The Mark Segger Sextet Lifts Off!

LIFT OFF / SEGGER: Lift Off. Cluttertone News. For the Bees. #18. …. One Note. Slow Motion. Bassline / Mark Segger Sextet: Jim Lewis, tpt; Heather Saumer, tb; Peter Lutek, t-sax/cl; Tania Gill, pno/melodica; Rob Clutton, bs; Mark Segger, dm / 18th Note Records (no number)

This disc, available February 7, is the second release by the Toronto-based Mark Segger Sextet. According to the publicity sheet, “Much of this music was written in the two weeks leading up to the recording session, after a tour playing improvised music in Europe. Segger’s music reflects a wide range of creative interests, from the swing of Mel Lewis and his jazz orchestra to the genre expanding string quartet writing by composers like Bartók and Ligeti (heard clearly on For the Bees.)”

The album gets off to a frenzied start with the fast-paced free jazz piece Lift Off, in which trumpet and trombone play wild, dizzying figures in counterpoint over the roiling rhythm section. Staccato chords by the piano introduce a sort of stabilizing influence that slows down the pace temporarily while trumpeter Lewis plays above it, but then the brass duo, now joined by the tenor sax, come roaring back to destabilize the meter and pace yet again, and it stays that way through to the end.

By contrast, the opening of Cluttertone News sounds almost normal and tonal, with lush chords played by trumpet, trombone and tenor sax, behind and around which the bass and drums play asymmetric rhythms, the former sometimes plucked and sometimes bowed. Some of those bowed bass lines get pretty far-out, however, and in fact it is the bass that gives us the “cluttertones” in this “news.” The piece ends abruptly, in the midst of nowhere.

For the Bees may indeed be influenced by Bartók and Ligeti, at least harmonically, but the initial theme swings merrily along—until, yet again, it is that darn bass that interrupts the proceedings and takes us into far-out territory. I liked this as a stand-alone piece, but felt that the pattern was too similar to Cluttertone News to follow it on the CD. In the middle section, the three horns play atonal zig-zag patterns that cross each other in a sort of counterpoint, then become more amorphous in structure, clearly the Ligeti influence. The one problem I had with this piece was that the different musical influences didn’t really seem to mesh, but rather interfered with each other.

The next piece, simply titled #18, combines a nice, loping, easy swing with atonal figures, and again the initial beat is interrupted here and there for free jazz interludes. Pianist Tania Gill is heard here for the first time in a solo role, although much of what she plays seems to be rhythmic material designed to prod the band into further cacophony. The loping swing figures return here and there during Segger’s drum solo.

I can’t say why the next piece is represented by four dots in succession as a title, but so it is. Perhaps this is because this is the most abstract composition on the album, a series of little splattered notes played over the long, sustained lines of the tenor sax—and it only lasts a minute and a half. One Note certainly lives up to its name, presenting long-held, repeated Bs that overlap one another, with little burps of sound (also played on a B) from the tenor sax. Between you and me and the lamppost, I didn’t “get” this piece at all.

Slow Motion begins, actually, in a pretty uptempo, a repeated figure into which the trombone interrupts with almost comical low-range blats. Lewis gets a rare solo on this one, and although it becomes almost cacophonous after a while, I enjoyed it for its wild sense of humor. This piece very obviously took a lot of rehearsal to get right.

We end our excursion with Bassline, one of the fastest pieces on the album in which stop-time is used as a compositional device in the early going before it moves into a sort of stiff march rhythm behind free jazz cacophony. Little solos stutter their way out of the ensemble here and there, sometimes played staccato (trumpet) and sometimes legato (tenor sax), with the trombone playing something in between. I also felt that this piece had the strongest structure of any music on the album, thus the sextet clearly saved its best for last.

Lift Off is certainly a strange album with some very interesting and often likeable pieces on it, challenging one’s perceptions of jazz while taking some great risks. Definitely worth a listen!

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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Introducing Olga Mykytenko

VERDI: I Masnadieri: Dall’infame banchetto…Tu del mio Carlo. Un ballo in Maschera: Morrò, ma prima in grazia. Il Trovatore: Tacea la notte placida…Di tale amor. I vespri Siciliani: Arrigo! ah! parli a un core; Mercé, dilette amiche. Il Corsaro: Egli non riede. Attila: Santo di patria; Liberamente or piangi. Ernani: Surta è la notte…Ernani, involami. Macbeth: Nel di della vittoria…Or tutti sorgete; Una macchia è qui tuttora. Luisa Miller: Tu puniscimi, o signore. La traviata: È strano!…Ah, fors e lui…Sempre libera / Olga Mykytenko, sop; Bournemouth Symphony Orch.; Kirill Karabits / Chandos CHAN 20144

In the opera world, one of the most reactionary and entrenched remnants of old-timey music, the advent of a great new Verdi soprano means 40 times more than the advent of a great new singer (of any category) whose repertoire ranges further and wider afield. The old stuff is pretty much all they ever want to hear; the few times they hear anything modern, they generally hate it or, worse yet, dismiss it as “not music”; thus when new voices are trained nowadays, they’re trained for the exact same repertoire their forebears sang a century or more ago.

