Huckleberry Duck’s Revenge: Raymond Scott Returns!

RAYMOND SCOTT REMINAGINED / Powerhouse. The Toy Trumpet. In an 18th-Century Drawing Room. Cutey and the Dragon. Huckleberry Duck. The Quintette Goes to a Dance. Yesterday’s Ice Cubes. Twilight in Turkey. Serenade (Raymond Scott). Spoken word tracks by Scott, composer John Williams and audio historian Art Shifrin / Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band: Wayne Bergeron, Daniel Fornero, Aason Janis, Dan Savant, tp; Andrew Martin, Charlie Morillas, Francisco Torres, tb; Craig Gosnell, bs-tb; Sal Lozano, a-sax; Brett McDonald, pic/cl/a-sax; Brian Scanlon, Thomas Luer, t-sax; Jay Mason, bar-sax; Justin Smith, Andy Waddell, gt; Meredith Clark, hp; Gordon Goodwin, pno/t-sax/arr; Wade Culbreath, mar/vib/xyl/cowbls; Kevin Axt, bs; Ray Brinker, dm; Don Williams, timp/tom-toms. Quartet San Francisco (Jeremy Cohen, Joseph Christianson, vln; Chad Kaltinger, vla; Andrés Vera, cel). Take Six, vocal group: Claude V. McKnight III, Mark Kibble, Joel Kibble, Dave Thomas, Alvin Chea, Khristian Dentley, voc / Violinjazz JCCD-110, also available for free streaming on YouTube & Spotify.

My thanks to jazz educator Miles Osland for hipping me to this album, which is clearly one of the most fun things I’ve reviewed in a long time.

It has always amazed me that certain musicians who were so much a part of our culture for so many years could be almost completely forgotten by later generations, but in the case of Harry Warnow, known professionally as Raymond Scott (1904-1998), I kind of understand it because after he sold the rights for his compositions to Warner Brothers in 1943, most of later generations’ exposure to him was second-hand, from the use of his compositions in cartoons. And let’s face it, cartoon music isn’t exactly taken seriously.

But that was really Scott’s problem from the very beginning. Perched on Occam’s razor between genius and madness, Scott turned out strange, quirky but happy little pieces based on jazz but containing no improvisations and then reinforcing their intent to merely entertain by giving them bizarre titles, as you can see in the header above. His records were immensely popular because they were catchy and fun to listen to, but in his heyday no jazz musicians took his work seriously. Drummer Art Blakey, hired to play some of Scott’s work, described the sheet music as simply looking like “fly shit on paper.” And most jazz musicians didn’t have the technique to play his rapid, difficult lines, any more than they could play the equally complex jazz charts of Don Redman, Bill Challis, Gene Gifford, Eddie Durham or John Kirby. The only instance of a jazz group recording a Scott piece I could find was Twilight in Turkey by Stuff Smith’s Onyx Club Boys.

Yet a gifted man he most certainly was, a 1931 graduate of Juilliard where he studied piano, theory and composition, and a pianist in the CBS Radio house band conducted by his older brother Mark Warnow. In late 1936 he formed his little band to play his offbeat scores. Although they were a sextet, Scott insisted on billing them as a “Quintette” because he thought that word sounded “crisper.” (He once told a reporter that “calling it a ‘sextet’ might get your mind off music.” I’m not sure why since, at that time, jazz sextets were extremely popular, particularly the one led by bassist John Kirby.) Despite banning improvisation, he called his music “descriptive jazz,” and although he was clearly score-literate, he never wrote out a single score (until after they were recorded) but just hummed the different themes to his musicians in rehearsal and then played them on the piano. How on earth you could hum the fast-paced, wacky themes he came up with is beyond me, but he did. He then recorded the rehearsals, listened to the records, and edited the scores by adding or deleting passages for the next rehearsal. He produced programs for Broadway Bandbox from 1942 to 1944 and, when his brother Mark died in 1949, succeeded him as music director at CBS for a few years, but spent the rest of his life as a free-lance inventor of musical devices. As Wikipedia put it:

In 1946, he established Manhattan Research, a division of Raymond Scott Enterprises. As well as designing audio devices for personal use, Manhattan Research provided customers with sales and service for a variety of devices, including components such as ring modulators, wave, tone, and envelope shapers, modulators, and filters. Of interest were the “keyboard theremin,” “chromatic electronic drum generators,” and “circle generators”. Scott described Manhattan Research as “More than a think factory—a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today.” Bob Moog, developer of the Moog Synthesizer, met Scott in the 1950s, designed circuits for him in the 1960s, and considered him an important influence.

Among other things, Scott was A&R director for Everest Records and helped to develop their highly advanced recording process that captured classical recordings on 35mm film sound rather than the more limited range of contemporary tape recorders. He also invented his own keyboard Theremin, called the Clavivox, and a machine called the Electronium that could instantaneously compose and perform music automatically using algorithms that were precursors of artificial intelligence. He used both instruments in composing music for TV shows and commercials, but also predated Steven Halperin by 30 years in creating electronically-produced soothing music, which he marketed for babies. Yet the greatest interest in the Electronium came from, of all people, Berry Gordy of Motown Records, who hired him in 1971 to be direction of electronic music for the company. Nothing much came of it, however, and Scott left in 1978.

What has this got to do with the music on this CD? In a sense, everything. Aldous Huxley once wrote a story called Young Archimedes about a young, poorly education Italian boy from a working class family who showed an intense interest in the music of J.S. Bach. At first the narrator of this story assumed that the boy was a musical genius, but as events proved, what interested him in Bach was that he was a mathematical genius. Some of the same was true of Raymond Scott. His fascination with music was in a sense algorithmic, which is why I alluded earlier to Occam’s razor. Scott always approached everything, composition as well as his scientific studies, using the smallest possible elements. This is perhaps one reason why, although he inspired the Moog synthesizer, he did not come up with it himself. It required more elements in its construction than probably appealed to him. His music, too, quirky as it is, is similarly constructed, the complex use of simple elements—sometimes so complex that they sounded funny to most people.

This new recording was the brainchild of Gordon Goodwin, leader of the popular and best-selling Big Phat Band as well as a writer of movie music. His goal was to score Scott’s music for his large orchestra, including a string quartet and, on two tracks, a vocal sextet. Goodwin’s expanded scores certainly fill out the music with a richness it never had originally; he adds inner voicings, countermelodies and all sorts of other devices which makes this complex music sound, well, more complex. And, though it may or may not win you over as great music, it’s surely a hell of a lot of fun.

The opener, Powerhouse, is a perfect example. After going through its original themes, Goodwin opens the floodgates to improvisation—first by one of the Quartet San Francisco’s violinists, then by one of his tenor saxists, before returning to the first theme for the ride-out. One of the interesting things about the way Warner Brothers (and later, John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame) used Scott’s music for their cartoons was as a background to scenes. Even by 1943, so many of Scott’s pieces were well known because the records were best-sellers that movie audiences didn’t have to be hit over the head with them. They were part of the daily musical environment of that time and didn’t need embellishment.

It’s hard to say whether or not Scott himself would be pleased with what Goodwin does here, but I tell you this: he sure as hell makes the music swing, even harder and looser than the original records. You’ve really got hear it to believe it. The wordless vocals of Take Six pop up on a couple of numbers. Personally, I thought they were a bit too much for In an 18th-Century Drawing Room, but you have to love the way Goodwin transferred the violin tremolos to the voices in one passage. No one but he—and, maybe, Raymond Scott—would ever have thought of such a thing.

Cutey and the Dragon is a previously unrecorded piece that Scott left unfinished. Goodwin finished it for him, and in terms of rhythmic feel it is the most “cartoony” of all the pieces on the album. Another violin solo (don’t know by which one; I didn’t have access to the booklet) swings like mad, followed by a neat electric guitar solo by Andy Waddell. It makes sense that since this piece was unfinished that it should have more improvised solos in it than the other pieces. At this point I think I should add that it was an inspired move on Goodwin’s part to include a string quartet in the instrumental mix. Not only do they add an excellent dimension to the scoring, in both obvious and subtle ways (once you hear the recordings you’ll understand), but the violin solos have a Stéphane Grappelli-like quality about them that suits music from this era.

Huckleberry Duck didn’t have to be expanded in orchestration from the original since it was recorded not by the Quintette  but by the big band that Scott formed in 1940, but here the emphasis is on the string quartet rather than the full brass-sax sections of the big band, and the quartet gives the piece a lighter touch than even on Scott’s original recording, as well as a certain Continental air. Perhaps they should have renamed the piece Huckleberry Canard au Jus. Judging from Scott’s own comments on the record, The Quintette Goes to a Dance was not a commercial recording but a demo record that was somehow played on the air at least once, so although it’s not a piece the Quintette didn’t record it’s a very rare one. Goodwin turns it into a real swinger; in his orchestration, it sounds like a precursor to the American Bandstand theme song of the 1950s and ‘60s, or perhaps even Doc Severinson’s Tonight Show theme. The second half is real powerhouse playing by the trumpet section plus another one of those Grappelli-inspired solos, in the course of which he quotes a bit of Powerhouse, followed by a trombone chase chorus.

I’m not sure where Yesterday’s Ice Cubes came from. It’s not a particularly strong piece by Scott’s standards, but it gets by. Here it sounds as if it’s being played by no more than eight or nine musicians, which brings it closer in feeling to Scott’s original band except for the inclusion of the strings. Twilight in Turkey was one of Scott’s Middle Eastern-inspired pieces (others were Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies and Egyptian Barn Dance) and clearly one of his most popular. Goodwin’s version is a shade slower than Scott’s original but retains the same quirky beat as well as, of course, solos not on the original record. The plunger-muted trumpet (Bergeron) is a real gem, adding a bit of Cootie Williams to Scott’s music. Goodwin’s rewriting of the piece in the penultimate chorus is absolutely brilliant as well.

The CD ends with a rare ballad by Scott, titled Serenade. Again, I’m not sure where this one came from. It’s much more of a conventional piece than any of the others on the disc, a ballad featuring the long lines of Adrés Vera’s cello against the lush wordless singing of Take Six. A surprisingly sentimental farewell to a man who was, by and large, cerebral and not sentimental at all. But it’s clearly an outstanding album.

