Fernando Benadon - delight / delirium (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS 2017)

Fernando Benadon has a rich background as a composer, saxophonist, improviser, and scholar. He brings this experience to his most recent recording project, delight/delirium, particularly to the final two tracks, Búgi Wúgi and Rhythmensional, both of which engage with the boundaries between improvised and notated music in interesting ways. For Rhythmensional, Benadon recorded an improvised drum solo by acclaimed Cuban jazz drummer and composer, Dafnis Prieto. Benadon then composed a through composed piece to be performed along with the recording of Prieto’s solo essentially turning Prieto’s improvisation into fixed media. As a scholar, Benadon has had an enduring interest in the field of “microtimings” (for a very different look at “microtimings”, see Richard Beaudoin’s New Focus release of the same name, FCR125 using the microscopic temporal inflections of iconic recordings as the basis for new composition), which investigates the aspects of time in a performer’s performance that go beyond notation, particularly as they relate to different styles. By recording Prieto and then placing his playing at the foundational level of the piece, in a sense, Benadon has frozen the microtimings in the improvisation while guaranteeing micro-variation in the rhythmic realization of the score by the live performers playing along with Prieto’s track. Búgi Wúgi consciously goes in the opposite direction, achieving the looseness of early jazz piano masters Earl Hines and Bubber Miley and the post-modern sensibility of contemporary experimental improvisors like Ethan Iverson and Vijay Iyer by keeping the left hand steady and meticulously notating improvised “sounding” material in the right hand.

Cotxes in inspired by the visual imagery of Barcelona, as this unique quartet of sax, vibes, harp, and piano spin out lush, impressionistic harmonies through notated lines that again sound improvised. delight/delirium opens with material that perhaps could be improvised, but reveals itself clearly as a fully through composed piece when we hear tightly coordinated unisons between clarinet and piano near the one minute mark. Nevertheless, the work often falls forward like an improvisation, with a sense of structure that is less oriented towards managed development of material than it is towards a journey whose changes of directions are suggested each moment anew. Cosmicomics is the odd man out aesthetically on the recording, not only because it is the only large ensemble work, but also because it inhabits a more conventionally composerly sound world. The work ebbs and flows between the gently pulsating, impressionistic chords of the opening and more explosive moments that bristle with orchestral color. Cosmicomics is a more direct look at Benadon’s material palette apart from his engagement with exploring the subtle boundaries between improvised and notated music.

1. Cotxes 09:15

2. delight/delirium 07:35

3. Cosmicomics 10:01

4. Bugi Wugi 07:27

5. Rhythmensional 11:47

Track 1,2,4,5 recorded at American University 

Track 3 recorded at University of Illinois 

Track 5 recorded at Systems Two 

Produced with support from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American University’s College of Arts and Sciences 

Mix: Rogerio Weis Naressi 

Mastering: Yana Sakellion

Matt Holman - The Tenth Muse (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS 2017)

Trumpeter and composer Matt Holman releases a recording of his large scale composition The Tenth Muse, written for his ensemble (trumpet, vibraphone, piano, woodwinds) of the same name. Holman seemlessly weaves together improvisational and through-composed elements in the work, looking to the romantic poems of Greek poet Sappho in translations by Anne Carson as a source of inspiration and direct material. 

In the ancient love poetry of the Greek lyrist Sappho, trumpet player/composer Matt Holman has found a trove of writings whose emotions and sentiments feel as timely and passionate today as they did when they were written, more than 2,500 years ago. On his new album, The Tenth Muse, Holman bridges the ancient with the modern through 16 ethereal compositions inspired by Sappho’s writings (as translated by Anne Carson).

Holman’s pieces take the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s poetry as it has come down to us as a guide for balancing structure and improvisation, clarity and mystery. Holman’s stark but enticing music is brought to life by a gifted quartet well versed in exploring heady concepts with impassioned vigor and airy sensitivity: Holman, saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist Sam Sadigursky, vibraphonist Chris Dingman, and pianist Bobby Avey. Holman initially discovered Sappho’s poetry through his wife, who introduced him to the Greek poetess during the early days of their courtship, the intoxicating period when every aspect of taste and personality is a new discovery. The words that survived from antiquity seemed to reflect his own feelings across a gulf-spanning millennia, while the significant portions that had been lost over time added a sense of entrancing uncertainty.

“I was astounded at the beauty of these fragments,” he recalls. “What exists today is so minimal that the spaces between the words prompt the brain to fill in words and phrases, almost like erasure poetry. Looking at Sappho’s work and finding these beautiful poems, I almost ache on some of them wanting to know what those words were that we’ll never know. For me that was really powerful.”It also resonated with Holman’s instincts as a composer/improviser, whose own muse subsists on the relationship between the written and the spaces left open for spontaneous invention.

To further distance the compositions from his own instincts, Holman devised different systems of cryptograms for each piece – pitches and rhythms associated with specific letters or words (the best known example being J.S. Bach’s coding of his own name into compositions using notes associated with its four letters). “You have a certain language and certain licks that are characteristically you, which is a good thing, but when you’re trying to create something new you want to start fresh, ”Holman explains. “I wanted to have another element outside of my own tendencies. You have to search really hard to find it, almost like it’s the composer’s secret, but I think it adds more depth.