Here, then, we are presented with the debut solo recital of Olga Mykytenko, so of course it’s all old stuff. Well, at least it’s Verdi and not Donizetti or Mercadante, and to show her versatility we get the (almost) obligatory arias from such early Verdi garbage as I Masnadieri and Il Cosaro along with the more standard fare. Mykytenko, who is no spring chicken (she’s 45 going on 46) and who sang at the National Opera of Ukraine in Kiev from 1995 to 2003, has had one previous recording released, a complete Iolanta conducted by Vladimir Fedoseyev on the Relief label.

Mykytenko has an excellent voice as far as Slavic sopranos go. Yes, it has that steely-brilliant sound that so many of them have, but it also has a fair amount of beauty in it as well, and she has a simply phenomenal technique, able to sing not only fast staccato and runs but also trills and grupetti (mordents and grace notes for the uninformed) with great security. Insofar as emotional expression goes, however, she is an atypical Slavic soprano in that she is generally more genteel and restrained than her sisters-at-arms. The Slavic sopranos of old would have thrown tons of chest voice into Amelia’s “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” from Un ballo in Maschera whereas Mykytenko sings it with some feeling but much more restraint. Of course, I have no idea if she has always sung thus, but it’s telling that in a recital meant to introduce her to Western audiences she emulates Emmy Destinn, the great Czech soprano who sang for most of her great years at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Near the end of this aria, a flaw in Mykytenko’s voice: the penultimate high note is not only squally but not properly supported with the breath.

As the recital continues, her few vocal flaws come and go but one really begins to admire her basic technique. One chink in her armor is that she seems incapable of singing really softly when the score calls for it: “Tacea la notte placida” is sung very placida but not so much tacea. In the cabaletta, “Di tale amor,” she has the quick trills and staccato notes needed for the music, but alas her conductor, one Kirill Karabits, is one of those stodgy sticks-in-the-mud who has very little idea how to conduct Verdi and takes sluggish tempi to boot. In this scene, too, I felt that Mykytenko did very little acting with the voice, and the same goes for “Arrigo! ah parli a un core,” an aria that the late Cristina Deutekom used to sing the bloody hell out of. For Mykytenko, she might as well be pondering which gluten-free bread she hopes to find at the supermarket. The Vespri “Bolero” moves at a sluggish pace. Why, Kirill? Your soprano clearly has the goods to deliver the grace notes and trills at the written tempo. Wake the hell up and follow the score, you idiot!

But of course, given the limited scope of this recital, what I really wanted to hear were the dramatic arias from Attila and Macbeth, since these call for singers with fire in their bellies and inexhaustible high notes (pretty much what 90% of all operagoers really go to hear anyway). She opens up Odabella’s “Ancor di patria”with pretty good steel in the voice, but insofar as real feeling and drama go, she can’t hold a candle to Cheryl Studer, who was in turn not quite as incendiary as Deutekom in the role. We seem to be going down, down, down in terms of acting the with voice—dramatic interpretation—even as we train vocal acrobatics like Mykytenko. Now, if you watch one of her videos on YouTube, she constantly moves, and wriggles, and waves her hands and arms, but that’s not a substitute for real from-the-gut drama. Your wriggling around doesn’t impress me much, honey. Give everything you’ve got into the role and I’ll sing your praises from here to Mars and back.

It was almost painful for me to listen to the whole “Ernani, involami” scene, taken not only at sluggish tempi but with no forward momentum or drive in the orchestral playing. Where did Chandos get this conductor from? Was this the best they could do? Mykytenko gives us Generically Dramatic Emphasis on the words, but not one of them comes from the heart. Damn, I miss Leona Mitchell.

And then we come, at last, to the Macbeth arias. Or at least the music for them. A whole string of prior Lady Macbeths came to my mind, among them Callas, Borkh, Nilsson, Scotto, even Fiorenza Cossotto. I admit that Mykytenko does a bit better in “Or tutti sorgete” than I thought she would—for our time, this is pretty passable—but even Cossotto sounded more cracked-in-the-head and power-mad than she. Go and listen to her recording if you don’t believe me. Mykytenko sounds somewhat angry and upset, which is not the same thing. Verdi insisted that Lady Macbeth sing in a cracked, strangulated voice, particularly in the “sleepwalking scene.” Callas and late-period Scotto were absolutely perfect in “Una macchia.” Mykytenko sounds professional, and she sings the high D-flat too loudly. Karabits sounds as if he’s conducting a ballet scene from Delibes’ Sylvia.

Next up is the big nothing aria from Luisa Miller, a Verdi opera I’ve never liked and probably never will. The recital wraps up with Violetta’s big scene from the Act I finale of La traviata, which Karabits opens up as if it were the Prussian March through Poland. Here, however, Mykytenko must have gone through several takes, because her voice is perfect in legato, technique, placement and tone from start to finish. Again, there’s no “inner” feeling when she sings “Ah, fors’ e lui,” but she does do a short messa da voce on the word “amor” before she starts singing “Ah, quell’amor,” and she does sound moderately happy in “Sempre libera,” again conducted too slowly.

