Lush Life
Heather Ferguson; Miguelito Valdes; Barrie Sorensen; Tony Genge; Jan Stirling; Joey Smith
Independent (heatherferguson.ca)

I had the pleasure of meeting Heather Ferguson at Toronto’s El Mocambo in May 2022; we were both at Ori Dagan’s Click Right Here album launch. I remember thinking how rich and warm her speaking voice was, and wasn’t surprised when she told me that she, like Dagan, was a jazz vocalist.

Lush Life is the Victoria-based artist’s smashing debut album. And while it may be her first full-length CD, Ferguson has been honing her singing chops for years. This is not a beginner’s voice. This is the voice of an experienced student and lover of jazz who has been paying close attention over a lifetime to the best interpreters of the 20th century’s classics and standards. You can hear it in her beautiful phrasing and in her engaging, confident, generous, insightful and passionate performance. She is a consummate storyteller who keeps things interesting and inviting.

Ferguson treats us to ten tracks, with help from some of Victoria’s finest, including Miguelito Valdes on trumpet, Barrie Sorensen on saxophones, drummer Damian Graham, keyboardist Tony Genge and guitarist Joey Smith, whose stellar arrangements add another layer of excellence to the project.

From the expressive and lovely title track, the truly soulful Body & Soul and the sultry (and cheeky at the end) At Last, to a deeply evocative Cry Me A River and darn right gorgeous Round Midnight, Ferguson’s Lush Life is a celebration of a musically infused life well lived!

Listen to 'Lush Life' Now in the Listening Room

Cory Smythe – Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
Sofia Jernberg; Large Ensemble; Cory Smythe
Pyroclastic Records PR 23 (store.pyroclasticrecords.com)

Composer and pianist Cory Smythe has worked with several of contemporary music’s most creative figures, among them Anthony Braxton, Tyshawn Sorey and Nate Wooley, but it would be difficult to name a more inventive conceptualist, engaging historical musical and social forms to generate challenging contemporary dialogues, reinventing the jazz practice of creative variations on standard repertoire. His Circulate Susanna investigated Stephen Foster’s famous genocidal ditty (see the original lyric of 1848); Accelerate Every Voice, was a choral piece about rising water levels. Now Smoke Gets in Your Eyes approaches Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach‘s ancient pop tune to address a world on fire. Smythe’s probing, highly creative liner booklet is illustrated with images of the song’s celebrated performers, including Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire and Bryan Ferry. 

The work comes in two distinct parts. The first four pieces, originally developed with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, are performed by a stellar 11-member ensemble (saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and cellist Tomeka Reid are prominent), playing four pieces. Liquiform 1 comes as close as might be possible to creating liquid sound, while Combustion 1 has trumpeter Peter Evans invoking fire with blistering, incendiary flurries. Combustion 2 has singer Sofia Jernberg reducing the original song to snippets. The second and longer part consists of Smythe’s seven solo explorations of the song, playing a piano with computer augmentation altering pitch and timbre. The original song is often wholly fragmented, appearing in glimpses through Smythe’s abstract, shifting improvisations as if etched in smoked glass.  

Funk Poems for “Bird”
Timuçin Şahin’s Flow State
Panoramic Recordings pan27 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue/timucin-sahins-flow-state-funk-poems-for-bird)

Timuçin Şahin is a Turkish guitarist currently teaching at New York University; his Funk Poems for Bird is a series of pieces dedicated to the musical spirit of Charlie Parker. This in itself is not unusual, but in 2022, forays into jazz history can grow increasingly exploratory. This is one of them. Şahin’s Flow State, meanwhile, is an ideal complement. Bassist Reggie Washington and drummer Sean Rickman are a masterful rhythm section adept at numerous jazz sub-genres. Here they provide coolly abstracted versions of funk grooves, while pianist Cory Smythe adds his own edgy vision.

Şahin pushes Parker’s thematic material further than most, both backwards into its modernist classical associations (Schoenberg and Varèse) and forward into the work of Parker’s most brilliant successor, John Coltrane. Şahin’s vision is built into his instrument and his approach. Here he plays a double-neck guitar, one a conventional fretted six-string, the other a fretless seven-string, the latter facilitating sudden shifts into quarter tones. Further, Şahin rarely plays anything resembling a conventional line, instead favouring swarms of notes, polyvocal lines that coil and slither amongst themselves, whether swimming amidst Washington and Rickman’s cool backbeats or matching Smythe’s explosive playing, here in a voice somewhere between Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor. 

The time-travelling Bird Watchers has it all, from its roots in Parker’s Ornithology to Şahin’s back-and-forth movement between fretted and fretless necks to Smythe’s technologically altered piano pitch, knit together with a slightly wobbly funk beat.

