short respite is programmed next in Festina Lente, very much cut from the same cloth as the Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten.  We return to Old Testament liturgy for the final track, Sarah Was Ninety Years Old, but wordlessly.  An intermittent drumbeat forms the backbone of the piece as the Hilliards in turn add plaintive melodies, the culiminative effect (once Broadbent's organ enters for the finale) being another masterpiece of steady pacing to thoroughly entrance the patient listener.  This might not be Pärt's easiest album to get in to, but it pays some of the greatest rewards.

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Tabula Rasa

Kanon Pokajanen

Spiegel Im Spiegel

Other posts featuring music by Pärt:

Trivium

Re: ECM

Christmas in Budapest, 2016

James MacMillan 60th Birthday Concert, 2019

The Fruit Of Silence at Truro Cathedral, 2019

BBC Concert Orchestra, Proms 2021

Jan Garbarek / The Hilliard Ensemble - Officium (1994)

Been giving this a fresh appraisal, so why not turn it into a post.  In a quirk of tapping in to the listening moods of the time, Jan Garbarek spontaneously joining in at a Hilliards rehearsal turned into one of ECM's breakout hits with the buying public, so the story goes.  There were sequels, but this first collaborative album between the early music singers and saxophonist remains a very 90s phenomenon all of its own.  So how does it hold up these days?

Officium certainly sounds breathtaking.  You'd expect nothing less from an ECM New Series recording of the Hilliard Ensemble, taking advantage of the resonances of the St. Gerold priory in Grosses Walsertal, Austria.  Flitting in and out is the ahistorical, but somehow seeming like a natural added voice, sound of Garbarek's saxes, equally attuned to the natural reverb.  An hour-plus immersion in this sound-world is definitely a sublime experience.

In terms of material, the album flits through the Hilliards' repertoire from the 12th to 16th century, giving a nice balance of starker, plainer material (including the odd solo spotlight) with more complex and interweaved voicings.  Garbarek doesn't overpower the singers, but finds subtle harmonies and drones with which to enhance the music.  The end result might be an early vocal music purist's nightmare, but for anyone willing to take the chance on this hybrid, as soon as you acclimatise to it it's a delight.  The only thing I sometimes wonder is if 77 minutes is a bit too much of the same thing for a single sitting, but on those occasions the first reprise of Parce Mihi Domine is a handy staging post to focus on one half of a double-album.  Overall, beautiful stuff that still stands up.  Must get hold of the other albums someday.

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Jan Garbarek at SGTG:

Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature

Othello Ballet Suite

Trip To Prillarguri

Listen To The Silence

Afric Pepperbird

Sart
Triptykon
Popofoni

Witchi-Tai-To

Dansere
Solstice: Sounds And Shadows
Sol De Meio Dia
Paths, Prints
Song For Everyone
Making Music

Neighbourhood

The Hilliard Ensemble at SGTG:

Perotin

The Lamentations Of Jeremiah

Codex Speciálník

Transeamus

Annie Gosfield - Flying Sparks And Heavy Machinery (2001)

Appropriately-titled release from New York-based composer Annie Gosfield (b. 1960, Philadelphia).  This album, her second of four for John Zorn's Tzadik label, presents two works "developed in 1999 during a six-week residency in the factories of Nuremberg" designed to "combine art and industry".  The three-part, 42-minute EWA7 that takes up the bulk of the album is based on the mechanical sounds and rhythms of its titular factory where the premiere performance was held, with the 'Cylinders' portion taken from this original recording.

 

Engines whir into life in the opening section, gradually joined by metallic clangs developing into interlocking rhythmic patterns.  The passages of eerie subtlety in this first movement, with electronics by Ikue Mori, are particularly effective in contrast to the industrial-racket expectations that the next two parts deliver on.  By this point, with drving rhythms underpinning the other noises, comparisons with Einstürzende Neubauten are inescapable, but honestly, who cares - if you like this sort of thing, Gosfield puts it together really, really well, and it's such riotous fun to crank up loud.  

 

The shorter work that closes the album and provides its title takes similar inspiration from industrial sounds, but writes them in to a (slightly) more conventional context for string quartet and percussion quartet.  It's a nice conclusion to a very satisfying album which makes me want to listen to more of Gosfield's music (believe it or not, this one was a charity shop find, earlier this year).

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Alexei Lubimov - Der Bote: Elegies For Piano (2002)

A sublime programme, and one spanning the centuries from baroque to modern, performed by Alexei Lubimov (b. 1944, Moscow).  This recording was made by DRS Radio in Zurich at the end of 2000, and released as an ECM New Series album a year and a half later.

 

Kicking off with a 20-minute stretch that pairs CPE Bach and John Cage, it's clear that this is no ordinary classical solo piano recital.  But you know what, the Fantasie Für Klavier and a nice pacey In A Landscape complement each other just fine, and things just get more interesting from there.  With an overall theme of 'elegies', and an album title of 'the messenger' (taken from the haunting final piece), as a concept piece it plays out well, and just sounds heavenly.  Balancing stock repertoire choices like Liszt, Chopin and Debussy with the kind of more recent composers that have long been Lubimov's interest (Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov), he turns in a great set that feels satisfying from beginning to end on every listen.

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