But maybe Mykytenko got shafted in this recital. If you go to YouTube and listen to her very different performance of “Sempre libera” from 2009, everything is more secure and she sings with much more feeling (plus the tempo is faster). Deterioration from a decade ago? Possibly, but maybe not. Maybe she was having vocal difficulties during these sessions and she and Karabits didn’t get along.

So there you have it. Without having seen or heard her “live,” my judgment is that Mykytenko is a good soprano with some real attributes, among them musicianship and a pretty solid technique, and some real problems, most notably uneven voice support and inability to feel the characters she is singing from within. If this is what you want, go for it. I’d rather pull out my Sondra Radvanosky recital disc and hear some real singing in the old stuff.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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Lintu Conducts Lutosławski

LUTOSŁAWSKI: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 2 / Finnish Radio Symphony Orch.; Hannu Lintu, cond / Ondine ODE 1322-5

This new release features two of Lutosławski’s symphonies performed by Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu with his regular orchestra, that of the Finnish Radio. For reasons known only to the conductor, they are presented on this CD in reverse order, the Third coming first and the Second after. Many conventional classical buffs would probably argue with my feeling that Penderecki’s music was uglier and more abrasive; surely, much of the music heard here will not thrill or even entice them. But of course, most casual classical listeners don’t know music from a hole in the wall, so this review is not for them. The rest of us can admire the elements of surprise, combined with fine craftsmanship, that make up this music. In the Third Symphony, Lutosławski almost seems to be creating a musical message via allusion and allegory; themes are brief, often aborted and sometimes juxtaposed. The liner notes erroneously attribute some of this to the “political turmoil” in Poland at that time and the Solidarity movement, which the composer said were of little consequence in his writing.

I will say, however, that in some respects I didn’t care a lot for this symphony. It’s not that the writing is too radical to follow so much as it’s simply too fragmented. As fine a conductor as Lintu is, even he could not manage to find any real structure in this score, and I don’t blame him. The symphony has its moments, but I felt that Lutosławski, to paraphrase the title of a very old pop song, was reaching for something but not finding anything there. He keeps putting his hand in and grasping, and he grasps in sometimes interesting ways, but all he comes up with are nothingburgers. Where’s the beef?? This symphony, to my ears, is Lutosławski’s musical equivalent of Alice wandering the hallway of Wonderland, opening doors too small for her to go through and alternately eating cakes and drinking fluids that make her grow larger and smaller in size. Well, perhaps that was the composer’s intent, but if so I’m not buying in completely. As I say, there are some very fine and interesting moments, but fleeting moments of concentrated excellence cannot always be put together to make a symphony, and this is what happens (or doesn’t happen) here. Incidentally, there’s a very prominent piano part in this symphony, yet the pianist is not credited anywhere on the CD or in the booklet. Curiouser and curiouser!

The Second Symphony, dating from 1967, is equally modern in style but, to my ears, a more coherent piece of music. The various motifs and phrases blend into and/or complement one another, and there is more structure to the work—and this despite the title of the first movement, “Hésitant.” For all the pauses and juxtaposed ideas, the music is more coherent. The scoring in this first movement is also lighter, only occasionally sprinkled with percussion and featuring small groups of instruments in almost chamber-orchestra-like writing.

The second movement, “Direct,” is even more tightly structured and lacks the hesitant quality of the first as well as the disjointed feeling of the Third Symphony. The opening is dominated by the basses, playing a slow, rumbling series of overlapping whole notes, leading to a long crescendo in which other instruments of the orchestra engage. At the 2:40 mark, it almost sounds like an orchestra tuning up as the music becomes still louder and, apparently, more chaotic, but eventually an inkling of order sneaks through the cacophony and we reach a passage resembling one of Leif Segerstam’s symphonies. Eventually, we also hear swirling wind figures that almost resemble the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos, and yet the music inexorably marches on its own crazy-quilt pattern. Later on, sharp-edged figures zigzag across the landscape and cross each other. This, I really liked.

A split review then, but not of the performance, only of the music.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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Monica Gutman Plays Schulhoff

SCHULHOFF: Piano Sonata No. 3. Ironien.* 10 Klavierstücke. Musik für Klavier. 11 Inventionen / Monica Gutman, *Erika Le Roux, pno / Wergo 7385-2

Over the last 18 or so years, the wonderful piano music of Erwin Schulhoff has become standard fare on recordings, at least. Since I am disabled and thus unable to get out of the house as I was once able to, I have no idea how his music is faring in live concerts, but if it’s anywhere close to his presentation on silver discs I’d be very happy. Of course, it clearly does not appeal to the atonal-squeamish; he was very much a modern composer of his day, used a great deal of extended harmonies, bitonal or atonal chords, and a melodic line that followed the harmonic progress of his music rather than leading it. As far as I’m concerned, his only real negative is that he was an ardent Communist who even went so far as to set Marx’s Communist Manifesto to music, but he was such a great composer that I can simply dismiss that one piece and admire all the rest.

Of course, his great introduction to the classical world came from Kathryn Stott’s now-legendary album of his jazz-and-ragtime-influenced piano pieces for the Bis label. On this CD, only the 11 Inventions (which were also on Stott’s CD) have any grounding in the popular music of the 1920s, and in fact all have been recorded before.

