Showing posts with label NONESUCH RECORDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NONESUCH RECORDS. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Mary Halvorson - Amaryllis (May 13, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Amaryllis is a six-song suite performed by a newly formed sextet of master improvisers, including Halvorson, Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). The Mivos String Quartet joins for three of the songs, making this the largest ensemble for which Halvorson has written to date. The suite showcases Halvorson’s many musical influences from jazz, experimental, new music, and beyond.

1. Night Shift
2. Anesthesia
3. Amaryllis
4. Side Effect
5. Hoodwink
6. 892 Teeth

Mary Halvorson - Belladonna (May 13, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Belladonna is a set of five compositions written for Halvorson on guitar plus The Mivos Quartet: Olivia De Prato (violin), Maya Bennardo (violin), Victor Lowrie Tafoya (viola), and Tyler J. Borden (cello). It is Halvorson’s first time writing for a string quartet. Mivos’ parts are through-composed and augmented by Halvorson’s guitar improvisations.

1. Nodding Yellow
2. Moonburn
3. Flying Song
4. Haunted Head
5. Belladonna

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder - GET ON BOARD (April 22, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder discuss the making of their album 'GET ON BOARD,' out April 22 on Nonesuch Records, in a conversation with writer Lynell George.

1. My Baby Done Changed the Lock on the Door
2. The Midnight Special
3. Hooray Hooray
4. Deep Sea Diver
5. Pick a Bale of Cotton
6. Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee
7. What a Beautiful City
8. Pawn Shop Blues
9. Cornbread, Peas, Black Molasses
10. Packing Up Getting Ready to Go
11. I Shall Not Be Moved

Monday, February 21, 2022

Tigran Hamasyan - StandArt (April 29, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Nonesuch Records releases pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan’s StandArt —his first album of American standards— on April 29, 2022. StandArt includes songs from the 1920s through the 1950s, by Richard Rodgers, Charlie Parker, Jerome Kern, David Raksin, and others; it also includes a piece Hamasyan improvised with his bandmates —bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Justin Brown —and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who is featured on two of the album’s tracks. Other special guests include saxophonist and label-mate Joshua Redman on Charlie Parker’s “Big Foot,” as well as saxophonist Mark Turner on Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “All the Things You Are.” Produced by Hamasyan and recorded last spring in Los Angeles, StandArt is Hamasyan’s first release of American music, having previously only released original compositions and traditional Armenian music.

1. De-Dah
2. I Didn't Know What Time It Was
3. Tigran Hamasyan, Mark Turner - All the Things You Are (feat. Mark Turner)
4. Tigran Hamasyan, Joshua Redman - Big Foot (feat. Joshua Redman)
5. When a Woman Loves a Man
6. Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
7. Tigran Hamasyan, Ambrose Akinmusire - I Should Care (feat. Ambrose Akinmusire)
8. Tigran Hamasyan, Ambrose Akinmusire - Invasion During an Operetta (feat. Ambrose Akinmusire)
9. Laura

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Brad Mehldau - Jacob's Ladder (March 18, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

Nonesuch Records releases Brad Mehldau’s Jacob’s Ladder on March 18, 2022 on CD and digital; a vinyl LP version will be released later in the year (exact date TBD). The album features new music that reflects on scripture and the search for God through music inspired by the prog rock Mehldau loved as a young adolescent, which was his gateway to the fusion that eventually led to his discovery of jazz. Featured musicians on the album include Mehldau’s label mates Chris Thile and Cécile McLorin Salvant, as well as Mark Guiliana, Becca Stevens, Joel Frahm, and others. A video for ‘maybe as his skies are wide’ is available today here. The song builds off an interpolation of one portion of Rush’s classic “Tom Sawyer.” Nonesuch Store pre-orders include an exclusive signed, limited-edition print.

Mehldau explains, “We are born close to God, and as we mature, we invariably move further and further away from Him on account of our ego. Jacob’s Ladder begins at that place closer to God with the voice of child, and then moves into the world of action. God is always there, but in our discovery and conquest, and all the joys and sorrows they bring, we may lose sight of him. He sets a ladder before us though, like in Jacob’s dream, and we climb towards him, to find reconciliation with ourselves, to stitch up all those worldly wounds and finally heal. The record ends with my vision of heaven—once again as a child, His child, in eternal grace, in ecstasy.