”The music for The Tenth Muse (the title comes from Plato’s adulatory name for the poetess) was written during a residency at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming in August 2013. He spent the month working in a refurbished schoolhouse dating from the early 20th century on a scenic 30,000-acre ranch offering outdoor activities and teeming with wildlife. “I had an incredible piano and nature right outside my door,” Holman describes. “Deer would walk by all the time. There was time and there was a vastness to being in Wyoming that allowed a real focus of purpose and connection to nature, a quality that is present in Sappho’s work. All of these poems come from an individual voice, so I strove to capture in the music this sense of solitude. I wanted the music to sound intimate, as if it came from a single individual even if there are moments where it’s multidimensional.”The Tenth Muse premiered at Dave Douglas’ FONT (Festival of New Trumpet Music) in September 2013. The music is remarkable for its intimacy and fluidity, sliding effortlessly between the composed and the improvised with grace and elegance, though not without a full-blooded urgency.

The unusual instrumentation provides an expansive palette, which Holman seizes on in a variety of ways. His trumpet and Sadigursky’s woodwinds are supple and soaring, tethered by the resonant power of Avey’s piano and softened by the gauzy luminescence of Dingman’s vibes. “I sought to evoke the full range of themes in these fragments,” Holman says. “Some are passionate and devotional, related to love, and others reflect on the awe-inspiring aspects of nature or the power of dreams. Over the course of two millenia, the human condition has remained fundamentally the same. We are still beholden to our desires, still marvel at a vast sky, still suffer over love both in its anticipation and in its loss.

In this day and age, we are inundated with images and reminders of what divides us from each other. Sappho’s poetry draws for us the connection between the ancient and the modern, reminding us that even something as simple as a fragment can speak to the depths of our shared humanity.

01. fragment 104b 6:49

02. fragment 147 7:20

03. fragment 24a,c,d 5:11

04. fragment 120 2:01

05. fragment 36 5:16

06. fragment 29a 3:43

07. fragment 67a 1:50

08. fragment 168b 2:10

09. fragment 4 7:57

10. fragment 34 1:36

11. fragment 38 6:11

12. fragment 32 3:14

13. fragment 18 1:04

14. fragment 26 3:31

15. fragment 63 3:41

16. fragment 88a,b 5:04

Matt Holman: trumpet, flugelhorn, compositions

Chris Dingman: vibraphone

Bobby Avey: piano

Sam Sadigursky: soprano sax, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto flute, flute

George Lewis - The Will to Adorn (NEW FOCUS RECORDINGS 2017)

George Lewis is a modern musical polymath, in the truest sense of the word. As the legendary trombonist and pioneering member of the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Lewis was a driving force in one of the most important movements in improvised music in the last decades of the 20th century.

His work with interactive computer software has transformed the fields of electro-acoustic music and virtual instruments. He has had an equally large impact on the academic community, both through his publications and his mentoring of student composers and performers alike. Lewis’s work as a composer fuses the many facets of his musicianship together, and his collaboration with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble) documented here on this recording, gives us an opportunity to see the wide net that he casts. The recording opens with the title track, a boisterous and colorful ensemble work that is inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Hurston’s description of churchgoing folks’ penchant for “decorating a decoration” captivated Lewis, and the piece manifests that exuberance through explosive, embellished lines, glitchy off-kilter grooves, and subtly shaded microtonal chords. Shadowgraph, 5 and Artificial Life 2007 are both examples of Lewis’s open-form scores, in which he strives to facilitate a structured improvisation experience through non-standard notation.

Shadowgraph was written for the AACM big band, comprised of a series of symbol instructions, and is among pieces Lewis wrote for what he calls the “creative orchestra.” Artificial Life 2007 was written for the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and seeks to “exteriorize the process of decision-making” inherent in improvised playing through more explicit text instructions. Born Obbligato was written for ICE as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Septet op. 20. Lewis borrows structural and textural ideas from Beethoven’s septet, and also adds percussion to the fourth movement, performed here by virtuoso Steven Schick.

The recording closes with Lewis’s performance of T.J. Anderson’s In Memoriam Albert Lee Murray, a writer and colleague of Anderson who often chose the African-American musical tradition as his subject matter and the departure point for inspiration.

01. Will To Adorn 14:20

02. Shadowgraph, 5 05:14

03. Artificial Life, 2007 04:57

04. Born Obbligato I. 06:44

05. Born Obbligato II. 02:59

06. Born Obbligato III. 03:26

07. Born Obbligato IV. 03:55

08. Born Obbligato V. 01:30

09. Born Obbligato VI. 05:47

10. In Memoriam Albert Lee Murray 03:08

Engineers: Silas Brown (track 1), Ross Karre (track 2-3), Jessica Slaven (tracks 4-6, 8-9), George Lewis (track 7), Ryan Streber (track 10) 

Recording locations: 

Track 1 Miller Theatre, Columbia University, NY, NY 

Track 2 Roulette, Brooklyn, NY 

Track 3 Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center 

Track 4-6, 8-9 Abrons Arts Center 

Track 7 Clark Studio Theatre, Lincoln Center, NY 

Track 10 Oktaven Audio, Mt. Vernon, NY