The recital presented here is performed by Monica Gutman, a Romanian pianist who studied in Germany at the Detmold Musikhochschule as well as in England with the superb, and often underrated, Louis Kentner. Her playing here has some muscle when needed, but largely relies on a singing legato. For those who feel that Schulhoff needs a singing legato in order to make his music palatable, this will then be a first choice, but I give the edge to Margarete Babinsky in the Piano Sonata No. 3 and to Stott in the Ironien and the 11 Inventions.

The problem, to my ears, is that Gutman flattens out the dynamics too much and emphasizes Schulhoff’s rhythms too little. The result is a sort of cross between Schulhoff and Debussy that never really existed.

So why am I reviewing this CD? As an object-lesson for all of you Historically Informed Performance nuts out there. This is how “traditions in performance” get started. One day, a performer you’ve never heard of gives a recital or makes a recording of music that is new to you. You like the music but, having no other frame of reference (yes, I know, in this case we DO have frames of reference; I’m just giving you a hypothetical example), laud it as a “classic” or a “definitive” performance when it is nothing of the kind. Ironically, you HIP people get away with a lot of murder of poor, innocent, good music because no one alive today could possibly have heard a performance from the 18th or 19th centuries, nor even from the early 20th, so you make up your own “traditions” based on “research” which consists of written descriptions that you cannot or do not interpret correctly. The you go about ruining the sound of music with your pathetic, whiny, unnatural-sounding Straight Tone string and wind sections that, if the composers had heard them, they would boil you in oil and then feed your remains to scavengers.

So there.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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Malin Byström in a New Recital

BERG: 7 Frühe Lieder. DUPARC: Au pays où se fait la guerre. Chanson triste. Le manoir de Rosamonde. La vie antérieure. Extase. L’invitation au voyage. RANGSTRÖM: Den mőrka blommen. Skold och svard: Sköldmön. 6 Poems by Bo Bergman: No. 1, Vingar i natten (Wings of the Night); No. 3, Melodi. The Dark Flower (excerpts): No. 1, Vingar i natten (Wings of Night); No. 2, Bon till natten (Prayer to the Night) / Malin Byström, sop; Helsingborg Symphony Orch.; Stefan Solyom, cond / Swedish Society Discofil SCD1168

Malin Byström is a Swedish soprano trained at the University College of Opera in Stockholm and coached by Jonathan Morris, still a frequent collaborator, since 1997. In 2016 she received the Litteris et Artibus medal, and in 2018 was appointed Court Singer by the King.

Byström has a pronounced flutter-vibrato that is occasionally uneven, though it evens out on sustained high notes; this takes some getting used to. Her performances, however, are expressive, which compensates for some of this. In Berg’s 7 Frühe Lieder, her interpretations are similar in style and form to those of Susan Graham in the piano-accompanied version with Malcolm Martineau, but in the orchestral versions no one can beat the late Jessye Norman.

The problem that I hear in Byström’s singing, however, is a certain sameness in approach regardless of the material. She sings the Duparc songs exactly as she sings the Berg, and the Rangström exactly as she sings the Duparc. I suppose that, for those with limited experience in older recordings, this is just fine, but for me it’s not quite enough. I still have the sound of Janet Baker’s voice in my ears singing Au pays où se fait la guerre, L’invitation au voyage , La vie antérieure and Le manoir de Rosamonde as well as Gérard Souzay singing Extase in my mind, and Byström doesn’t really measure up to them, particularly in vocal control.

By contrast, however, Stefan Solyom’s conducting is really exceptional, much better, in fact, than André Previn’s mushy accompaniment for Baker on her EMI recordings of these songs. I was especially impressed by the way he conducted Le manoir de Rosamonde. Interestingly, in the Duparc songs Byström seemed to have tightened up her vibrato a bit. Her upper range at full volume has a peculiarly unpleasant timbre, however, as in the case of many Scandinavian sopranos.

In the music of Ture Rangström, however, Bylström has few rivals, and she sings these pretty well. So the CD is valuable for this material, at least, and Solyom’s conducting continues to impress in these songs as well.

It isn’t often that I recommend a vocal recital CD for the conducting, but this is one those rare times. Bylström’s singing, though uneven, is at least interesting most of the time.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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The Lex Jasper Trio Plays Again

NOTES FROM THE NETHERLANDS / ARLEN-MERCER: Come Rain Or Come Shine. PORTER: Soon. JASPER: Sweet Seventy. ANDERSON: Serenata. STRAYHORN: Take The “A” Train. JASPER: Letter to Alissa. SCHERTZINGER-MERCER: Tangerine. JASPER: Song For Emil. LOESSER: On a Slow Boat To China. RONELL: Willow Weep For Me. WESTON-CAHN-STORDAHL: I Should Care. WOOD-MELLIN: My One and Only Love. McHUGH-FIELDS: Don’t Blame Me. HEFTI: The Odd Couple Theme / Lex Jasper, pno; Vincent Koning, gtr; Edwin Corzilius, bs / Challenge Records CR 73498

The Lex Jasper Trio, in various permutations, has been around since the 1970s but apparently only records intermittently. They last spate of seconds came around 1994, when they made three albums. In recent years, however, there have only been two: Happy Days Are Here Again from 2016, and this one.