“The musical conduit on the record is prog,” Mehldau continues. “Prog—progressive rock—was the music of my childhood, before I discovered jazz. It matched the fantasy and science fiction books I read from C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle and others at that time, aged ten through twelve. It was my gateway to the fusion of Miles Davis, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra and other groups, which in turn was the gateway to more jazz. Jazz shared with prog a broader expressive scope and larger-scale ambitions than the rock music I had known already.

“The prog from Rush, Gentle Giant, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer here only hints at the genre’s conceptual, compositional and emotional range. These bands and others have continued to influence newer groups that bring prog impulses into the arena of hard rock and screaming math metal, like Periphery, whose music is included here, and also inspired the screaming vocals on ‘Herr und Knecht.’ I tried to avoid a direct tribute approach to all the songs, and opted in some cases for excerpts, or reworking of themes.”

Although Brad Mehldau is best known as a jazz composer and improviser, he has made several albums that fall outside of the mainstream jazz genre, including his 2001 Largo, produced by Jon Brion. Wide-ranging in texture and big in scale, it features woodwind or brass ensembles are on several tracks, as well as a heavy emphasis on powerful drums. In 2010, Nonesuch released his second collaboration with Brion, Highway Rider, which includes performances by Mehldau’s trio—drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Larry Grenadier—as well as drummer Matt Chamberlain, saxophonist Joshua Redman, and a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman. Mehldau also orchestrated and arranged the album’s fifteen pieces for the ensemble.

Mehldau’s 2014 collaboration with Mark Guiliana, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, featured Mehldau on Fender Rhodes and synthesizers and Guiliana on drums and effects, playing twelve original tunes—six by the duo and six by Mehldau. His 2019 album Finding Gabriel featured performances by him on piano, synthesizers, percussion, and Fender Rhodes, as well as vocals. Guest musicians included Ambrose Akinmusire, Sara Caswell, Kurt Elling, Joel Frahm, Mark Guiliana, Gabriel Kahane, and Becca Stevens, among others.

1. -maybe as his skies are wide-
2. Herr und Knecht (Master and Slave)
3. (Entr'acte) Glam Perfume
4. Cogs in Cogs, pt. 1: Dance
5. Cogs in Cogs, Pt. II: Song
6. Cogs in Cogs, Pt. III: Double Fugue
7. Tom Sawyer
8. Vou correndo te encontrar / Racecar
9. Jacob’s Ladder, Pt. I: Liturgy
10. Jacob’s Ladder, Pt. II: Song
11. Jacob’s Ladder, Pt. III: Ladder
12. Heaven: I. All Once – II. Life Seeker – III. Würm – IV. Epilogue: It Was a Dream but I Carry It Still

Saturday, November 6, 2021

ADVANCE: Cecile McLorin Salvant - Ghost Song (March 4, 2022 Nonesuch Records)

1. Wuthering Heights
2. Optimistic Voices / No Love Dying
3. Ghost Song
4. Obligation
5. Until
6. I Lost My Mind
7. Moon Song
8. Trail Mix
9. The World Is Mean
10. Dead Poplar
11. Thunderclouds
12. Unquiet Grave

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Sam Gendel - Isfahan / My Little Suede Shoes (September 2021 Nonesuch Records)

1. ISFAHAN 03:12
2. MY LITTLE SUEDE SHOES 03:08

Sam Gendel - saxophone
Gabe Noel - electric bass
Philippe Melanson - electronic percussion

Dean Hurley - mixing
Mike Bozzi - mastering
Mario Ayala - original airbrush painting (color inversion)

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians (NONESUCH RECORDS 2018)


1998 Grammy Award Winner

Nonesuch Records' 1998 Grammy-winning recording of Steve Reich's landmark piece Music for 18 Musicians, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians, returned to vinyl in July 2018. First released on vinyl in a limited run for Record Store Day 2015, the album, mastered for vinyl by Robert C. Ludwig, is now available at a new, low price, pressed on two 140-gram vinyl LPs at Pallas Manufacturing in Diepholz, Germany. The New York Times says: "It would be hard to think of any American music more important than this."