I should mention that this isn’t the first tribute to Scott by a contemporary jazz group. The Stu Brown Sextet put out an album in 2009 called Twisted Toons based on Scott’s music, which is also an excellent album that, for some reason, flew under the radar in this country. The Brown Sextet also plays Scott’s music with tremendous élan and the right amount of swing, This CD includes many Scott compositions not on the Goodwin disc, to wit Square Dance for Eight Egyptian Mummies, Dark Drum, The Penguin, Suicide Cliff, Boy Scout in Switzerland, Egyptian Barn Dance, Hypnotist in Hawaii, The Bass Line Generator and The Toy Typewriter. Although  the Goodwin arrangements are more spectacular, I liked Brown’s version of 18th Century Drawing Room better because there’s no vocal in it. (Sorry, but I still think the addition of a vocal group was a mistake.) You can hear the Brown album in its entirely on Spotify, but I still recommend this new Goodwin album overall for its over-the-top arrangements, which I dearly loved, and its even more powerful swing.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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UK’s Latest Mega-Sax CD

STINK STANK FUNK! 4.0 / Conversation (Bobby Watson). Some Skunk Funk (Randy Brecker). Deep Phat (Greg Yasinitsky). Greensleeves Fantasy (Rick Hirsch). H is for Hottentotte (Jim Ogden). Luminescence (Rick Hirsch). New Kid in Town (Larry Nelson). Hey There (Derek Brown). Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’ (Andy Weiner). The Missing Piece (Miguel Zenón). Hiatus (Mike Mower) / University of Kentucky Mega-Sax Ensemble: Nick Foster, s-sax/a-sax; Will Baumann, a-sax; Dalton Stanland, a-sax/t-sax; Trevor Wheatley (first 5 tracks), Trevor Bowling (last 6 tracks), t-sax; Hiroshi Hunter, bar-sax; Miles Osland, dir / Mark Records 57045-MCD

Multi-instrumentalist and reed virtuoso Miles Osland (with help from his wonderful wife Lisa) has been director of jazz studies at the University of Kentucky for what feels like forever, graduating top-level musicians in virtually every class he teaches, and once every few years he gathers his forces—all reed players, and without a rhythm section—to record their best efforts. The album series takes its strange name from the first release, We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Rhythm Section (1996), to produce various “stinkin’” sequels. This one, as you can see, is 4.0, though it is actually their eighth CD (Stinkin’ 3.0 was released in 2017—almost an eon ago for Miles’ bands!).

Although they occasionally play with some nuance, for the most part this music isn’t subtle. It’s emotionally powerful, hot jazz that really cooks, based largely on the kind of bands that were around from the late 1960s through the early ‘90s. You won’t find any tender, soft-grained “ambient jazz” here, thank goodness. This is in-your-face music, and they always sound as if they’re having a ball playing it.

More interestingly, to me at least, is the fact that these young players all improvise with a strong sense of musical construction. Just occasionally, I wish one of them would cut loose with the kind of wild abandon one hears from, say, Noah Preminger, a little less formal and more loose-jointed rhythmically, but for the most part this is jazz that satisfies musically as well as thrills. I’ve harped long enough about how too many current jazz musicians seem to have no idea how to structure a jazz solo so that what emerges is musically coherent, but Miles, like the late David Baker at IU, stresses musical structure to his pupils as strongly as the need to communicate one’s feelings. Thus, after a hard-boiled opening ensemble, Conversation is just that, an excellent exchange of musical ideas based on solid musical principles as laid down decades ago by such masters as Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. and the band carries this into Randy Brecker’s Some Skunk Funk. The only drawback, to me, was that the tempos and basic melodic lines of these first two pieces sounded a bit too much alike, but taken individually they are excellent performances.

I especially liked Greg Yasinitsky’s Deep Phat, a slow but insinuously swinging piece, and it si here, oddly enough, where my ear could almost hear a rhythm section playing behind the band. In fact, there’s almost a late-Ellington vibe about this track that especially appealed to me, and Dalton Stanland’s tenor solo is simply marvelous—although the only solo on this track, which I found a bit odd considering that it lasts nearly five minutes. Then, suddenly, we’re in Third Stream land with Rick Hirsch’s superb rewriting of that overworked chestnut, Greensleeves, the tempo increased, the uneven meter turned upside down, and the basic melody completely rewritten so that only the last part of the theme actually sounds like Greensleeves. In addition to another excellent Stanland solo, there’s a nice chorus featuring two saxes playing opposing figures against one another before coming together. H is for Hottentot is a bluesy piece, somewhat in the “hard bop” style of the late 1950s-early ‘60s. Stanland is again the featured soloists—apparently, he’s the star of Osland’s most recent crop of musicians—but here he plays alto. His second chorus, played a cappella, goes into double-time and is really a little (impromptu) composition in itself, ending with a Latin beat to which his sax is joined by two or three others playing polyphonically. This becomes louder and more complex until the whole band is involved, hang-gliding their way to the finish line.

Rich Hirsch, who wrote the fabulous arrangement of Greensleeves, also contributes an original, Luminescence. This is more in ballad tempo and, although I’m normally no fan of jazz ballads, this one is, happily, a very interesting and resolutely unsentimental piece which moves from its ensemble opening into a bit of a canon with the saxes moving in and around each other in a nimble musical dance. Again, this is more of a Third Stream piece, most of the music being pre-written, but a fascinating one. The second half has more of a jazz kick to the beat as Hirsch takes the music into different territory than where we started.

New Kid in Town is a very complex, uptempo Third Stream blues written by Larry Nelson, Miles Osland’s counterpart at Eastern Kentucky University. But have no fears, there is a connection, since Nelson received both his Masters and Doctorate in music at UK, and was one of the founding members of the Osland Saxophone Quartet. This piece is one of those rarities, a 16-measure blues rather than the more common 12, and as the piece develops Nelson complicates things still further with madly shifting stress beats within each measure, not to mention more outstanding polyphonic writing.

Derek Brown’s Hey There opens up with some fast, double-time flurries by the saxes before settling into a fairly simple tune with a nice funky beat. It almost sounds like a jazz folk song if you can imagine such a thing. Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’ is an uptempo blues in the more conventional 12-bar format, but fast-paced and really swinging. Once again, the focus is more on ensemble than solo playing, but how wonderfully adroit these UK are! It’s also the shortest piece on the CD at just 2:07, but is followed by the longest, The Missing Piece, a wonderfully moody composition by one of my favorite living jazz composers, Miguel Zenón. For a change, the soloist is not Stanland but Nick Foster on alto, and an excellent solo it is.

The album wraps up with Hiatus by Mike Mower, a British jazz composer who has contributed several pieces to the UK “Stink” band’s books over the years. This is yet another strong piece, both in terms of its musical structure and its driving rhythms, a very complex piece on an entirely different level from the two pieces that opened this album. My overall impression of this album, then, is quite different from what I (and other listeners) may assume from the cover and the opening tracks. It’s not nearly as heavy on the funk element as advertised, but it is much better than that, with the extraordinarily complex and complicated Hiatus being simply the climax to an absolutely outstanding album. Never underestimate Miles Osland’s taste or his influence on these young musicians and all those who preceded them. The Midwest seldom garners the acclaim it deserves for proselytizing jazz, but both Osland and Jamey Aebersold, the legendary jazz saxophonist-educator from Indiana, have done as much if not more to encourage not only a knowledge of jazz but a love of it for several decades.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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The Emerson Quartet Bids Goodbye

HINDEMITH: Melancholie. BERG: String Quartet. CHAUSSON: Chanson perpetuelle.* SCHOENBERG: String Quartet No. 2 / Barbara Hannigan, sop; *Bertrand Chamayou, pno; Emerson String Qrt: Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, vln; Lawrence Dutton, vla; Paul Watkins, cel / Alpha 1000

In the booklet for this CD, the Emerson Quartet states that this is their last-ever recording, but although they stop short of saying that they’re disbanding, that is the implication. I always enjoyed, in the old days, hearing the Emerson Quartet on the radio, but I never acquired any of their albums until they recorded the Schumann String Quartets for Pentatone, and they are fabulous performances.

Although most of the pieces on this CD were indeed written during the 20th century and therefore quality as “modern,” it will be noted that most of these works are still quite old by today’s standards—older than if a string quartet of the early 1920s were playing Brahms. Still, I very much wanted to review this CD because it features one of my favorite active sopranos, Barbara Hannigan, for whom my enthusiasm knows no bounds, and except for the Berg quartet and the first two movements of the Schoenberg, she sings on the entire CD.

Since the liner notes tell us that Hannigan and the Emerson Quartet have performed in person prior to this studio session, it is not a case of her simply making a one-time guest appearance just for the sake of a recording. This can be felt in the easy rapport they have with one another and, yes, this does make a difference in the overall quality of the performance. When you are used to working with a specific group in a live setting, you establish a bond that lingers in the mind and can easily carry over a few years later into the performances given here.

The most unusual piece on this disc is Paul Hindemith’s Melancholie, completed in 1919. There are two other recording of the complete set of four songs, the first by mezzo-soprano Susan Narucki with the Ciompi Quartet on Albany TROY603 (2003) and the second by mezzo Barbara Hofling with the Helian Quartet on Dreyer Gaido DGCD21092 (2015), but it is still a fairly rare work both in live performance and the recording studio. The Chausson Chanson perpetuelle dates from 1898.

Comparing the Hannigan-Emerson performance of Melancholie to the other two is quite interesting. Narucki and the Ciompi Quartet perform it in a straightforward, almost clipped fashion, with almost stiff, march-like rhythms, whereas Hofling and the Helian Quartet allow the music a bit of “give” and relaxation which, if you listen to Paul Hindemith’s own recordings of his quartets from the early electrical recording era, is closer to his style. The third song, “Dunkler Trople,” is particularly interesting due to its slow, almost melancholy melodic line and the very sparse quartet writing, often using just one instrument at a time or, at most, two, with the cello playing a plucked moto perpetuo while each of the other three instruments seem to take their turns playing above it. The text, too, is dark, reflecting Hindemith’s experiences as a soldier in World War I: “Dark drop, dark drop, falling today into my cup, into the cup of life, dark drop of death – Do you want to cloud my clear wine as I drink myself weary? Weary – weary – out of this life.”