Listen to 'Funk Poems for 'Bird'' Now in the Listening Room

The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism
Tyshawn Sorey Trio +1 with Greg Osby
Pi Recordings P196 (pirecordings.com)

On his preceding recording, Mesmerism, drummer/ composer Tyshawn Sorey turned from his more esoteric composing practice to stress jazz performance traditions, a conventional instrumental grouping exploring a standard, but expandable, repertoire. Here that notion has grown from a single studio session and a piano trio to nearly four hours with brilliant saxophonist Greg Osby joining Sorey, pianist Andrew Diehl (the star of Mesmerism) and bassist Russell Hall, recorded over three nights at New York’s Jazz Gallery. 

It’s a mode that’s rarely heard on record (where composer royalties are an issue), though it’s the lifeblood of the jazz club, a concentrated dialogue around a common repertoire, though here broader than usual. Its thematic bases include American Songbook titles (Cole Porter’s Night and Day, Van Heusen and Burke’s It Could Happen to You) to earlier jazz forms (Fats Waller’s Jitterbug Waltz, Billy Strayhorn’s Chelsea Bridge) to bop and free jazz (Thelonious Monk’s Ask Me Now to Andrew Hill’s Ashes and Ornette Coleman’s Mob Job), several heard in different forms from different nights.   

The performances brim with life. Osby is central here, whether broadly lyrical or pressing toward expressionist intensity, generating continuous lines that accommodate themselves to the varied material but have a life of their own. This celebrates the core jazz experience, a small group exploring the melodic and harmonic possibilities, the expressive resonances and collective meanings of a song at length (20 minutes in the case of Three Little Words). It’s a contemporary embodiment of a great tradition.

Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams
Satoko Fujii
Libra Records 209-071 (librarecords.com)

Hyaku, One Hundred Dreams is pianist/composer Satoko Fujii’s 100th CD as leader and a fitting celebration of her remarkable career, launched in 1996 with duets with Paul Bley. Among images of her first 99 works, South Wind, the fourth, leaps out, its title track figuring significantly for me during 20 years of teaching jazz history. Based on an Okinawan mode, it combines dramatic energy and pacific beauty, embodying what jazz has increasingly become, an inclusivist art alive to local dialects and the possibility of global values. 

The contrasts, too, are dramatic, reflecting how much has changed. South Wind’s big band was conventional, with sections of trumpets, trombones, reeds and rhythm instruments, with Fujii the sole woman among 15 musicians; Hyaku is a nonet with individual emphases on both instruments and musicians, its ensemble almost evenly split between women and men. Further, Hyaku’s five-part suite blurs composed and improvised components. 

From its beginning, Hyaku introduces essential qualities in Fujii’s music, the subtly organic shape of her initial piano figures, the landscape-like incidental percussion, the dream-like flow state and an undercurrent of welling energy. Each movement will extend a continuum with what has gone before, theme statements, improvised solos and ensemble passages achieving rare homogeneity. Each member of a brilliant ensemble will appear in the foreground, from trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith and Natsuki Tamura through bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, electronic musician Ikue Mori and bassist Brandon Lopez to drummers Tom Rainey and Chris Corsano.

Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite
Jason Yeager Septet w/Miguel Zenón
Sunnyside Records SSC 1672 (sunnysiderecords.bandcamp.com/album/unstuck-in-time-the-kurt-vonnegut-suite)

Kurt Vonnegut was a satirist, science fiction writer and outsized personality who is still quoted and revered long after his death. The pianist and composer Jason Yeager has been a huge fan for years and had composed several jazz pieces inspired by Vonnegut’s writing. Unstuck in Time (named after Billy Pilgrim’s condition in Slaughterhouse-Five) is a compilation of these pieces released to honour the author’s 100th birthday. 

All the works are lively, build off Vonnegut’s idiosyncratic narratives and characters and utilize Yeager’s septet which, in addition to the rhythm section, contains combinations of saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, trombone and vibraphone. Blues for Billy Pilgrim has a wistful feeling, with a Thelonious Monk-like melody with a rowdy trumpet solo. Bokonon opens with a delightful hip-hop vibe and features a vivacious staccato alto sax performance by Miguel Zenón. Kilgore’s Creed begins with the band chanting (from the novel Timequake) “You were sick, but now you are well again and there’s work to do” before working into a jazz polka rhythm, overlaid with excellent ensemble playing and solos. 

Unstuck in Time is everything Vonnegut would have loved: eclectic and sensitive compositions and performances that show how jazz can have a lot of fun while paying homage to an artistic hero.