From the original 1998 release:

At the close of the 1970s, the New York Times declared Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians one of the ten most important works of that decade. But the passage of time has proven that inaccurate. As K. Robert Schwartz writes in his liner notes, it is “one of the handful of late-twentieth-century works that can rightly claim to have altered the course of Western music.”

Twenty-two years after its first release on vinyl, Steve Reich and Musicians deliver a new recording of Music for 18 Musicians on Nonesuch Records. Originally offered as a volume within the composer’s 10-CD retrospective box set in 1997, 18 is now available as its own album with graphics and liner notes prepared expressly for this issue.

Reich himself admits that 18 marks a “high point” in his thirty-year career. “It’s undoubtedly one of the best pieces I’ve ever done. Sometimes everything just comes together and suddenly you’ve created this wonderful organism, and in this piece it happened. That accounts for its durability. but it also has a real structural backbone, so it continues to please me twenty years later.”

The product of virtually continuous work from May 1974 to March 1976, 18 was finished when Reich was nearly forty, and reflects numerous influences that had made their mark on the composer’s life up to that point: bebop and Balinese gamelan, African drumming and modal jazz, the melismas of Perotin and the scat-singing of Ella Fitzgerald. These elements came together to define Reich’s essential harmonic language, one that had evolved well beyond the austere and reductive so-called minimalism of his earlier pieces.

Along with the benefit of digital recording, this new 18 features many of the very same musicians that participated in its first recording as well as many of its concert performances over the last two decades: a team that could be said, over time, to have osmotically absorbed every nuance this richly-detailed score has to offer. A tempo change in the new album—governed by the breathing pattern of the clarinetist—has resulted in a version eleven minutes longer than the original. Some harmonic reinterpretation may be noted as well.

Music for 18 Musicians has influenced a whole generation of young composers, as well as a legion of pop musicians. As much as ever, it remains an alluring marvel of coloristic shimmer and an evocation of non-Western music, of classical music, and of jazz—without sounding like any of them. Viewing it from a modest historical distance, is it still absurd to label it a minimalist work? Steve Reich replies, “Yes, I think it is. You can apply minimalism to 18 if you want, but what you’re really hearing is that whole phenomenon—at least in any recognizable, strict form—fade away into the distance.”

Steve Reich, marimba, piano
Rebecca Armstrong, Marion Beckenstein, Cheryl Bensman Rowe, sopranos
Jay Clayton, alto, piano
Russell Hartenberger, Bob Becker, Tim Ferchen marimbas, xylophones
James Preiss, vibraphones, piano
Garry Kvistad, marimba, xylophone, piano
Thad Wheeler, marimba, maracas
Nurit Tilles, Edmund Niemann, pianos
Philip Bush, piano, maracas
Elizabeth Lim, violin
Jeanne LeBlanc, cello
Leslie Scott, Evan Ziporyn, clarinets, bass clarinets

Produced by Judith Sherman
Recorded October 1996 at the Hit Factory, New York City
Engineered by John Kigore
Assistant Engineers: Glen Marchese, Chris Hilt
Mixed November 1996 and January 1997 at the Hit Factory, New York City
Assistant Mix Engineers: Tony Black, Greg Thompson
Production Assistants: Sidney Chen, Jeanne Velonis

Design by John Gall
Cover Photo by Fumio Kurasakai/Photonica

Executive Producer: Robert Hurwitz


John Adams - Doctor Atomic (NONESUCH RECORDS 2018)


Nonesuch released the first recording of John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, on June 29, 2018. Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars created the libretto for Doctor Atomic, drawing from original sources. The composer leads the BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in this recording, which features a cast led by Gerald Finley, who originated the role of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. The two-CD boxed set includes a 64-page bound booklet with archival photos, libretto, and an essay by Mark Swed.

In addition to the San Francisco premiere, Finley has sung Oppenheimer in productions in New York, Amsterdam, Chicago, and London. He is joined on the album by Julia Bullock (Kitty Oppenheimer), Brindley Sherratt (Edward Teller), Samuel Sakker (Captain James Nolan), Andrew Staples (Robert Wilson), Jennifer Johnston (Pasqualita), and Aubrey Allicock (General Leslie Groves). This recording was made possible in part through generous support from New Music USA.