The Emerson Quartet takes it at a tempo closer to that of Helian, but with a clearer, brighter sound timbre similar to Ciompi. Hannigan, as may be expected, gets deep into the lyrics as Hofling does, but with a better voice. I’ve long been impressed by the fact that, although Hannigan sings modern music most of the time, her voice has always had a sensual, beautiful vibrato, similar to that of the late Arleen Augér. Also, considering how long she’s been singing (since 1988, when she was only 17 years old), she takes superb care of her voice. It sounds just as fresh, bright and firm today as it did when she first arrived on the scene. And her diction is always clear regardless of what language she’s singing in. Thus I cannot and will not accept the excuses of the many modern opera singers who have infirm, wobbly and poorly placed voices as well as poor diction. In short, this is the performance of Melancholie on records. The way they perform it, it sounds eerily like a lost composition of Mahler’s.

Compared to the late-Romantic effusion of young Hindemith, the Berg string quartet almost has the effect of a splash of cold water in one’s face, yet if one really listens to its musical progression  it is not so far off the mark as it seems at first. It is only the harmony that unbalances the unadventurous listener because all of the chords seem to be “transitional” ones, i.e., the sort of chords an earlier composer would use to transition from one theme to another. In addition, Berg almost never gives the “root note” in any of them, which gives the listener the feeling that none of the music is ever resolved in a conventional manner. But even here, the Emerson Quartet plays with an intensity and emotion that at times is almost overwhelming: note, for instance, the explosion in the middle of the first movement. In addition, they manage to pull all the various threads of the music together in a way that creates a continuous “line” from start to finish in each movement. This is art at its highest level of achievement.

I’m not sure that placing the Chausson piece between Berg and Schoenberg was such a good idea—it might better have come right after the Hindemith set—but once again Hannigan is superb. Since neither the piano nor the string quartet parts are much more than accompaniment, it was, I think, quite generous of Emerson to include what is essentially a soprano showcase on this CD. It is beautifully sung and played, however.

Our musical journey ends with Schoenberg’s second String Quartet, the first I know of to include a singer. Written in 1907-08, it is in his “mid-period” style, halfway between Verklärte Nacht and the first half of Gurre-Lieder and his later, Pierrot Lunaire style. The soprano only appears in the last two movements, but Hannigan makes the most of it, projecting both the music and its emotional meaning with startling passion. It is a worthy finale to a nearly impeccable album.

Despite the stylistic differences of the various pieces, this recording is as near a mystical experience as you are going to get. I was hooked from first note to last. Highly recommended.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Perelman and Moran are “Tuning Forks”

PERELMAN-MORAN: Gregorian. Pythagorean. Tesia. Schumann. Fibonacci. Rife / Ivo Perelman, t-sax; Matt Moran, vib / Ibeji Records, no number (available for ourchase or streaming on Bandcamp)

In the course of Ivo Perelman’s long career on and off records (but mostly, it seems to me, on, since he tends to release a new album every six weeks or so), there have been a few albums that rank as special and mesmerizing from start to finish. Fruition with pianist Matthew Shipp was clearly one of these, and so too, for me at least, is this new incarnation with vibes player Matt Moran.

Perelman explained to me that he

rescued my label Ibeji (which released Soccer Land and Tapebas Songs in the 90s) in the digital format of Bandcamp. This way I will launch from time to time some special projects than other labels will not. This duo with Matt Moran comes after a period of studies of the tuning fork and its acoustics and therapeutic tools  (see photo). That’s why you will hear in this recording a different timbre from my sax, penetrating and with richer harmonic sounds resulting from a vibrational hyper-absorption recently provided by these studies The vibraphone and the way Matt Moran plays it is very similar to what tuning forks provide.

It is thus not accidental or coincidental that many of these pieces are named after musical genres (Gregorian), methods of tuning (Pythagorean) or numerical sequences (Fibonacci). Perhaps most surprising, to me at least, is the one named after Robert Schumann. Even though I am aware that Ivo has a classical background, his jazz playing is so outré and has been so for so long that I would have thought his connection to classical music had been severed, perhaps not in his listening habits but surely in his methods of improvising. (Fore those who are wondering, Tesia is a Greek work meaning “late summer.” “Rife” is self-explanatory in English.)

Perelman starts off Gregorian with a rhythmic figure that becomes a motif, and although he produces a few high-register squeals, they are moderate and less important than his interaction with Moran, whose vibes stay mostly in the middle of the instrument’s range. Te basic calming influence of Moran has a salutary effect on Perelman, not only in this track but also in the ones that follow. For the first time in my experience Perelman’s figures, especially around the 2:30 mark, are actually playful, a nice quality that I didn’t know he possessed. He later indulges in some fast double-time figures that run up and down the scale, yet never conflicts too strongly with the vibes, which play a supporting role here but also have a calming effect. At 4:40 Perelman suddenly begins playing very softly and deep in his lowest register, a nice touch that, again, I hadn’t heard from him in other recordings. Towards the end he returns to the high range, but more to play plaintive appeals than to engender hysteria.

If anything, the mood in Pythagorean is even mellower, with Perelman playing actual melodic lines. For the most part, Moran sticks to a series of chords and isolated solo notes, creating an environment for Perelman to play in rather that goading him into more aggressive competition, and this serves both of them well. Moran gets to solo in this one, and it’s a good solo, bt by and large he acts like musical Ritalin for Perelman’s tendency towards hyper-excitement.

Tesia is a fast track, and here Perelman lives in his overblown high range, yet the figures he produces still make sense and add to Moran’s equally busy vibes. It’s actually a duo-improvisation rather than a chase chorus.

Schumann has nothing to do with the music of that German master; in fact, it is the most abstract piece on the album, yet it still has a relaxed feel. Here, Moran mostly plays chords, sounding like a glass harmonica, while Perelman creates a sparse yet delicate filigree around him. And so the performances go, always surprising, always original and all showing a slightly different aspect of Perlman’s musical personality. In such and environment, it’s easy to take Moran for granted, but working as a stabilizing force for Pereereman he performs an immense service.

Since every track works towards a unity of style, in which the twp instrument complement each other, there are no weak tracks or superfluous moments. Every note and phrase seems to have its place in this musical cocktail without one instrument or the other drowning out either participant. My sole regret was that the CD is very short, less than 40 minutes, but I assure you that every single moment has its high points.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Cowie’s “Where the Wood Thrush Sings”

COWIE: Book I: American Fish Crow; Wood Thrush; Eastern Meadowlark; Common Loon; Belted Kingfisher; American Winter Wren. Book 2: Broad tailed and Blue throated Hummingbirds; White Winged Dove; Common Nighthawk; Great Roadrunner; Least Bittern; Great Horned Owl. Book 3: Blue Jay; Mockingbird; Yellow Crowned Night Heron; Northern Goshawk; Say’s Phoebe; Red Winged Blackbird. Book 4: Northern Cardinal; Virginia Rail; Turkey Vultures; Yellow Breasted Chat; Horned Lark; Bald Eagle / Anna Hashimoto, cl; Roderick Chadwick, pno / Métier MEX 77104

Edward Cowie is one of the most instinctively and naturally talented people I know of. We now have a pleasant interaction occasionally on Facebook, but only because I started from a position of being in awe of his music in earlier reviews and he has responded to those kindly and modestly. In addition to being, as he is known in his native England, the finest living composer who bases his music on the sounds of nature, he is also an extraordinarily gifted and natural visual artist who has graced the otherwise vapid content of that social media site. Below are two examples, one the last page of this album’s booklet and the other one of his many public posts of what he refers to as quick doodles that he sketches out in just a few minutes:

Incidentally, the artwork on the cover of this album was made by his wife, who is also a talented artist. In this new collection, his musical sketches concentrate on aural impressions of American birds, which for me, at least, is good because I’ve seen many of them in real life. (And believe me, sometimes I wish we could get rid of the blue jays in my neighborhood because they are the NOISIEST damn birds in the world!)

Delicately scored for just two instruments, this music typifies Cowie’s approach. His music is tonal and consonant when the bird calls he is emulating are so, but as we all know, birds do not follow the well-tempered tonal system so they are often quite outré harmonically. His portrait of the American Fish Crow which opens this album is a typical mixture of tonal and atonal, simply by following the utterances of this bird. It is to her credit that clarinetist Anna Hashimoto really gets into the spirit of the music, doing her best to make her instrument “speak” like a bird, which is amazing when you realize that she is an urban woman who has lived her entire life in London. Pianist Roderick Chadwick also does his best to get into the spirit of this music. As he put it in the liner notes:

being good at musical detail and the big picture) included performing three musical lines at once – a melody and two rhythms – and Anna was renowned for her ability to do these often without fault. This, allied with her questing mind when it came to exploring new repertoire and new sounds, and her generosity, focus and calm in the recording studio, made her an ideal partner for setting down this latest 24…

It was no surprise that, at the first rehearsal, our ‘inner metronomes’ were well in sync. If anything it became a matter of loosening the laces of the ensemble because, as Ted Hughes put it in ‘Pibroch’: This is neither a bad variant nor a tryout. Nature doesn’t rehearse.

Trying to describe this music in words produces, for me at least, a paralyzing effect. The closest I can come is to urge the reader to listen to some of Olivier Messiaen’s bird music, and he wrote a great deal of it because he considered birds to be almost mystical creatures, closer to the God of creation than humans. I don’t know if Edward feels the same way, but his ear is as keen as his skill in painting with watercolors (I speak from personal experience, one of the most difficult mediums to work in), and the end result is simply mesmerizing.