One unnamed online critic has written that “This recording includes the important features required to make this piano, bass, guitar combination operate as smoothly as it should. They are all accomplished musicians who listen to each other, play to make each other sound as good as possible, they are sensitive to each other’s’ dynamic and intensity ranges, and you hear the joy they have while playing this music.” The thing that struck me, too, is how much this group sounds like some of Erroll Garner’s trios, which followed the same aesthetic. The entire rhythm section is “bound” in the same way that the best swing orchestra rhythm sections (Basie, Miller, Norvo and Hines) were bound together, with everything functioning as a unit rather than the every-man-for-himself aesthetic that we’ve had since the first Bill Evans Trio in the early 1960s.

Since I was not provided a CD back cover or liner notes—Challenge Records really is a chintzy little outfit—I had no idea who the guitarist in this trio was until I was informed by my media contact at Naxos. Neither their own website nor Allmusic.com has any personnel listing, so your guess is as good as mine. By and large, Jasper doesn’t do a lot with his piano; his playing is even less “busy” than that of Garner and many other pianists you can name; but the overall effect is so enjoyable that you just let it all soak in and enjoy the whole rather than the parts. Despite the strong traditional bias of his playing, however, Jasper does use some altered chord positions borrowed from the likes of Nat Cole, Garner and Bud Powell in his playing. The unnamed guitarist gets a few nice little solo peek-ins, but bassist Corzilius just sort of chugs along to help bind the rhythm feel with just a two-bar break until we hit Tangerine, where he all but takes over the number from the leader.

One of the most remarkable of all Jasper’s transformations is, oddly enough, Billy Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train, which he plays for half its length as a slow ballad before ramping up the tempo—yet never once does he touch the melody, and there is not only a nice guitar solo in this one but also a remarkable passage in which Jasper plays simultaneous single lines with both hands, just before slowing down the tempo yet again.

There are also some surprises here in the choice of repertoire. I can’t recall too many other jazz renditions of such songs as Leroy Anderson’s Serenata, Victor Schertzinger’s Tangerine or Frank Loesser’s On a Slow Boat to China, though all were big pop hits in the 1940s, yet Jasper does a fine job on all of them, particularly on Tangerine which can so easily sound like a piece of pop sludge. Slow Boat to China, by contrast, I’ve always liked for its tune construction with those rising chromatics in the chord sequence under the simple but attractive melody. An interesting tidbit about this song: it was the very last number recorded at the last 1947 studio session by the Kay Kyser Orchestra, trying to beat the deadline before another of Musicians’ Union chief James C. Petrillo’s recording bans took effect. They just sort of shoved it in as an afterthought, but when it was released the next year it took off like a comet, climbed the charts and stayed in the Top Ten for weeks, as well it should have. It’s one of the great yet lesser-known tunes in the Great American Songbook. Jasper’s arrangement alters the chord positions to the point where a certain amount of harmonic dissonance replaces the climbing chromatics. It’s an interesting take on the song, but between you and me, I liked Loesser’s original harmony better. By contrast, however, I did like Jasper’s reharmonization of Ann Ronell’s classic Willow Weep for Me, on which Koning gets an entire half-chorus solo.

By contrast with “A” Train, which was taken as a slow ballad, I Should Care, normally a ballad, is taken as a medium-uptempo number, with excellent results. And surprise of surprises, both the bass and guitar get solos on this one! Following each other, no less! Don’t Blame Me is also taken out of the ballad category by upping the tempo a bit. The latter tune also has, oddly, a George Shearing kind of feel to it.

The album wraps up with another oddity, The Odd Couple Theme written by Neal Hefti for the hit TV comedy show of the same name—yet another tune that one seldom hears played by jazz groups. Jasper elevates it quite a bit, particularly in his chord-laden improvisation in the second chorus.

A very interesting and enjoyable CD, then.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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One More from Barry Mills

ELAN VALLEY / MILLS: Elan Valley. Mandolin & Guitar Concerto.* Evening Rain – Sunset. Guitar Concerto.⁺ Mandolin Concerto / Daniel Ahlert, mand; *Birgit Schwab, ⁺Sam Brown, gtr; Moravian Philharmonic Orch.; Petr Vronsky, cond / Claudio Contemporary CC6040-2

This recording of Mills’ music breaks from the chamber music sequence to present some of his orchestral compositions. The style is not significantly changed, but the textures are more varied and thus more interesting. In Elan Valley, for instance, one hears fluctuating sounds played by the brass, probably using mutes, to create an unusual texture, and although he employs his normal use of chromatics and extended chords, he also leans more heavily, I think, on simpler, more tonal passages more often, perhaps taking a cue from Aaron Copland’s works of the 1940s. The vacillation between extended harmony and more tonal chords helps to vary the mood just as the richer sound palette helps to extend his musical dialect, so to speak. Around the six-minute mark, for instance, the sound “opens up” quite interestingly, and the ensuing bassoon solo has a strangely Slavic sound about it, which is then mixed into his “nature” sounds that follow.