"His most visionary and ambitious stage work to date," said the Guardian. "Adams's conducting, second to none in his own music, had tremendous conviction and unique authority, with every facet of the score's terrible beauty laid bare … thrilling playing and choral singing … Gerald Finley conveyed Oppenheimer's moral agony with singing of great refinement and subtlety."

"A magnificent accomplishment that easily takes its place alongside the other Adams-Sellars triumphs," exclaimed the Los Angeles Times. "It contains music of unearthly splendor … gorgeous lushness and … rich expressivity."

Doctor Atomic concerns the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the Alamagordo test site in New Mexico in July 1945. The focal characters are the physicist and Manhattan Project director, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer; his wife Kitty; Edward Teller; and General Leslie Groves, US Army commander of the project.

Sellars's libretto draws on original source material, including personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics, declassified government documents, and the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet and contemporary of Oppenheimer.

John Adams's works, spanning more than four decades, have entered the repertoire and are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music, among them Harmonielehre, Shaker Loops, Chamber Symphony, Doctor Atomic Symphony, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and his Violin Concerto. His stage works, all in collaboration with director Peter Sellars, include Nixon in China (1987), The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), El Niño (2000), Doctor Atomic (2005), A Flowering Tree (2006), and the Passion oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012). In November 2017, Adams's new opera Girls of the Golden West, set during the 1850s California Gold Rush, received its world premiere at San Francisco Opera.

The opera's libretto, assembled by Sellars, includes original Gold Rush song lyrics, letters, journal entries, and personal memoirs from the era. Doctor Atomic is Nonesuch's thirty-first recording of the works of John Adams, beginning with Harmonielehre in 1986; the label has released forty-seven first recordings of Adams pieces.


Punch Brothers - All Ashore (NONESUCH RECORDS 2018)


The Story Behind Punch Brothers' New Album, "All Ashore"

All Ashore, Punch Brothers' fifth album and the first to be self-produced by the quintet, is both ambitious and easygoing, a lot like the "ridiculously eclectic" combo, as London's Guardian once called the band. The work has the feel of a nine-song suite, one that invites you to unravel the threads of its connected themes and stories over repeated listening. Each track segues seamlessly, even a little sneakily, into the next. Before you know it, "The Angel of Doubt," a dark-night-of-the-soul drama featuring a vocal from singer-mandolinist Chris Thile, has glided into "Three Dots and a Dash," an instrumental that veers from ruminative to rave up, named in tribute to a classic Tiki cocktail, Thile's latest recreational obsession.

Thile calls All Ashore "a meditation on committed relationships in the present day, particularly in light of the current unsettled political climate—certainly the most unsettled one that anyone in the band has ever experienced." He continues, "We were hoping we could create a thing that would be convincing as a complete thought, sort of a nine-movement or a nine-song thought, even though it's rangy in terms of what it's talking about and in the characters doing the talking."

When Punch Brothers released its last album, The Phosphorescent Blues, in 2015, Rolling Stone noted, "The genius of Thile and bandmates guitar player Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjo player Noam Pikelny, and fiddler Gabe Witcher is the artistry with which they mix bluegrass, roots, rock, pop, jazz, and classical to create a unique, contemporary sound." All Ashore also has an appealingly relaxed virtuosity to it, self-assured but never showy.

In a more pronounced way than on prior discs, All Ashore comes across as a glimpse into Punch Brothers' current real life, as these artists who have spent more than a dozen years playing together grapple with marriage, family, and their ever-accelerating individual careers as producers, composers, arrangers, and front men. On the album's early tracks, it candidly addresses the state of their own world. In smart and satirical later songs like "Jumbo" and "All Part of The Plan," it tackles the state of our collective one. Understated ballad "The Gardener" poignantly combines the personal and political in its evocation of a dedicated tradesman who brings beauty to a family's garden but remains a stranger, a mysterious other, to them, only glimpsed occasionally from a window.