Another thing that struck me is that, if you simply put the recording on, sit back and take it all in without checking things, these various bird call imitations blend into one another. Of course this wouldn’t be possible if one were listening to tapes of the actual birds, since each one makes its own distinctive sound, but as transferred to the clarinet (Anna mostly plays the Eb instrument because she feels it has the greatest range of expression) the only clue one has of a “change of bird” are the luftpausen between tracks. Although this is a 2-CD set, the playing time is just seven minute too long to fit onto one CD, running a shade over 89 minutes, so it’s not a terribly long journey through the panorama of American birds. Chadwick, as I say, also does his best, but since bird calls are a vocal sound and the piano is not an instrument that can simulate vocal sounds of any kind, he has a natural barrier between him and his intent. (The same thing is true in Messiaen’s piano music; being a percussion instrument, the piano can only do so much, although a few isolated geniuses like Paderewski, Cortot and George Shearing could get more out of a piano’s sound than anyone else.)

I was a bit surprised when Hashimoto simply blew air through her instrument in various places during her performance of “Broad tailed and Blue throated humming birds,” but to be honest, hummingbirds are rather rare in my neighborhood and so I very rarely see them—and almost never hear them, so I’ll take Cowie’s word for it. Then, during the course of “White Winged Dove,” Chadwick knocks around the inside of the piano frame. It’s all quite mesmerizing in its own low-key way. And I can assure you that Cowie captured the sounds of the Blue Jay. Mockingbird and Northern Cardinal exactly right. I’ve never seen or heard a Northern Goshawk, but this bird apparently has a very atonal and syncopated call to judge by the music, particularly the piano part which is the most rhythmically active in the set.

In a way, however—and this is hard to put into words—this is music that I liked hearing once, in the moment, as if I were attending it in a concert hall, the same way I would enjoy hearing the actual birds themselves, but not the kind of music I would listen to again for a year or two. Perhaps Cowie did his job too well, reproducing the sounds of these birds so well that they will surely appeal to those who do not hear most of them on a daily basis but not to those who do. As a tour-de-force for the musicians involved, however, I highly recommend it. I don’t think it is possible to sound as much like birds captured in the sheet music any better that Hashimoto has done.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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The Buselli/Wallarab Jazz Orchestra’s Tribute to Gennett Records

WALLARAB: The Gennett Suite: Mvt 1, based on Tin Roof Blues (Mares-Roppolo-Brunies-Stitzel); Chimes Blues (Joe “King” Oliver); Dippermouth Blues (Oliver-Armstrong). Mvt 2, based on Davenport Blues (Beiderbecke); Jazz Me Blues (Tom Delaney); Wolverine Blues (Morton). Mvt 3, based on Star Dust (Carmichael-Parish), Riverboat Shuffle (Carmichael). Mvt 4, based on King Porter Stomp (Morton), Grandpa’s Spells (Morton) / Buselli/Wallarab Jazz Orch.: Clark Hunt, Jeff Conrad, Scott Belck, Mark Buselli, John Raymond, Jeff Parker, tp; Tim Coffman, Andrew Danforth, Demondrae Thurman, tb; Rich Dole, bs-tb; Greg Ward, s-sax/a-sax; Amanda Gardier, a-sax; Tom Walsh, fl/t-sax; Todd Williams, t-sax; Ned Boyd, bar-sax; Luke Gillespie, pno; Jeremy Allen, bs; Sean Dobbins, dm; Brent Wallarab, cond/arr / Patois Records, no number

This rather unusual album consists of a “suite” in four parts based on some of the early jazz recordings made by the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana under the label name of Gennett Records. These recordings have taken on mythic proportions over the decades because they were the first representation on discs of some of the major jazz musicians of their time: the New Orleans Rhythm Kings with cornetist Paul Mares, trombonist George Brunies and one of the most advanced jazz musicians of that time, clarinetist Leon Roppolo; King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which featured the great clarinetist Johnny Dodds, often overlooked because they were also the first recordings by Louis Armstrong; The Wolverines Orchestra of Chicago, which featured the remarkable cornetist Bix Beiderbecke; the great New Orleans pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton, who made his first piano solos for that company as well as a couple of sides as guest pianist with the N.O.R.K.; and, in their view, pianist-composer Hoagy Carmichael, here focusing on just two of his compositions, Riverboat Shuffle (originally titled Free Wheeling but retitled when the Wolverines and Bix recorded it) and his evergreen Star Dust.

If one digs into the history of Gennett Records, however, one will find far less romance and much more incompetence, perhaps not surprising for a tiny label produced as a sideline by a piano manufacturer. I gave some detail about the company in my 2001 book, Spinning the Record, which can be read or downloaded for free by clicking HERE:

In 1915 the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana decided to start producing phonographs and records, which were slowly replacing sheet music and player piano rolls as the preferred format for popular music. They established a division to produce discs in 1916, then constructed a recording studio in New York and began manufacturing their own phonographs. Their early records featured a green Starr label. In 1917 the company erected a building near their Whitewater Gorge factory complex devoted to the manufacture of phonographs and records. In 1917 they replaced the Starr label with one called Gennett after the surname of Starr’s four Gennett brothers, Henry, Fred, Harry and Clarence, who were the company’s principal executives.

There was absolutely nothing that was interesting or distinguished about Gennett records. Their sound was dull and dead, even by the standards of their time; one of the jazz musicians who later recorded for them said that it amazed him how music that sounded so alive and vibrant when played in the recording studio could sound D.O.A. on the very first playback. The early Gennett labels were likewise dull and plain, and their roster of artists ranked dead last among contemporary American labels. But in the early months of 1919, Starr converted to lateral recording; for several months, Gennett discs were offered in both formats before the vertical cut was finally abandoned in the summer of 1919. Starr’s announcement that it was producing lateral discs, made in the Talking Machine World for March 15, 1919, triggered a lawsuit by the Victor Talking Machine Company (Victor Talking Machine Co. v. Starr Piano Co., 263 F. 82) in which Victor alleged that Starr had infringed Eldridge Johnson’s patent #896,059.

Why Victor went after Gennett, with its insignificant roster of artists, when it had ignored Odeon with its much finer stock for years, remains a mystery. Speculation has it that they didn’t mind a foreign label infringing on their patent, but the announcement in the U.S. industry’s chief business organ—something Odeon had never bothered to do—made their violation of Johnson’s patent much more flagrantly obvious and, since Gennett refused to pay the licensing fee for the Johnson patent, they had to be publicly defeated. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

The Victor lawsuit didn’t go well even from the very beginning. The crux of the matter, it seemed, was that Starr claimed the invention of its own system of lateral-cut recordings, different from that of Johnson’s. They presented their case in court via photographs and films of their recording and mastering process in action—the first time that film was allowed as testimony in a court case. Emboldened by Victor’s first defeat in court, other small American labels either sprung up anew or converted to lateral-cut discs using the Gennett process by mid-1920. Victor was in serious trouble now. They asked rivals Columbia and Compo, a Berliner offshoot, to join them in pursuing the suit to higher courts. At each level, the Victor alliance was defeated. Their final defeat came in 1922 when the Supreme Court ruled that the Eldridge Johnson patent was only valid insofar as Johnson’s system—now a quarter-century outdated—was concerned.

Victor lost hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing their suit against Starr/Gennett. But even more importantly, Starr’s victory ensured that even the humblest rival label could now compete with them on their own terms, namely the lateral-cut record.

In the early 1920s, still pursuing their lawsuit despite numerous rejections in court, Victor dragged Columbia Records into the fray, but Columbia didn’t have as deep pockets as Victor did so they had to turn to their British affiliate to take charge of their pressing costs to keep them afloat. The ironic thing about all this is that, if Victor and Columbia hadn’t been so stubborn about fighting Gennett, one of them may have been the label that recorded all of these jazz folks who were creating a sensation in the Chicago area, which means that Gennett wouldn’t have had them at all.

Not only were Gennett Records dull and dead-sounding—the musicians who hade them used to joke that what into the recording horn sounded alive and vibrant, but what came out on the records sounded dead and embalmed—but their distribution methods were so poorly organized that most jazz fans on the East Coast either didn’t know they existed or couldn’t get hold of them when they found out that they did. To “help” their distribution, Gennett licensed their masters to other small labels on the East Coast, like Claxtonola. but in doing so Claxtonola gave the bands pseudonyms that didn’t even resemble the names of the real bands (the Wolverines became “The Jazz Harmonizers”), thus many collectors simply ignored them.

And in addition to all this, the owners of Starr/Gennett were, like most white businessmen of their day, horrible racist. When the Oliver band came to town, they were forced to stay at a dilapidated shanty of a hotel on the outskirts of Richmond (a small enough town to begin with…I visited there twice in the 1980s, and even saw a faded Gennett Records logo and advertisement on the side of an old brick building). Armstrong, Dodds and Lil Hardin objected strenuously to this, but Oliver, a “nice” old Southern black man who was used to such treatment, refused to complain. When the N.O.R.K. brought Morton, a Creole, with them to Richmond in 1923 to make their records together, they told the Gennett brass that he was a Mexican, and Jelly knew just enough Spanish to fake it, so he got to stay in the white hotel. FYI, Gennett also pressed special records for the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan—with white labels, of course!

So in a way, the romance of Gennett records is largely a phony mystique built up by collectors. Musicians hated making records for them, but since the only labels in Chicago that recorded jazz at the time were Victor and OKeh, and both took a while to realize that there was a difference between peppy ragtime music (as played by the Benson Orchestra of Chicago and Paul Whiteman) and real jazz, it really wasn’t until late 1924-early 1925 that Victor started recording the real thing.