By contrast, the Mandolin-Guitar Concerto, in four movements, presents faster, more complex and more tonally ambiguous lines, fast-moving in the first movement and complemented by strings and winds mirroring the guitar’s rapid eight-note motif, which then changes during the development section. This is a wonderful piece, one that could easily be programmed into any modern music concert and draw praise for its ingenuity and excellent construction. Mills sometimes has the guitar and mandolin playing rapid lines together, sometimes against one another, but always with the orchestra inserting its own commentary. In the second movement, titled “Serenade,” Mills also tosses in brief French horn and clarinet solos to add color as well as to add to the evolving theme. Yet even here, he has the mandolin and guitar play rapid lines to contrast with the lyrical ones, which continues into the third movement. This cat-and-mouse game between the two soloists, which never quite breaks out of fast repeated figures but does contain some variations on them, continues throughout the concerto, even when things calm down as in the last movement, “The Ever-Changing Sea.”

Evening Rain – Sunset is another of his evocative nature pieces, here using a repeated motif played by the muted trumpets (and, it sounds, trombone) while the lower strings rumble menacingly off and on underneath. A rising eight-note figure appears in the lower brass which is then echoed, slightly differently, by the strings before the tempo suddenly decreases and we hear a rocking figure played by the clarinet with French horn commentary underneath.

In the Guitar Concerto, Mills leans heavily on folk songs for his material. I don’t mind folk songs as such, but unless they’re harmonically interesting to begin with, as in the case of Magyar folk music, or harmonically altered as Benjamin Britten did, I just don’t respond to their use in classical music, and here Mills presents the folk songs fairly “straight,” merely scored for guitar with strings. Of course, if you like this sort of thing more than I do, you’ll surely enjoy this more than I did. I did, however, like those passages where Mills abandoned the folk tunes per se and inserted his own musical personality.

With the Mandolin Concerto we return to the Barry Mills style I admire most, stretching the tonality to produce unusual melodic lines and sonorities, except for the second movement, “My Singing Bird,” which is again based on a folk song. Interestingly, however, in this movement Mills not only has the mandolin play much like a banjo but, later on, does develop the music in more harmonically interesting directions. Overall, this was, for me, an excellent piece and a big improvement over the guitar concerto.

A generally excellent album, then, and one that bears careful listening for the wonderfully subtle things that Mills can do with an orchestra.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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The Chineke! Orchestra Presents “Spark Catchers”

E. WALLEN: Concerto Grosso.^2-4 J. WILSON: The Green Fuse.² D. KIDANE: Dream Song.¹ KENDALL: The Spark Catchers. P. HERBERT: Elegy – In Memoriam – Stephen Lawrence. J. JOSEPH: Carry That Sound / ¹Roderick Williams bar; ²Tai Murray vln; ³Chi-chi Nwanoku, bs; ⁴Isata Kanneh-Mason, pno; Chineke! Orch.; Anthony Parnther, Kevin John Edusei, Wayne Marshall, cond. / NMS D250

The Chineke! Foundation, created in 2015, gives up-and-coming black and minority ethnic composers career opportunities and a chance to establish themselves. Of course I have no objection to any composers of any race(s) having such opportunities, but in many cases the cream rises to the top regardless of the composer’s race, particularly nowadays as opposed to 40 or 50 years ago. One such case in point is Errollyn Wallen, whose Concerto Grosso leads off this CD. She and her music have been promoted pretty well in the past few years, and her work is, to my ears, both original and consistently excellent.

Although the publicity sheet accompanying this CD claims that Wallen’s piece pays homage to Bach and Corelli, it does so in her own unique way, using driving rhythms, repeated motifs using one to four notes, and a surprising way of breaking up the meter and suddenly assigning notes or motifs to the bass or the first violin as the music hurtles along. This first movement is almost a classical counterpart of those clockwork-intricate pieces that Gene Gifford wrote for the Casa Loma Orchestra way back in the early 1930s. As noted, the violin (Tai Murray), bass (Chi-chi Nwanoku) and piano (Isata Kanneh-Mason) are major players in this work, and the second movement opens with just the violin and bass playing as a duo before the piano enters around the two-minute mark to form a piano trio. At 3:56 the string section of the orchestra tentatively enters, then suddenly the music explodes in a riot of atonal sound before the piano and violin pull it back from the precipice. When the trio continues, the piano gives the music a bit of a jazz swagger, to which the violin eventually succumbs, but not the bass. The movement then suddenly stops dead in the middle of a phrase before the third begins, opening with the solo violin playing a Baroque-type phrase, joined by the other violins and then by the whole orchestra. Again, the piano adds a syncopated kick to the proceedings as the music develops. This, however, is the shortest movement of the four, and we soon find ourselves in the last movement where the violin swaggers jazz-like in a slowish tempo while the bass grumbles underneath, then the tempo picks up as the piano and orchestra enter the picture. The music ramps up in speed, hurtling forward in a very non-Baroque sort of way as Wallen continues to play around with meter and phrasing.

James Wilson’s The Green Fuse, inspired by Dylan Thomas’ poem The force that through the green fuse drives the flower and is a minimalist piece, well constructed but of no great interest until the slow middle section, where the music slows down and violinist Murray gets intermittent solos. Unfortunately, this section, too, gets bogged down in pointless repetition.