The five band members took time from their families to once again come together United Sound in Los Angeles (formerly Ocean Way), where they'd previously recorded The Phosphorescent Blues with T Bone Burnett as well as their 2010 album, Antifogmatic. Pikelny says. "When we first got together as a band, we were mostly single guys in our mid to late twenties. We shared a musical vision but there was this sense of fraternity, of brotherhood, that really sealed the deal and laid the groundwork for a long lasting collaboration."

He adds, "We had so much more free time than we have now, with fewer family and professional commitments. Our time together early on would happen spontaneously, casually, and often included stumbling home from cocktail bars at 3am in New York. We now have to be much more organized with our time to make sure we have opportunities to be together and make music. We're no longer all living in the same city, three of us are married, and there are three Punch Brothers kids running around."


Pikelny continues "On top of that, the current political and cultural situation in this country really contrasts with anything the five of us have experienced in our lifetimes. All our previous albums were made in times of relative calm, compared to the present time. But who better than your closest musical family to help navigate and makes sense of these increasingly foreign and challenging times? This album seemed like a momentous re-gathering of the band, an opportunity to really get to the core of what Punch Brothers represents. "

Additionally, the band's individual projects influenced them on All Ashore. "We were hearing new things out of everyone," says violinist Witcher, "and that's what going off and doing something else does for you. We had this whole collection of influences, new experiences, a broadening of scope."

Thile has always juggled multiple projects throughout his career with Punch Brothers and as a member of Grammy Award–winning trio Nickel Creek. He currently hosts the public radio show, Live from Here, often abetted on stage by one or more Punch Brother. In 2017 alone, he released a duo album with jazz pianist and Nonesuch labelmate Brad Mehldau; a set of Bach trios with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime mentor and friend, double bassist Edgar Meyer; and Thanks for Listening, a studio set of "Song of the Week" tunes he'd composed for Live from Here.

Witcher produced albums for Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins (2016's Young in All the Wrong Ways), Pikelny (his 2017 solo disc, Universal Favorite), and the acoustic guitar duo of Punch Brother Chris Eldridge and Julian Lage (2017's Mount Royal). Nonesuch label mate Rhiannon Giddens recently engaged Witcher to create orchestral arrangements of her repertoire for concert appearances with symphony orchestras.

Kowert just released Unless, the debut disc with his Nashville-based quartet Hawktail produced by bandmate Eldridge and featuring frequent Live from Here guest star violinist Brittany Haas. Eldridge also recorded and toured with Julian Lage, a prodigious guitarist who melds his jazz background with folk, rock and bluegrass. In early 2017, Pikelny released a purely solo album, Universal Favorite, and toured the country extensively with his one-man show. He produced Motel Bouquet for singer-songwriter Caitlin Canty, with whom he also performs. In fall of 2017, he was again awarded Banjo Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association.



Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Gaby Moreno & Van Dyke Parks - The Immigrants (NONESUCH RECORDS 2018)



"The immigrants are here to stay, to help build America
The immigrants ain't going nowhere, they're here for America
Fighting for a better life, fighting through the grunge
America remember Ellis Island, we all came here to take the plunge
I hope you understand it."

Guatemalan-born singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno and American musician, songwriter, arranger, and producer Van Dyke Parks mark the United States' Independence Day holiday with the release of their heartfelt interpretation of David Rudder's "The Immigrants" on July 3, 2018. Rudder, a renowned Trinidadian Calypso artist, wrote the song twenty years ago in response to the horrifying attack by New York police officers on the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. The song speaks, as much today as in 1998, to the harsh treatment of immigrants while also celebrating their contributions to America, and their admiration of the ideals upon which the nation was founded.

"The Immigrants" may be purchased from the Nonesuch Store, iTunes, and Amazon, and streamed at YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify. Proceeds will be donated to the Central American Resource Center of California (CARECEN), a community-based, nonprofit organization whose mission is to empower Central Americans and all immigrants by defending human and civil rights, working for social and economic justice, and promoting cultural diversity.