Composer-arranger-conductor Brent Wallarab has largely transformed the original tunes recorded by these early musicians into something entirely new, played in a style that resembles some of the best progressive jazz orchestras of the late 1950s-early ‘60s (the Marty Paich Dektette, the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra). Tin Roof Blues, for instance, is slowed way down, its initial theme played by the baritone saxophone, an instrument not even used in early jazz. (Harry Carney of the Duke Ellington Orchestra was the first jazz baritone sax soloist I can trace.) The style of the improvisations also have that progressive 1950s jazz vibe about them; Ned Boyd’s baritone sounds a good deal like Pepper Adams in both timbre and style, not a bad thing. Following his long peroration , Wallarab completely changes the meter of Tin Roof and ups the tempo, assigning it to a trumpet choir, first muted and then open, with counter-figures played by the trombones. When the latter take over, there is a key change, then we move into a tenor solo by Tom Walsh that sounds very modern indeed. I loved it, but I can tell you right now that the members of the Rhythm Kings would have recoiled in horror. (Not only jazz critics, but jazz musicians who were raised on the jazz of the late 1920s through the mid-1940s, detested the changes that jazz underwent in the 1950s, the only exceptions being surrealists like Henry “Red” Allen and Pee Wee Russell.) And if you think Tin Roof Blues is changed around, wait until you hear Wallarab’s reimagining of Oliver’s Chimes Blues, although this one does include a stop-time chorus behind a nice soprano sax solo by Greg Ward. Mark Buselli’s trumpet solo tries to capture some of the flavor of the times by using a plunger mute, and he does a fairly good job of it although Oliver’s own “freak” muted sounds went much further than anything Buselli accomplishes here. (Wynton Marsalis is, in my experience, the only modern-day trumpeter who does a good job of emulating some of Oliver’s freak sounds.) This first movement ends with a rewrite of the famous Dippermouth Blues that sounds like an arrangement by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Andrew Danforth plays a stunning trombone solo that flirts with the overtone series in a couple of bars, but by and large sounds like Jimmy Knepper (not a bad comparison).

In the second movement Wallarab conflates the only original piece that Beiderbecke wrote and recorded for Gennett, Davenport Blues (really just an ordinary jazz tune with nothing special about it) with Tom Delaney’s Jazz Me Blues which he recorded with the Wolverines, with a piece Bix never played, Jelly Roll Morton’s Wolverine Blues. It’s an imaginative mixture treated in an imaginative manner, starting out with Bix’s little tune played just by flugelhorn (instead of cornet) and piano, then moving into a rich mixture of low trombone chords before the arrangement opens up with muted trumpets and reeds joining in the background scoring. His arrangement actually makes something more interesting of the piece than Beiderbecke’s original recording, particularly when the key changes arrive and the scoring becomes more complex, almost Gil Evans-ish. A clarinet plays the lead melody with embellishments while a brass and reed mixture plays behind him, including some boppish figures guaranteed to give heart attacks to the annual attendees of the “Bix Fest” in Davenport, Iowa. The improvised solo by Mark Buselli closer resembles Clark Terry than Beiderbecke, but it’s a very good one. (Ralph Berton used to tell me that Chet Baker was the latter-day equivalent of Bix, but Baker never played any of Bix’s tunes and no one I’ve ever heard has tried to do an update on Bix’s music using Baker’s style.)

The transition into Jazz Me blues is well done but just a bit jarring since the two tunes are played in entirely different tempi. Wallarab adds a couple of beats to the last measure in each two-bar section of the original tune, at least at first, before moving into a scored ensemble improvisation with some interesting counterpoint. At first, Amanda Gardier’s alto sax solo seems a bit out of place rhythmically, but in her second chorus the rhythm section comes in strong behind her, particularly bassist Jeremy Allen who really kicks up a swinging beat. Luke Gillespie’s piano solo is also quite excellent, Scott Belck’s trumpet solo more Dizzy Gillespie-ish that it might have been though good in its own way. Wallarab very wisely turns the one-minute “Interlude” over to Allen’s bass, bending both notes and time like a master, following which we move from Bix to Jelly Roll. Wallarab has completely rewritten this tune, using longer bar- and phrase-lengths and moving the notes of the melody around so much that, if you didn’t know in advance what they were playing, it would take you most of the first chorus to (maybe) recognize it. I found it refreshingly different, but I can tell you, Morton would not have been amused because the original melody is never really stated, let alone lurking behind the soloists. But we have to remember that, whether he liked it or not, the bop revolution was already gestating in small New York clubs when Morton was still alive in the early 1940s. Gardier really flies on alto sax in this one and Allen’s bass solo is equal to his previous work in this movement.

Photo of the Buselli/Wallarab Orchestra by Greg Reynolds. You can spot Amanda Gardier in the rear row, center.

I wondered about a full movement using just two songs, Star Dust and Riverboat Shuffle. After all, Hoagy Carmichael wrote several other interesting jazz and pop tunes during this decade, including Washboard Blues and Boneyard Shuffle, both of which he also recorded for Gennett, but let’s face it, Star Dust is such a rich composition in itself that any number of permutations and arrangements can be made of it and this one is extremely imaginative. Unlike Hoagy’s original recording, played at a medium fast tempo, Wallarab uses the more traditional slow tempo that listeners have been used to ever since Isham Jones recorded it in 1931, the record that made it a hit. The scoring is delicate and primarily uses just the reeds, particularly the high reeds, in a transparent texture through which Greg Ward’s alto sax weaves a solo in double time which has the effect of improvised counterpoint. This is some talented jazz orchestra; nearly every single member of it is a strong and interesting soloist, and many of them get a chance to shine in various moments of this suite.

Riverboat Shuffle is divided into two different sections, the first running 4:31 and the second 6:20. By this time I was less surprised by Wallarab’s rewriting of these older pieces in new forms; the opening two-bar motif, not really a theme, of Riverboat is turned into a sort of mantra at the outset, then abandoned entirely as entirely new melodic themes are created over the chords of the original and explored with the chords themselves being changed and redistributed. It’s not really as far-out as all of this might make it seem, but it’s certainly complex scored jazz. We hear two trumpet soloists in part 1, Sean Dobbins and John Raymond, both playing in their best Woody Herman Herd style with a slower coda featuring high winds and muted brass to ride it out. The second section dissolves Carmichael’s tune still further along with a greatly slowed-down tempo. This riverboat isn’t shuffling, it’s dissolving into an opaque, abstract vision in which sunlight dances on its glittering shards. Take this segment out of context and play it for any jazz lover, and I defy him or her to identify Riverboat Shuffle in it. It almost sounds more like a surreal arrangement of Minnie the Moocher.

One thing I really should add, and this seems like a good moment to do so, is that the sound quality of this recording is absolutely first-rate. One can not only hear each section clearly, but almost each instrument in each section. There’s just enough room reverb to give the band a beautiful sheen without sounding too tubby or like they’re playing in an empty locker room. This enhances the impact of the music on the listener, particularly as they alternate between solos and section work.

The Morton portion of our suite opens with a relaxed, medium-slow rendition of King Porter Stomp with pianist Gillespie playing it in what almost comes across as a quasi-George Shearing style. Wallarab uses soft brass mixtures with an emphasis on muted trumpets behind him, later mixing in some reeds. Allen’s bass is especially prominent. One trombone and the bass trombone, playing an octave apart, introduce the famous trio theme, joined in the second half of the chorus by tenor sax. We get a surprise solo by Rich Dole on the bass ‘bone. This is Jelly Roll Morton meets ‘50s West Coast Cool. Interestingly, Jeff Conrad’s muted trumpet solo throws in a few allusions to Beiderbecke’s Davenport Blues. Wallarab really seems to like the idea of conflating Beiderbecke with Morton, and in a way I don’t blame him; I’ve always wondered what a Morton record with a Bix solo might have sounded like.

We jump into Grandpa’s Spells after a moment of silence, taken at close to Morton’s original brisk tempo but with a definitely more streamlined and swinging beat. Allen propels the entire band from his bass and Tom Walsh’s tenor sax solo is very fine although, when compared to some of the more extraordinary ones which preceded it, a bit less imaginative (just my opinion). Raymond’s trumpet, however, restores the high standard as the trombone and trumpet sections add their own commentary behind him. Wallarab has fun rewriting and reshaping the out chorus, and our Gennett Suite is over.

And quite a ride it is. Indeed, I find it hard to be moderate in my feelings about this music. It is so creative and imaginative that it simply transports you regardless of how you may feel about some of the musical transformations. In addition, both the music and the performance are fun to listen to, and when was the last time you could actually say that a recording of new jazz was fun?

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Rob Garcia’s “Natural Bounce”

GARCIA: Dark Blue Horse Power. Meeting of the Tulips. Gary Song. Natural Bounce 1. Fades to Blue. Vernal. Overbalance. Natural Bounce 2. Mr. K.C. A Flower for Diana Part 2. Sweet Joe. Stretch. Natural Bounce / Noah Preminger, t-sax; Leo Genovese, pno; Kim Cass, bs; Rob Garcia, dm / Fresh Sound Records FSR-CD-5128

In the modern jazz world, where one’s artistic quality is often judged by how good their publicity machine is, which in turns leads to their winning meaningless “awards” for their “brilliance,” it’s refreshing to run across musicians like these. Every one of these four players are highly creative and have something to say, they do it without patting themselves on the back for being geniuses or including ostentatiously posed photos of themselves in the booklet. They just play, and what comes out is interesting because they are serious, committed artists.

I’ve heard some of Kim Cass’ work before and been impressed, and to a certain extent tenor saxist Noah Preminger and I are pen pals, my having reviewed a few of his records over the past several years and been impressed by all of them. Here, surprisingly, his playing is just a bit more reined-in than in his own CDs—possibly a restriction caused by the written parts of these compositions—but when he cuts loose he’s Noah Preminger, all right, a marvelous player who not only combines inside and outside jazz in his solos but always has something cohesive to say. Cass is his usual understated but brilliant self on bass, and drummer-composer Garcia brings a varied touch to his playing that I found refreshing. He somehow manages to both keep the pulse going and embellish it. Most modern jazz drummers are great at playing varied betas and meters, but not so good at realizing that the music needs to have a recognizable rhythmic direction.

I had heard of Leo Genovese before but, somehow, had never heard him before. If anything, he is the most consistently interesting soloist on this particular album. His playing is extremely fluent, often moving into double time, but never sounding rushed. On the contrary, he, like Preminger, is cogent and clear in his musical narrative if somewhat more flowery in style. In Meeting of the Tulips, in fact, Genovese’s brilliant solo seems to push Preminger to even more remarkable playing than on the first track, and in his solo there’s a remarkable passage where he slips into 3 (or possibly 6/8, since the basic pulse is maintained) for a few bars, and the rhythm section follows him there. A written passage? Possibly, but I don’t know this for certain.