Heyday
RJ LeBlanc
MCM; Bent River Records; Diese Onze Records (rjleblanc.bandcamp.com)

The embodiment of smoothness, Heyday has the fluidity of a living organism, with nary a transition feeling contrived and a staggering level of sonic detail. Into The Sun is a composition that takes calculated risks while never coming across as arrogant. Each metre and tempo change is seamless, without clear delineations necessary in terms of solo sections versus premeditated grooves. In the track’s third and fourth minutes, the synth ostinato slows to a halt, but the momentum of the music isn’t compromised, as it either punctuates a backdrop of thunderous percussion or brings the song to a close. 

Montreal bassist RJ LeBlanc as a session leader is dazzlingly adept at precisely that: taking one simple musical element and finding a thousand different uses for it. In a less overt way, the way LeBlanc incorporates harmonics on his bass in the mesmerizing emotional core track Chanson pour Marguerite is quite fascinating. Extended passages employing harmonics are used in the beginning as a means of introducing the primary melodic figure, used as an interlude connecting sections, and then underneath the guitar (Nicolas Ferron) to create a climatically uplifting ambient soundscape. Meanwhile, this album perhaps shines brightest when LeBlanc brings along the entire ensemble, with Saturnales in particular being a dizzyingly dense achievement of married sound. The track, like the album itself, is an exploration of ingenuity and how invigorating it can be to have friends to realize your ideas.

Songwriter
Alex Bird; Ewen Farncombe
Independent (alexbird007.bandcamp.com)

Alex Bird doesn’t need an accompanist. With a single phrase, the directness of his voice conveys so much emotional information, that even the most silent seconds have an unshakeable sense of fulfillment to them. Pianist Ewen Farncombe, knowing this, gives Bird plenty of voids to work with. There’s an endearing ebb and flow to their tandem, like the cordial exchange of shared dance, a conversation, a flurry of interjections or two shopping carts gracefully rolling across a lot. There are moments where each musician almost sounds like they’re crafting an independent piece. 

Such is the case in the closing minute of Symphony of Love, with Bird’s loose reframing of the melody evasively circling around Farncombe’s increasingly zestful comping. There are magical moments where each musician sounds like they’re completing the other’s ideas before they’re conceived. Such is the case in the closing minute of the aptly titled I’ll Go Where You Lead, with Farncombe’s thoroughly intentional calls concerning how the beginnings of each phrase coincide with Bird’s. Fact is, there are magical moments everywhere to be had on this album, because Bird is in control of his songwriting craft and Farncombe is as adaptable and willing an accompanist as they come. Bird’s vocals may not need an accompanist to make profoundly interesting and layered music, but Farncombe expands what is possible in that regard. The sum here far exceeds its parts.

Listen to 'Songwriter' Now in the Listening Room

Hooked
Dizzy & Fay
Independent (dizzyandfay.com)

Dizzy & Fay are at it again. With Hooked, their second release in just two years (thanks lockdowns!), the duo (keyboardist, songwriter, arranger and producer Mark Lalama and Juno-nominated singer and songwriter Amanda Walther) continues to build its persona, reminiscent of smoky jazz clubs, late nights and one too many martinis.

Hooked ventures beyond the duo and their considerable playing and singing skills though, with arrangements rich with woodwinds (Johnny Johnson) horns (William Carn and Jason Logue) drums (Davide DiRenzo) and bass (Rich Moore). The City of Prague Philharmonic even makes a couple of appearances and Drew Jurecka’s orchestrations on those tracks really shine.

As great as all of those accoutrements are, what draws us in most is the songwriting. Inspired by the Great American Songbook, Lalama and Walther have given us a set of songs that are both lyrically and musically strong and stylized, yet heartfelt. Themes of love and longing dominate but no modern album is complete, it seems, without at least one song about the pandemic and I’m Alright elegantly shrugs it all off while Good News cleverly evokes the strange mix of ennui, despair and coziness many of us felt. Hooked is playful and cool but will break your heart if you let it. 

(The duo’s virtual world, the Dizzy & Fay Speakeasy, complete with tour dates and merch, can be explored at dizzyandfay.com.)

Listen to 'Hooked' Now in the Listening Room

Song
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
Decca B0036196-02 (deccaclassics.com/en/artists/sheku-kanneh-mason)

Since winning BBC Young Musician in 2017 cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason has been much in demand from every musical quarter, traversing a road to glory, the envy of many musicians, some twice – even three times – his age. It is now safe to say that the music world is Kanneh-Mason’s oyster, albeit with room to spare for all his über-gifted siblings.  