Daniel Kidane’s Dream Song, written for the reopening of Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2018, uses the words of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech sung by baritone Roderick Williams. Williams has a fine tone and somewhat decent diction, but his voice spreads a bit under pressure. The music is in the accepted “modern-edgy” style that seems to permeate the field nowadays, but Kidane does introduce a few original touches of his own, particularly the use of flutes playing harsh, edgy figures against stiff eighth-note figures played by the trumpets. This, like Dream Song, is a live performance and not a studio recording. Personally, however, I’m not sure why Kidane chose to make this piece so full of edgy angst. I well remember the original “I have a dream” speech when Dr. King delivered it. The mood was jubilant, not tense or edgy, as he voiced the hopes and dreams of the hundreds who had gathered to hear him. It was a moment of hope and triumph.

This is followed by Hannah Kendall’s The Spark Catchers, based on a poem by Lemn Sissay commissioned for London’s 2012 Olympics. This, too, is a sort of an edgy minimalist piece, but Kendall varies the beat placements just enough from bar to bar to hold the listener’s interest, wondering where the music will go next. She also slowly changes the tempo from fast to slow via a very gradual shift, later doubling it again with rapid clarinet figures playing around the ensemble. Philip Herbert’s Elegy – In Memoriam – Stephen Lawrence is a tribute to a man “murdered in a racist attack in London in 1999.” It is a well-written and very imaginative piece which avoids the sin of being mawkish in its expression. Its one fault is that it is too repetitive and goes on for too long.

We end with Julian Joseph’s Carry That Sound, a piece full of swirling strings and bitonal trumpet figures. The promo sheet for this CD claim that the music contains “elements of jazz and blues harmonies,” but these are so slight as to be almost negligible until the second half of the piece, and here the Chineke! Orchestra players are too stiff in rhythm to bring it off. Nonetheless, it is a fine piece, well constructed and, thankfully, having no social or political context. The ending is surprisingly original and, in fact, quite stunning.

Overall, then, a good CD of modern works by young composers, generally well played and sung by all.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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Delfeayo Marsalis Has a Jazz Party!

JAZZ PARTY / D. MARSALIS: Jazz Party.^2,4 Blackbird Special. 7th Ward Boogaloo. Raid on the Mingus House Party.¹ Mboya’s Midnight Cocktail⁶ (2 vers). So New Orleans.⁴ Dr. Hardgroove.³ Let Your Mind Be Free. Irish Whiskey Blues. Caribbean Second Line / Scott Frock, Andrew Baham, Dr. Brice Miller, John Gray, Michael Christie, tpt; Terrance Taplin, Delfeayo Marsalis, Christopher Butcher, T.J. Norris, tb; Gregory Agid, cl; Khari Allen Lee, a-sax/s-sax; Amari Ansari, a-sax; Roderick Paulin, t-sax; Scott Johnson, a-sax/t-sax; Roger Lewis, bar-sax; Trevarri Huff-Boone, t-sax/bar-sax; ¹Ryan Hanseler, Kyle Roussel, pno; ²Detroit Brooks, gtr; David Pulphus, bs; ¹Willie Green, ³Raymond Weber Jr., Joseph Dyson, Jr., dm/perc; ⁴Tonya Boyd-Cannon, ⁵Karen Livers, ⁶Dr. Bryce Miller, voc / Troubador Jass TJR083119

Ever since I bought my first Delfeayo Marsalis album back in the 1990s—it was on the RCA Novus label, a label that no longer exists as an independent company—I found myself drawn to his wonderful trombone style and his commitment to a more modern style of jazz than that of his older brother, Wynton.

This album is a departure for him, a program of what he terms “happy jazz.” He explains it this way:

I stopped at a local restaurant whilst wearing an Elvin Jones Jazz Machine t-shirt. An elderly gentleman approached me, inquiring excitedly, “Do you play jazz? I love jazz! What type of jazz do you play?” My response was simply, “Modern jazz.” Somewhere between disappointment and deflation came the muted admission, “Oh, I don’t like modern jazz. I only like happy jazz!” I pondered this statement for a while, then concluded that the traditional New Orleans and swing era songs were mostly in major keys and the prominent players interpreted them with a great deal of optimism.

But as one also steeped in the blues and the modern New Orleans beat, which in general means an R&B or Professor Longhair style, Delfeayo’s concept of “happy jazz” is not really the Swing Era style, as much as he may like it himself. It’s sort of a modified version of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the New Orleans aggregation that took the city, and the country, by storm back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s with an orchestrated funk-New Orleans beat. With that being said, Marsalis has made an effort here to keep his big-band arrangements neat and clean. A bit of funk is here, both in the ensemble and solo passages, but it’s not too overwhelming or overly complex. It is, as advertised, “happy jazz,” albeit happy jazz with some modern twists. A good example is Trevarri Huff-Boone’s baritone sax solo in Blackbird Special, which goes a bit more “outside” than, say, the “happy jazz” of the 1940s and ‘50s played by such groups as Sharkey Bonano and his Sharks of Rhythm or by Al Hirt in the ‘60s. And the beat in this track is indeed quite close to the kind of things the DDBB was doing in the early ‘90s.