Gary Song is a departure from the first two tracks, using a 10-note motif with the note values distributed unusually within each two-bar cell by the pianist before eventually settling into a somewhat straight 4 although Cass plays yet another unusual metric division of the time underneath the others. Needless to say, such seasoned and brilliant musicians as these fall into this unusual metric division easily, Preminger in particular soaring across the bar lines in his solo, giving the music his usual strong emotional edge. Genovese, as usual, is cool yet brilliant. His style of playing is difficult to describe, but it seems to me to combine the rhythmic and harmonic brilliance of Jaki Byard (there’s a name too few jazz lovers know!) with a bit of McCoy Tyner and a touch of Lalo Schifrin. And that’s about as close as I can come to describing it in words.

Indeed, this entire album is so good that after a while you stop trying to analyze what they’re playing, or categorize it, and just relax and enjoy every moment of this disc. Even when Garcia, the nominal leader of this group, opens up Natural Bounce 1 with an extended drum solo, you’re no longer surprised at just how brilliant this solo is—flashy but not monotonously so. Garcia isn’t trying to dazzle you with Buddy Rich-isms, but rather varying the beat in subtle and intricate ways despite the speed at which he plays it. And interestingly, once Preminger enters and the tune itself begins, it settles into a relaxed medium-tempo 4 of a type that has all but vanished from jazz.

Knowing what great improvisers Preminger and Genovese are, it’s difficult for me, without the scores, to tell how much or what part of these pieces are written out and which ones improvised since nearly everything they play sounds improvised even when it probably isn’t, but that in itself is a compliment to Garcia’s skills as composer-arranger. He obviously picked these specific musicians for this recording because he knew how good they were and possibly wanted listeners to not know (or even care) which parts of each piece were composed beforehand. and in the end it doesn’t really matter. One of the great joys of listening to the old Dave Brubeck Quartet was that Brubeck, Paul Desmond and Eugene Wright were so perfectly attuned to one another that they could almost read each other’s minds as they played, and you get the same feeling listening to this quartet.

A very few pieces on this album, i.e. Vernal, struck me as somewhat conventional. This doesn’t mean, however, that they’re uninteresting, only that they somehow remind you of older tunes though they are not. In Vernal, as it turns out, things get really interesting once Preminger really opens up on his tenor; for once, Genovese is content to underplay a little. And this somewhat conventional piece is followed by the unusual Overbalance, which resembles a Latin tune with asymmetric rhythmic division. Genovese makes up for his slight reticence on the previous track by producing an absolutely mind-blowing solo that almost sounds like Cecil Taylor but with structure and musical focus. Following this, Cass immediately jumps into a fast 4 behind Preminger, and Garcia’s drums, as usual, are excellent throughout.

Even a piece like Natural Bounce 2, in which the percussion section (drums and bass) tend to dominate the proceedings and the thematic material is minimal, there is great invention going on—here, especially, in Cass’ outstanding bass solo. But every track has its extraordinary moments. Sweet Joe is another throwback piece, but exactly the kind of jazz you never hear anymore, a real tune that the ear can follow and remember without it sounding trite or treacly. Brubeck and Bill Evans used to write tunes like this, as of course did Vince Guaraldi, and the jazz critics of that time didn’t criticize them for creating melodies that stick with you. Preminger eschews his usual adventurousness here for a more economical style of playing, sounding a bit like Sonny Rollins in ballad mode, and it works.

One thing I particularly liked about Garcia’s compositions is that so many of them are creative and unusual but they don’t try to do too much. There’s a bad tendency nowadays for jazz composers to overreach, yet as unusual and unorthodox as some of these piece are (such as Stretch), he neither insults the listener with a complex mind nor the average listener who may have trouble grasping really outré musical structures. And there’s something to be said for the relaxed, casual way each of these four musicians play. Their solo and group improvisations are all interesting and impressive without trying to force the issue.

I’m going to make a prediction: most of the mainstream jazz press (Down Beat, Jazz Times, Jazziz, All About Jazz, etc.) will either ignore this album or give it faint praise. It will not be one of their top 10 albums of the year, nor will it be nominated for a Grammy. Why? Because the music doesn’t fit a specific niche. It’s not in one of the prescribed jazz styles considered hip nowadays. Oh, yes, one or two other reviewers besides me will give it a great review, but not enough to give it the push it deserves.

But I am telling you: if you like jazz, you absolutely must have this album. It’s that good. Had this been released on Verve, Prestige or Blue Note back in the old days, the critics would be drooling over it, not because the music here is retro but just the opposite, it’s innovative but not abrasive. In fact, there are moments, such as during Preminger’s solo on Natural Bounce 2, when I suddenly thought of the old Ornette Coleman Quartet (particularly since Genovese sits this one out; the old Coleman quartet had no piano). I found myself hanging onto every solo in this album and then some, and you will be, too.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Schreker’s ”Der Schatzgräber” Revived

SCHREKER: Die Schatzgräber (The Treasure Hunter) / Tuomas Pursio, bs-bar (The King); Doke Pauwell, actor (The Queen); Clemens Bieber, ten (Chancellor); Michael Laurenz, ten (The Fool); Elisabet Strid, sop (Els); Daniel Johansson, ten (Elis); Michae Adams, bar (Count/Herald); Thomas Johannes Mauer, bar (The Bailiff); Joel Allison, bs-bar (Mayor); Patrick Cook, ten (Albi); Seth Carico, bs-bar (Young Nobleman); Gideon Poppe, ten (Scribe); Stephen Bronk, bs-bar (Innkeeper); Deutsche Oper, Berlin Chorus & Orch.; Marc Albrecht, cond  Naxos 2.110761, DVD (live: Berlin, May 10 & 14, 2022)

This is exactly the kind of opera that most fascinates me, one with a symbolist plot in which the characters represent “types” and not just “who they are” with names attached. Written at the height of the symbolist era (1915-18) and finished just about the time that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was being filmed, Der Schatzgräber is not as fantastic as that famous German film yet still in tune with the times. Wikipedia informs us that this opera provided Schreker with his greatest public success but, ironically, his last one. By the end of the 1920s, his style of opera was no longer in fashion, in part due to the pressure put on theaters by the Nazis who were slowly but surely ascending to power.

Marc Albrecht’s interest in this opera is twofold. First, he admires Schreker’s musical setting of the plot, moving as he does between lush Romanticism and a more modern, strophic quality in setting the words to music in a more dramatic fashion. n both respects his score is clearly a development of the Wagnerian style; in fact, as Albrecht points out in the liner notes, the third act, which is essentially a long love duet, is clearly based on Tristan und Isolde, even to the extent that “the Tristan chord occurs in all possible variations, also in its original guise…But then Schreker moves off into totally different regions: he’s on the trail of Debussy, Impressionism. This palette that Schreker works with is enormously broad, particularly for the pantomime by Els after the night of love.” The other reason why Der Schatzgräber fascinates him is that the principal female character is complex and conflicted. She creates the angst and drama on which the plot is based, then later cannot find her way out of it.

And indeed the libretto, written by Schreker himself, is one of the most convoluted I’ve ever read. Set as a Prologue and four acts, it ostensibly concerns a Queen who is “suffering from a strange, insidious disease” caused by the theft of her jewels. This in itself suggests two possible causes: one, the more mundane one that she’s just a material girl who can’t live without her jewels, or the more mysterious one that those specific jewels had some mysterious hold on her life-force and thus cannot be replaced by others.

As in Rigoletto, there is a court jester or Fool, but this one really is somewhat simple-minded. Nonetheless, he tells the Count of a strange treasure hunter who wanders about as a minstrel, appearing and disappearing mysteriously. He feels that this minstrel would be the only person who could recover the lost jewels if they were indeed recoverable. The King orders him to track the minstrel down; if he succeeds, he will grant the Fool his greatest wish and provide him with a wife.

In the first act we meet Els, a simple waitress who has been chosen by the county squire to be his wife but who has no love for him. Although she sends him to the jeweler’s shop to buy her some expensive trinkets, she wants to get out of the marriage and so instructs a sycophant who adores her, Albi, to murder the squire on his way back through the forest and bring her the necklace he bought for her—which only she knows is part of the stolen jewels. Els is quite the gold-digger, having previously disposed of two other “fiancés” the same way after getting part of the stolen jewels. Despite the fact that many men court her, she clings to a fantasy image of a fairy-tale prince who will carry her off to his castle. Surprisingly, she suddenly meets a man who seems to meet her priorities: the minstrel, whose daydreams seem to become reality. (Believe it or not, I’m actually shortening this plot synopsis. It really IS a convoluted mess!) He tells her that his lute led him to a valuable piece of jewelry in the forest, he suddenly has it in his hand: the very necklace that the squire was sent to fetch.

Aside by me: This really does complicate matters. How can the minstrel conjure up a necklace that 1) was in a jewelry shop, and 2) was bought by the squire, and 3) the minstrel apparently never ran across the squire? Unanswered questions like this one make Der Schatzgräber difficult to comprehend.

Back to our regularly scheduled synopsis. Els immediately believes that this is the man she has been waiting for all her life, but in the meantime the squire has been found, brutally murdered. Quite naturally, considering the string of events unfolded above, the bailiff suspects the minstrel, whose name is Elis, of being the murderer and has him arrested. This puts Els in the bind of a quandary: how can she save him without admitting that she was the one who ordered the squire killed? Poor baby, I feel so sorry for her. Not.

In Act II, Elis has been tried and sentenced to death via a public execution. The Fool arrives and talks to Els; in the course of his conversation he realizes that the convicted murderer is the very man he’s been looking for. The Fool promises Els that he will talk to the King and save Elis’ life; what he doesn’t tell her is that he has fallen in love with her, and so will ask the King to give her to him as his wife. Elis is thus pardoned, and the Queen asks him to use his magic lute and songs to recover the rest of her lost treasure, but if he fails he will be publicly humiliated and forced into exile. What a nice bitch!

Els is in great distress, naturally, feeling that Elis will indeed find the lost jewels—in her possession. Once again she turns to Albi, this time to steal the minstrel’s magic lute.

In the third act, Elis’ lute has indeed been stolen by Albi, which of course puts him in a deep state of depression, knowing what is in store for him. Els, however, offers him a long night of love, after which she will give him the stolen jewels to bring to the Queen—as long as he never asks her how she came by them. Ecstatic that he will be spared, Elis agrees and has a long sort of Tristan-Isolde night of love with her.