But the cellist has – to all intents and purposes – pride of place in music’s rarefied realm. His Shostakovich First Cello Concerto unearthed real depth. From evidence of his various Decca recordings he seems to have soaked up every experience in the glitz and gush of what you might call his formative years. At the time of reviewing Song, with its repertoire culled from the classical and the popular, and from secular and sacred pieces, Kanneh-Mason is set to perform his interpretation of Elgar’s monumental Cello Concerto in E Minor Op.85 – a work long held out of bounds because of Jacqueline du Pré’s iconic 1962 recording – with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. (Unfortunately, that will have taken place by time of publication.)

However, Song amplifies the truth that Kanneh-Mason may have inherited Du Pré’s crown. The freshly radiant interpretation of Beethoven’s Variations on Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words (both also feature his brilliant pianist-sister, Isata), Stravinsky’s Chanson russe and Bach’s sacred music are spectacular. But Same Boat, a song composed by Kanneh-Mason (with vocalist Zak Abel) is the album’s apogee. In this simple song lies notice of Kanneh-Mason’s glowing compositional genius. 

My America 2: Destinations
Jim Self; Various Artists
Basset Hound Music (bassethoundmusic.com)

Unless you’ve been living in a cave with no access to media for the past 40 years, you have heard the tuba playing of Jim Self. A legendary fixture in Hollywood recording studios, he has performed on countless sessions for film and television and is probably best known for his performance as the “Voice of the Mothership” from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And all the while, Self has maintained an impressive “live” career in many groups, including the Los Angeles Opera, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, as a jazz musician and a celebrated tuba soloist.

His latest solo release, My America 2: Destinations (a sequel to My America released 20 years ago) is a jazzy romp through places in the USA that have been important to him throughout his long career. (As the cover states: “We hold these tunes to be SELF-evident.” Cute.) It goes without saying that Self’s solo tuba playing is amazing and his backup band made up of top LA studio musicians is as tight as one would expect, but what makes this album memorable are the arrangements by his longtime friend, Kim Scharnberg. His eclectic, inventive writing, his creative scoring (and, of course, Self’s stellar tuba playing) will have me returning to this disc time and time again.

i’d Love to Turn…
John Oswald
fony (pfony.bandcamp.com/album/id-love-to-turn)

Prolific Canadian composer/performer John Oswald is back with an illustrious, boundary-crashing release, dedicated to Phil Strong. Four main tracks are online streaming, with additional five bonus tracks. videos and main track PDF scores for downloading.

The main four tracks are Oswald’s self-described plunderphonic Rascali Klepitoire/hybrids combining elements from live-performance recordings with studio-based additions and plunderphonic transformations, primarily focused on music he discovered in the mid-1960s. Fee Fie Foe Fum is complex, surprisingly easy listening based on the 1966 pop hit, and Oswald’s research between Frank Zappa’s first album release and Edgard Varèse’s death. Familiar tidbits are superimposed into fragmented short upbeat modern sounds. 

The BBC orchestral commission I’d Love to Turn… quotes The Beatles, Ligeti and Terry Riley. This studio recreation combines orchestral sounds with electronics, creating new music embedded in popular music. 

Oswald quotes from around 40 piano scores in brief fragments, up to four simultaneously, in the Marc-André Hamelin solo piano commission Tip (2022). A calm, classical-flavoured opening leads to chords, flourishes, runs and rhythms. Love the evocative high-pitched ringing sections. 

Varèse, Zappa and 1960s music are featured in reFuse. Oswald’s ear-catching talent to keep a work moving with fragmented interchanging, superimposed live instruments and electronic quotes and effects drive this “name that tune” work. Bonus tracks highlights are live Hamelin rehearsal Tip, and Turning Point Ensemble reFuse performances. Oswald reinvents Ligeti, Zappa and Varèse each separately on three additional tracks.

The more one listens to Oswald’s memorable music here, the more one hears and loves.

Perhaps it’s related to the storied freedom of 1920s Paris where a Black entertainer like Josephine Baker could become a superstar, or the French pre-and-post Second World War intellectuals who wrote learnedly about jazz when it was still scorned in North America, but improvised music in France took longer to assert its own national identity than in other countries. With successive waves of foreign musicians making their homes there, local musicians became the most proficient Europeans playing styles ranging from Dixieland to Hard Bop. That has changed for the better since the 1970s. Since free jazz/improvised music accepted musical influences from all over, unique Gallic sounds began coming to the forefront. Folkloric influences from the countryside, advanced notated and electric/acoustic experiments and melodies from France’s former colonies became accepted. As these discs demonstrate, while it’s impossible to exactly define jazz from France, in its best iteration it’s certainly not an imitation of North American models.