7th Ward Boogaloo is one of the most Latin-sounding pieces on the album, with Delfeayo playing the opening melody on his trombone. Yet oddly, the leader doesn’t get many solos in this program; he turns most of them over to his talented sidemen, on this track tenor saxist Roderick Paulin before he himself does indeed return to play a solo of his own—at which point the beat is converted from a Latin beat to a straightahead swing. His tone and technique, including some nifty triple-tonguing, is as impeccable as always. I also liked the intricate sax section writing following his solo.

The opening tune of Raid on the Mingus House Party sounds for all the world like the Spider Man theme, scored in a Charles Mingus style. We then move into a different melody played by the saxes, and the band does indeed do a good job of sounding like a Mingus aggregation. Gregory Agid plays an interesting and, at times, gritty-sounding clarinet solo, followed by a chase chorus between Khari Allen Lee on alto and Scott Johnson on tenor, again with shades of Mingus’ own soloists with their emotional cries. This is the only track on the album on which Ryan Hanseler plays piano, and he makes the most of it in a good if not exceptional solo.

The only soloist on Mboya’s Midnight Cocktail is speaker Karen Livers in a pretty dumb, overtly sexual monologue. I could have lived without this one. So New Orleans returns us to a Professor Longhair/DDBB kind of groove, with trumpeter Bryce Miller doing the speaking. Again, it’s not particularly interesting. Dr. Hardgroove slows down the funk but keeps it present, thankfully without a superfluous narration. The tune isn’t particularly good or memorable, but there are nice solos here by Khari Allen Lee and Andrew Baham.

In Let Your Mind Be Free we finally return to some interesting jazz. The opening melody, played by trombonist T.J. Norris, reminds me of another tune but I just can’t put my finger on the title. Clarinetist Agid plays some counterpoint before the whole band enters and again changes the melodic line. The band sings the vocal on this one and we hear solos from Paulin, Norris and lead trumpeter Scott Frock. Irish Whiskey Blues again gives the leader a chance to shine, and this is a real swinger, somewhat in the Count Basie mold but with a New Orleans accent. This is a real showcase for the leader’s trombone, also including two choruses by saxist Scott Johnson.

The real closer on this CD is Caribbean Second Line, another funk/R&B-type tune. Some of the sax scoring in this one is pretty interesting, and we hear solos from soprano saxist Khari Lee, alto saxist Amari Ansari, and the band’s other three trombonists, Terrance Taplin, T.J. Norris and Christopher Butcher. We end with an instrumental version of Mboya’s Midnight Cocktail which I greatly preferred to the original.

A mixed bag, then; tracks 5-7 are kind of a waste of space, but the rest of it is quite good.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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The NYCGB Sings Modern Music

RAKASEKAR: Numbers. did you know. HARRIS: Not Been Found. Margaret. H. BAKER: Might Live Happy. Moments. J. WARD: I CANNOT GET TO MY LOVE… / National Youth Choir of Great Britain; Ben Parry, cond . NMS DL3038

The National Youth Choir of Great Britain has, according to the promo sheet accompanying this release, always promoted the music of modern composers. What a refreshing view in a classical music world tied so firmly to the old dead guys! And the very opening piece on this CD, Shruthi Rakasekar’s Numbers, is a perfect introduction to them. Set simply to the recitation of numbers, the text is virtually unimportant; all that matters is the composer’s highly rhythmic and imaginative setting of them to music that is polyphonic, alternately driving and lyrical. In fact, because it is merely a recitation of numbers, the listener can focus in on the music without having to worry about whether or not it matches the words. It’s an abstract exercise, and a very enjoyable one at that.

Lillie Harris’ Not Been Found, which follows the Rakasekar piece after a very short break, appears to be merely an a cappella exercise without many words; the only two I could make out were “old man” and “one hundred and five.” Once again, in the absence of any meaningful text, one focuses on the way she manages the polyphony and rhythm, in this case using a variety of meter and tempi to create an interesting sound pattern. The young singers in this choir are exceedingly good, their voices not only fresh-sounding but steady, attractive and well-blended.

This is followed by Harry Baker’s Might Live Happy, a slower, more lyrical and less energetic piece than the two preceding. This one does appear to have lyrics, but the words were so over-enunciated that they didn’t register in my ears as I listened. This is a fault with this chorus; they need to work on overall diction. All I could make out were “…in the woodland,” “voices” and “ring.” Yet it is a fine piece of music. Harris’ Margaret is another slow piece, and again the only word I could make out was that very name of Margaret.

Joanna Ward gets but one piece on this disc, the weird, slow-moving I CANNOT GET TO MY LOVE… in which she uses some unusual rhythmic devices to create a complex web of sound in which those words are repeated in various ways. There appears to be more text to this song but, again, without a booklet or liner notes I have no idea what they were singing (something about a “keer road”). But I liked the music very much indeed. We then return to Rakasekar with did you know, and here I could actually make out an entire sentence: “Did you know how they see us?” This piece is more lyrical and less contrapuntal than Numbers.

Baker’s Moments is a contrast to his earlier piece in that it is a faster-paced piece using short notes in contrapuntal figures. “We go go go” and “we pluck” were the only words I could extract from this one.

This was the last selection on this CD. As I say, mostly interesting music and good singing per se, but as a comedian once said, “The kid’s got lousy diction, Harry.”

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley

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