Elis returns the Queen’s jewels to her, she regains her health and beauty, and he is knighted, but for some strange reason he believes that he is being mocked by the court. In an emotional outburst, he attacks the Queen and demands the jewels back so he can give them to Els, who he feels deserves them more. (Apparently there is some symbolism attached to these jewels that go beyond the surface, but we’re left to decide for ourselves exactly what that is.) While this brouhaha is going on, the bailiff arrives. He has forced a confession out of Albi and now knows that Els was responsible for both the squire’s murder and several others. But then comes the bitter irony: the Fool saves Els’ life by demanding that she be the wife he was promised if he found the Queen’s jewels. Elis denounces Els now that he knows what a horrid person she really is, so she really has no choice but to marry the Fool if she wants to live.

In a brief Epilogue, we see Els and the Fool a year later. He has found no happiness with her, and she is wasting away as the Queen once was. In desperation, the Fool has sent for Elis to come and try to make her happy. Elis does arrive, but only to sing her into eternal sleep. Els sinks into death, Elis vanishes as usual, and the Fool is left alone and unhappy while life goes on for everyone else.

If Wagner was a major influence on Schreker, Richard Strauss was obviously a lesser but important one. Much of the opera, especially the Prologue, put me in mind of the way Strauss wrote Salome, lyrical yet strophic vocal lines which match the rhythm and tempo of the words excellently. Tenor Michael Laurenz, as the Fool, has a very attractive voice if one that is a bnit unsteady in sustained notes, but baritone Tuomas Pursio as the King is a wobbly mess. Perhaps there was a fire sale on wobbly baritones at the Berlin Opera, but this just goes to show how vocal standards have sunk over the past quarter-century. In addition to his attractive timbre, Laurenz is a real vocal artist who acts with the voice and sings with a great deal of nuance. Interestingly, although this opening court scene is rather dimly lit, we catch a glimpse of Els, dressed as a waitress and serving the members of court. We also get a brief glimpse, unexplained because he’s not supposed to be there, of Elis, who quickly disappears.

The prologue morphs into the first act without a break. In her opening scene, soprano Elisabet Strid, as Els, also has a tremulous voice despite an attractive timbre. I’m assuming that bass-baritone Seth Carico is the one singing the role of the squire; although he is identified as “a young nobleman,” there is no actual cast listing for “squire” in the booklet, so I had to make an educated guess. He, too, starts out wobbly, but after a few minutes his voice warms up. Strid takes somewhat longer to warm up, but eventually her voice settles into a sort of even flutter and doesn’t spread too badly. I have no idea who’s singing the role of Els’ father because he’s not identified in the booklet, nor is he mentioned in the plot synopsis, but he, like Pursio, is pretty wobbly. Thomas Johannes Mayer, as the Bailiff, is also a wobbly horror. Tenor Daniel Johansson, as Elis, has a richer-sounding voice than Laurenz but one with a similar timbre. His high notes sounded strained until his voice warmed up, and then they were powerful but slightly unsteady.

There is one thing I really liked about this performance, however, and that is the production. Stage director Christof Loy, set designer Johannes Leiacker and costume designer Barbara Droshihn have worked hand-in-hand to produce a slightly modern but intelligent production that does not insult the composer’s intentions. There are no surreptitiously naked people running around, no one dressed as a mouse, a Nazi or a mental case who escaped from an institution. In short, everyone pretty much looks like the characters described in Schreker’s libretto, and that in itself is a major achievement. I don’t know if their work was directly influenced by the stage director or instinctive, but in either case everyone’s acting is excellent.

And so is Albrecht’s conducting. I’ve praised his work previously on this blog, in connection with his recordings of Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, both on Pentatone Classics. He has an intuitive grasp of the structure of the music and, more importantly, imparts forward momentum to the proceedings. Indeed, it’s difficult for me to imagine what this performance would sound like were it not for his direction, and considering the high quality of the singers on his studio recordings I don’t assign all of the blame to him for the wobbly singers in this cast. It’s no secret that, by and large, German singing has taken a severe nosedive over the past two decades, and the generally mediocre quality of the cast says more for the low standards of the Berlin Opera than for Albrecht’s personal taste.

In the scene where Els first realizes that she loves Elis, Strid’s acting is excellent, passionate without making her look like a hooker trying to seduce a john. In fact, by and large everyone’s acting is quite good although some of the performers look as though they’re just following the stage director’s orders without “feeling” the character inside themselves. And there’s clearly something of Lulu in the character of Els, since nearly every available man in the opera—including the Bailiff—falls in love with her, the difference being that Els, unlike Lulu, spurns most of them.

Considering the overall level of the performance, not to mention the high quality of the music, I was shocked to hear the paucity of applause at the end of the first act. It sounded to me as if there were only about 150 people in the audience, and on top of that they sounded as if they were clapping more out of duty than enthusiasm for this excellent work. Maybe they thought it was going to sound like Der Rosenkavalier.

Interestingly, at their first encounter in Act II, the Fool aptly sums Els up: “A beautiful woman, but as cunning as the devil!” He is the only one to fall in love with her who has no illusions as to her character. And yet, as we know, he demands her as his wife once the jewels are recovered. Another psychological mystery. Why would he want a woman who he known is devious and possibly plotting behind his back? And yet he does.

Much of the staging in this act is bare-bones and, as for most of the opera, set largely in darkness. I felt this was appropriate considering the dark quality of the plot as well as the “midnight gloom” feeling overall. It is not an opera that calls for bright lights and gay stage sets, although there were moments when I wished that the lighting director would turn up the spots a bit more than he did. (Herbert von Karajan, the king of darkly-lit opera productions, would clearly have approved of this, however.) As in his most famous and often-performed opera, Die Gezeichneten, Schreker maintains lyrical vocal lines set to a primarily tonal orchestration without resorting to cheap arias that disrupt the dramatic flow of the music. Els does get an aria in the second act, when she recalls a song that her mother sang to her, but it almost sounds more like a lied by Hugo Wolf or Max Reger.

In the third act love duet, Elis sings some interesting lines to Els about love, which he sees as a distraction, a languor, that takes men away from striving and succeeding at various important things in their lives. He has lost his magic lute and so cannot find the missing jewels, but Els offers to give the jewels to him as longas he doesn’t press her as to how they are in her possession. For love’s sake, you see. The Fool was right; she’s as cunning as the devil. When Elis sings of the night making its approach, “wafting over from different isles,” an offstage chorus sings wordlessly to bolster the ambience of the moment, “dreams in which ancient songs of yore drift into silence.” He then sings, “What secret does this room hold, hovering around the image of this bewitching woman?” Els answers, “Your ardor for me is what is bewitching you.” While it is true that Schreker makes clever use of the Tristan chord, this love duet is not as laid-back and languorous as the one in Wagner’s opera. It is taken at a medium-fast tempo and inexorably moves forward. Nonetheless, the music is dramatically effective, creating a spell unlike anything else in the opera, culminating in a passionate section with high notes—and here, the orchestral background rises to a feverish section before suddenly pulling back in volume and intensity as Elis imagines that he is in a blissful Eden with her. Yet at the end of the act, Els takes diamond earrings and a necklace off herself and gives them to Elis, proof positive that she somehow had something to do with their theft. Yet Elis is loath to take them to the Queen because they “hallowed” her body. She insists; he point out that the necklace was the one he gave her when they first met, but only Els knows that this necklace was the Queen’s to begin with. A strange moment.

The fourth act opens with happy, festive music, a fit opening for the scene where the court is rejoicing the return of the Queen’s jewels. Schreker mixes his musical styles well in this act, moving mercurially as the plot and libretto dictate. The point at which the opinion of the King’s court suddenly turns on Elis, whoever, has nothing to do with he and Els being laughed at; it has to do with courtiers insisting that he tell them how and where he found the stolen jewels in the hope that the perpetrator could be caught and another theft thwarted—surely reasonable requests. It is only because Elis knows that Els had something to do with their theft, and he refuses to give her away, that he becomes angry and demands that the Queen give the jewelry back to him. To make matters worse, when they ask him where his magic lute is, he simply tells them that he lost it and instead sings them a ballad about legendary Ilsenin in ancient times, a metaphor for the discovery of the jewels involving a dwarf who loved a fair maiden (shades of Das Rheingold). The woman dies, her body decays, but her spirit rises up in awesome power and the dwarf, tormented by love and remorse, could not rest day or night. If you think of Die Gezeichneten, Schreker seemed to have a thing for dwarves. Still pressured by one of the nobles, Elis describes a night like one that has never been, with “a gauzy thistle of softly luminous veils,” when “out of the sheen of the sonorous sea,” an enchanted being arose, luminous light falling on “the soft rise and fall of two breasts.” Els, who is present, is aware that he is describing their night of love-making in poetic terms. “Body and jewelry were wedded as one, unknown sublimity offered itself to me!” Where he makes his mistake is by suddenly breaking off this narrative and attacking the King and his court as people who cannot know of such sublime things, which is when he demands that the Queen give the jewelry back to him. The arrival of the Bailiff to stop their hatred of Elis and reveal Els as “the shameless hussy” who initially stole the jewels and caused so many deaths is as dramatic as King Marke breaking in on Tristan and Isolde’s night of love. We also learn that it was Els who stole Elis’ magic lute.

Interestingly, when the Fool asks for Els’ hand in marriage as a reward for his returning the jewels, he says that he’ll drive the devil out of her with his jokes and foolery. Does he really think he can do this? At this point, even the trusting Elis isn’t sure if Els was being honest with him or not; he asks her to clear her name and he’ll believe her, but in response she says goodbye to him, thus tacitly admitting her guilt.