"I am a Guatemalan immigrant. This country welcomed me eighteen years ago. It breaks my heart to see the events taking place at the border right now. We all deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and to be received into this country with more love and empathy," Moreno says "The song 'The Immigrants' was written by a wonderful artist from Trinidad named David Rudder and was brought to my attention by the brilliant Van Dyke Parks, who has arranged this piece with such passion and grace. It's a powerful message of courage, love and faith that resonates to this day and should be spread wide across the entire nation and beyond. We all share the same dreams and we came here to fulfill them and to prosper, together."

Parks adds: "When I was offered a concert at Denmark's Roskilde fest in 2010, I saw that immigration would become a central issue in the USA, and felt this anthemic tune could entertain as well as inform—and change hearts—and I asked Gaby to join me. 'The Immigrants' has a political punch, while also being joyful and underscoring how our culture is refreshed by immigrants like Gaby, and how those who arrive here can really redefine, and help build America. As Phil Ochs observed 'In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.'"

Moreno and Parks originally recorded "The Immigrants" for inclusion on a collaborative album to be released this fall. They opted to put this song out early in order to voice their support for those caught in the current immigration crises.



Leland Sklar, bass
Jim Keltner, drums
Grant Geissman, guitars
Matt Cook, marimba
Amy Schulman, harp
Yvetter Holzworth, violin
Linnea Powell, viola
Aniela Perry, cello
Doug Legacy, steel drum
Lizzie Upton, French horn
Mark Pender, trumpet
Phil Feather, woodwinds
David Stone, upright bass


Saturday, April 28, 2018

New Mandy Patinkin & Thomas Bartlett, John Adams Albums | Rhiannon Giddens, Rostam & Pat Metheny News (NONESUCH RECORDS)


Diary: January 27, 2018

The first in a series of musical installments from singer Mandy Patinkin and pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett, Diary: January 27, 2018 was recorded by the two musicians in Bartlett's New York studio. The ten tracks of this first Diary entry include songs by Randy Newman, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright, Teitur, Marc Bolan (T. Rex), Stephin Merritt (The Magnetic Fields), and Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius). 



Violin Concerto

This recording of John Adams's Grawemeyer Award-winning Violin Concerto was made with his frequent collaborators violinist Leila Josefowicz, conductor David Robertson, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis in 2016. The piece features Adams's usual "intelligence, craftsmanship, and quirkiness," says the Boston Globe, and "mingles virtuoso show with soul."






Rhiannon Giddens spoke with NPR's All Things Considered about her MacArthur Fellowship, the role of the banjo in her work, and her latest album, Freedom Highway, from which she also performed two songs. 


Mandy Patinkin Named IRC Ambassador

The International Rescue Committee has named Mandy Patinkin an IRC Ambassador, in recognition of his continued efforts to advocate for the welcoming of refugees around the world. "Meeting with refugees from all around the world has made one thing very clear to me," he says: "all they want is a better tomorrow for their loved ones, their family, their children." 

Read more ...


Watch: Rostam Shares Story Behind Half-Light Title Track

Rostam has shared a video in which he deconstructs the title track to his debut album, Half-Light, part by part, instrument by instrument, vocal track by vocal track, both his and those of featured vocalist Kelly Zutrau of Wet.

Watch the video ...


Pat Metheny to Receive PRS for Music Gold Award at Jazz FM Awards

Congratulations to Pat Metheny, who will receive the PRS for Music Gold Award at the Jazz FM Awards in London next Monday. Metheny begins a European tour in late June. 


Read more ...



Free Yourself Up

Peter Pears

Seymour Reads the Constitution!

Still Dreaming

Shelter


Diary: January 27, 2018

Violin Concerto

American Utopia

Phantom Thread

Freedom Highway

Saturday, March 31, 2018

Thomas Bartlett & Nico Muhly - Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music (NONESUCH RECORDS May 18, 2018)


Longtime friends and collaborators Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) and Nico Muhly release a new album, Peter Pears: Balinese Ceremonial Music, May 18, 2018, on Nonesuch Records. Peter Pears comprises nine songs written by the duo plus three gamelan transcriptions by ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee that inspired the songs. Peter Pears is available to preorder from the Nonesuch Store and iTunes, where the album tracks "Dominic," "Gambangan," and "Festina" may be downloaded instantly; they can also be heard on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube in the videos below. Bartlett and Muhly perform the Peter Pears music on May 24 at (le) poisson rouge in New York City as part of its tenth anniversary festival, June 6 at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, and June 8 at LSO St Luke's in London presented by the Barbican. Details and tickets at nonesuch.com/on-tour.

McPhee lived in Bali during the 1930s, where he studied the gamelan intensively, bringing its sounds with him back to the Americas as one of the first composers to incorporate "world music" into his work. Returning to New York, McPhee moved in a group of artists that lived at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn. Alongside W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee, he found the collaborator with whom in 1941 he would record his westernized transcriptions, for two pianos, of the ceremonial music he had heard in Bali: the composer Benjamin Britten, who would himself travel to Indonesia, and drew heavily on its traditions in his own later works.

In college, Muhly and Bartlett became obsessed with these recordings and started writing music rooted in their textures and interlocking rhythms. The resulting nine songs reflects both artists' recent work—from Muhly's attempts to bridge the gap between post-minimalist composition and many other musical obsessions, to Bartlett's Oscar–nominated work with Sufjan Stevens for Call Me by Your Name. The project is named for Britten's partner, who also lived at 7 Middagh; accompanied Britten to Bali; and sang with a voice arguably as unusual as the one Bartlett deploys on this album. Pears was Britten's link to a wider community of artists; similarly, these songs feature a large cast of Bartlett and Muhly's regular collaborators on strings and metallic pitched percussion.

Bartlett says, "I wanted to not write in the same voice as I wrote Doveman songs, which is essentially "sad heartbroken boy who can barely muster the will to sing", and I was a little sick of that. I ended up going through baby books my mom has from when I was a little kid, finding strange things I had said, and building lyrics off of that—then folding in all of these references to different saints and things that seemed connected to Peter Pears, to Colin McPhee, to that world."


Muhly adds, "How integral the relationship is between someone's life partner and their music informs the lyrics too. McPhee's transcriptions are instrumental, so they don't really "mean" anything, but there's this matrix of connections that are both musical and emotional."

Thomas Bartlett, also known as Doveman, is an American pianist, singer, and producer. He has worked with many Nonesuch artists—including Sam Amidon, David Byrne, the Magnetic Fields, Mandy Patinkin, and Chris Thile—as well as Sufjan Stevens, Glen Hansard, The National, St. Vincent, Father John Misty, The Gloaming, Martha Wainwright, and others. Born in Vermont, Bartlett studied piano in London with Maria Curcio. As teenagers, he and Amidon formed the folk music band Popcorn Behavior (aka Assembly), and released three albums. Upon moving to New York, Bartlett began performing with Chocolate Genius and Elysian Fields. The first Doveman record, The Acrobat, was produced by Patrick Dillett, as was 2007's With My Left Hand I Raise the Dead. In 2008 Bartlett released a solo re-imagining of the Footloose soundtrack. The Conformist (2009), again produced by Dillett, featured members of The National, as well as backing vocals by Hansard, Wainwright, Norah Jones, Beth Orton, and Dawn Landes.

Nico Muhly is an American composer and collaborator whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and others, he has written more than eighty works for the concert stage. Muhly is a frequent collaborator with choreographer Benjamin Millepied and, as an arranger, has paired with Joanna Newsom, Antony and the Johnsons, Sufjan Stevens, and The National. He has composed for stage and screen, with credits that include music for The Glass Menagerie and scores for the films Kill Your Darlings; Me, Earl and the Dying Girl; and The Reader. Born in Vermont, Muhly studied composition with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse at The Juilliard School before working as an editor and conductor for Philip Glass. Muhly's previous Nonesuch recordings are the Metropolitan Opera's recording of his Two Boys and his collaboration with Teitur, Confessions. He lives in New York.

A playlist with much of the music Bartlett and Muhly have each collaborated on can be heard below via Spotify and on Apple Music.

01 “Gambangan”
02 “Dominic”
03 “Festina”
04 “Grendel”
05 “Pemoengkah”
06 “Valentine”
07 “Albeus”
08 “Nicholas”
09 “Taboeh Teloe”
10 “Selenite”
11 “Eusebius”
12 “Balthasar”