In the postlude the Fool tells Elis that as long as he wore the jester’s cap and bells he was immune to the woes of the world. “My costume was my being. I myself was dead. That kept me young. But now, this one year spent with her…” Elis breaks off his talk when he notices how old and worn Els looks. The Fool says that whether it was pining for Elis or being tormented by her theft, she has deteriorated both physically and spiritually. When Els wakes up, the Fool leaves and Elis reminds her of that night of love and the fact that she told him all about her life. Els things this horrendous and wonders that he doesn’t hate her; he replies that no one is free of sin. He tries to encourage her back to life and happiness, but she is at a point beyond caring, too ill to make a second start. Thus we realize that when Elis “sings her to eternal sleep,” it is a kindness, a form of euthanasia. All of Schreker’s music for this postlude is tender and lovely in its own way, some of his best and most subtle, and here stage director Christof Loy has one of his most inspired moments, bringing in other figures of her life, such as her father and previous lovers, onto the stage as mute figures . As Els lies dying, it is the Fool who bids her to die in peace, that somehow God will forgive her. And that’s how the opera ends.

Making allowances for the defective singing, some of which comes and goes, this is still a good representation of Schreker’s opera thanks in no small part to Albrecht’s conducting. Yes. I’d prefer a performance in which every singer sounds fabulous, but by and large it works. I therefore recommend this to all admirers of Schreker’s work. One of the glories of this performance is that the music is not interrupted by audience applause, thus we can appreciate each scene unspoiled by the unwonted enthusiasm of musical philistines. The stage direction and costumes are excellent with the exception of a superfluous orgy pantomime near the end of Act III which means nothing and adds nothing to the story. But you know these modern stage directors: they absolutely have to add some kind of prurient stimulation to show that they’re hip and cool. As if the viewer is too stupid to imagine his or her own love-making images. Who knows? Maybe the director wanted some audience participation!

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Storgårds Conducts Nørgård

NØRGÅRD: 3 Nocturnal Movements.* Symphony No. 8. Lysning / *Peter Herresthal, vln & Jakob Kullberg, cel. Bergen Philharmonic Orch.; John Storgårds, cond / Bis SACD-2502

Per Nørgård is another modern Scandinavian composer who, apparently, people love to hate. because his music is also more common on records than it is in the concert hall. but conductor John Storgårds is a stubborn guy and he’s going to play and record it no matter what.

And Nørgård himself is a stubborn bunny because he’s now 91 years old, probably waiting for his music to he played at orchestral concerts worldwide. Poor guy, doesn’t he know that he has to die before he’ll be “rediscovered,” like Rued Langgaard?

Nørgård bases much of his music on number sequences, which you would think would produce music close in style to that of the 12-tone composers, but it doesn’t. On the contrary, he has a penchant for creating long lines which, though melodic, are not conventionally tuneful, and like so many composers who came up in the 1950s and ‘60s he owes a lot in terms of form and orchestration to Stravinsky without actually copying Stravinsky’s style. This aesthetic serves him well in his 3 Nocturnal Movements, which have about as much of a relation to the conventional idea of a nocturne as a bad dream does. This bad dream is not quite a nightmare—the music isn’t quite that frightening or forbidding—but it clearly inhabits a sound world of edgy lyricism and uncomfortable but not completely off-putting harmonies. I also found it interesting that this set is the most recent music on this SACD, having been written just eight years ago when he was a mere stripling of 83. Again like Stravinsky, who continued to write great music almost until the day he died, Nørgård is making the most of the winter of his life, and more power to him.

Harmonic differences aside, there’s a certain kinship in these pieces to the similar music of Sibelius, who even way back in the early 20th century was using unusual melodic patterns and what I would call stark orchestration—note, for instance, his “Berceuse” from The Tempest. Thus, in one sense, Nørgård is a descendant of Sibelius though perhaps not as strongly influenced by him as by other 20th-century composers.

The bottom line is that Nørgård’s music has real met on its bones. He is not the kind of composer who just tries to shock his listeners, as sometimes Stravinsky himself did, but one who is more insinuating in his style. For much of their duration, these three nocturnes sound as much if not more like music written for a chamber orchestra (or maybe just a nonet) of strings. In addition to the essential simplicity of the writing and the chilliness of the orchestration, there is even an element of playfulness in the third nocturne. This is interesting stuff!

Nørgård’s Eighth Symphony is already represented by an outstanding recording on Dacapo by Sakari Oramo (he really does get around!). It’s more abstract and less lyrical than the nocturnes yet, ironically, less forbidding-sounding. The music just has a certain cool distance about it, being rather more cerebral, but emotionally it’s rather playful rather than emotionally upset.  As the composer himself put it, “Each of my symphonies has its own personality, which cannot be repeated.” Oramo’s performance has a warmer sound, probably because it is played by the Vienna Philharmonic, whereas Storgård’s is so transparent in texture that it almost has a 3-D sound—possibly the result of the SACD sonics, which are even evident when playing it on a conventional CD player and listening through headphones. Various instruments seem to come at you from all different directions and angles, which gives the symphony a much more varied sound profile, whereas Oramo’s performance produces a more homogenous sound. I suppose it’s a matter of preference, but for me, personally, I get a lot more out of the symphony in this recording. I should also note that Storgårds has also recorded Nørgård’s Symphonies Nos. 2, 4, 5 & 6 for Dacapo with the Oslo Philharmonic, and I like those performances, too. I will say, however, that as the first movement progresses Storgårds makes the music sound edgier and a bit jess jolly than Oramo, so there is a trade-off.

The orchestral tone poem Lysning (2006) returns us to the lyrical style of the nocturnes, but in this instance less edgy in feeling. It’s a nice albeit modern piece to close out this excellent CD. You may not be able to enjoy Nørgård’s music at a concert hall near you, but who cares? You can hear it on this excellent CD. Small wonder that concert halls are struggling to fill seats, playing the same old stuff over and over again that people can, and have, heard on records now for close to a century.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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Oramo Conducts Langgaard’s First Symphony

LANGGAARD: Symphony No. 1 / Berlin Philharmonic Orch.; Sakari Oramo, cond / Dacapo 6220644

I didn’t review this recording when it was released in January because, due to severe health issues, I was completely off the computer for a month; and besides, I already had a recording of the Langgaard First and so didn’t think it was, for me, a “necessary” recording, but since then it has been put up for and won awards, so I thought I’d review it now.

To begin with, this symphony is just barely representative of Langgaard’s high unusual and unorthodox musical mind. Written when he was still a teenager and under the spell of Brahms and Bruckner, it’s a very melodic, big-boned and surprisingly conventional work. Interesting, yes, but not so interesting as to make you sit up and take notice of its composer or make you think that he will develop into one of the most arresting and eclectic composers of his time. In short, it’s exactly the kind of piece that people who don’t understand or appreciate Langgaard would find attractive because it doesn’t ruffle any feathers or change one’s perception of what a symphony should be. Indeed, at the time he wrote it, Mahler was already working on his Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, two works which, although somewhat more tuneful than his Symphonies 5 through 7, were far in advance of what Langgaard was doing at that time.

In addition to this, in the 1990s, now 30 years ago(!!), Ilya Stupel recorded all 16 of Langgaard’s Symphonies for this same label (Dacapo) with the Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra, and by and large these performances are quite good.

Yet making a side-by-side comparison between Stupel’s and Oramo’s performances of this symphony, the balance tips heavily in the direction of the latter, and it’s not just that the Berlin Philharmonic is a better orchestra than the Rubinstein Philharmonic, though it is. Oramo’s performance just has more sweep, a strung rhythmic pulse, and reveals details here and there that pass unnoticed in the Stupel recording. It’s like listening to Weingartner’s or Toscanini’s Brahms recordings after suffering through Karajan’s. What may have sounded fine at first listening suddenly comes across as inferior in terms of musical drama and orchestral detail. To put it in general terms, the Langgaard First is an interesting run-through in Stupel’s hands but a monumental piece of musical drama in Oramo’s, and there’s no two ways of getting around this. Oramo is slightly slower in the first three movements than Stupel and just a touch faster in the last two, but tempo doesn’t matter here so much as that combination of detail and drama. Stupel gave us a glimpse of Langgaard’s soul; Oramo rips the body open to expose all the explosive emotion inside the man. True, there’s no getting around the fact that the waltz theme in the first movement is still pretty sappy music, but the surrounding material comes across with much more force. In Oramo’s hands, the finale of the first movement is so ferocious it almost takes your breath away.

Oramo also evokes a greater feeling of mystery in the sotto voce third movement much better than Stupel and the fourth movement, running at only 4:54 compared to Stupel’s 6:17, takes on much greater bite and drive. In the last movement, he pulls out all the stops, and there is a moment in this movement where I almost expected the music to move into the opening theme of the Die Meistersinger overture. This disc now joins his previous recordings of Symphonies Nos. 2, 6 & 14 (often listed as a Suite). Will he finish the series? Who knows? He’s a busy boy, having recorded the complete symphonies of Per Norgård and also dabbling in the Nielsen symphonies.

One thing I strongly object to, how that Langgaard has finally been rediscovered, is the claim that he was Denmark’s greatest composer. That’s a fine point that now suddenly pushes Carl Nielsen into the shadows, and you simply can’t do that. Nielsen’s ouvre may not have been as stunningly outré as Langgaard’s, that’s true, but there is clearly greatness in Nielsen’s work as evidenced by the fact that, when conductor Alan Gilbert scheduled a series of concerts with the New York Philharmonic of all of Nielsen’s symphonies, the audiences stayed away in droves because it was “too modern” for them. This is comparable to pushing Saint-Saëns aside because Berlioz was more modern and radical for his time.  Both were great composers.

In all fairness, I should also point out that Thomas Dausgaard also recorded several of the Langgaard Symphonies: Nos. 12 & 13 on Dacapo 6.220517, Nos. 4, 6, 10 & 14 on Danacord DACOCD560, Nos. 9-11 on Dacapo 8.224182, Nos. 6-8 on Dacapo 8.224180, Nos. 4 & 5 on Dacapo 8.224215 and Nos. 15 & 16 on Dacapo 6.220519, not to mention a recording of No. 1 by Leif Segerstam and Nos. 4-6 by Neeme Järvi on Chandos. All of these have fine moments although I think that Dausgaard came closer to Langgaard’s aesthetic than the others.

This one is a necessary disc if you like Langgaard’s music. Despite his well over-the-top Romantic effusion and occasional bombast, it’s still a hell of a symphony for a composer who was only 16 years old when he finished it.

—© 2023 Lynn René Bayley

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