Along with others such as Jacques Thollot and François Tusques, keyboardist Jef Gilson (1926-2012) was one of the first Gallic musicians to incorporate free improvisations into straight-ahead jazz. However, by 1974 when Workshop (Souffle Continu FFL 075 CD soufflecontinurecords.com) was recorded, his music was individual since it was also influenced by the ethnic sounds Gilson had heard and played during an extended Madagascar sojourn. The two lengthy tracks here reflect that. On one hand co-leader alto saxophonist Philippe Maté (1939-2002), projects the multiphonic sweeps of spiritual free jazz while percussionists, bassists and keyboardists create a highly rhythmic underpinning that propels and accents the narratives. Bruno Di Gioia’s baying English horn adds another element to the extended Vision, while his and Maurice Bouhana’s dual flute interludes contribute Third World hues to both tracks, amplified by drum pounding, cow bell whacks, cymbal shaking and keyboard glissandi. The varied keyboards played by Gilson and Pierre Moret also serve as linkage between percussion rhythm and Maté’s unfettered free jazz. Moving among spiky bites, energetic overblowing and smeared multiphonics, the saxophonist’s output frequently ascends to prestissimo and staccato timbres. Juddering rumbles from one electric keyboard keeps the saxophonist from straying too far from the exposition in those cases, and Gilson’s jazz-inflected electric piano accents complement lyrical asides in the saxophonist’s more relaxed moments.

Jump forward almost five decades and this electro/acoustic mixture is also expressed by 40-year-old  pianist Eve Risser. Except in this case the polyrhythmic weaving expressed by her eight-part suite on Eurythmia (Clean Feed CF 609 CD cleanfeed-records.com) is interpreted by the 12-piece Red Desert Orchestra instead of Gilson’s septet. Its classic sound is achieved by adding specific modulations played by African and Levantine qarqabas, balafons, djembes and baras to the orchestra’s Western electric and acoustic instruments. Although some of the tracks are more so-called European and some more so-called ethnic, creative melding is the most prominent take away. In fact, it’s the concluding Soyayya which puts this in the boldest relief. Picking up the relentless percussion beats of the previous track, with dancing cross rhythms and balafon strokes most prominent, harmonized riffs from the five-piece horn section are heard as speckled electronic oscillations also come to the fore. As the percussion pops and shakes continue, Antonin-Tri Hoang’s alto saxophone takes apart and reconnects the theme with fluttering squeals. Finally, these and other textures fade into Tatiana Paris’ lyrical guitar coda. Later her voice along with Risser’s harmonize with the reeds on Desert Rouge providing balance to the bent notes and multiple cross rhythms from the percussionists, while trumpeter Nils Ostendorf and trombonist Mathias Müller blow mariachi-like triplets that settle on top of the undulating groove. Ever present, the surging percussion raps are prominent throughout the disc. Yet between pianist Risser’s carefully positioned repeated patterns and chording control, the performances are prevented from becoming techno-trance music. Furthermore, in spite of standout solos, especially from Müller on Gämse, which blasts up the scale and down again with an emphasized collection of half-valve slurs, slides, shakes and plunger grumbles, Eurythmia never becomes a singular jazz-improv session, but inhabits its own idiosyncratic niche.

More attuned to expected improvisation is the quintet of pianist Cécile Cappozzo on Hymne d’automne (Ayler aylCD 179 ayler.com), six tracks which blend into one another to make a suite. With the rare ability to compose tunes that are both dulcet and daring – often on the same track – Cappozzo’s themes are interpreted by tenor saxophonist Guillaume Bellanger, bassist Patrice Grente, drummer Etienne Ziemniak and her father, trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo. Not that there’s any nepotism or favouritism here. The elder Cappozzo, who in the past has collaborated with other pioneering French improvisers like Daunik Lazro, is versatile enough to efficiently put his daughter’s ideas into action. Often, as on the title track, the two Cappozzos outline a skeleton theme consisting of single-note keyboard clips and portamento brass grace notes only to have the rest of the band interject flamboyant dissonance in the form of reed slides into flattement and blunt pops and smacks from the bassist and drummer. As the exposition turns energetic, Jean-Luc Cappozzo joins the fray with emphasized triplets and flutters in counterpoint to Bellanger’s strained mid-range split tones until guitar-like strums from Grente return the performance to a reflective narrative. This strategy continues throughout, culminating with the concluding Hymne d’automne (reprise). In that case, rapid drum paradiddles and breaks introduce the meeting of the trumpeter’s triplet peeps with the saxophonist’s slap tonguing and reed bites. Finally, a calming piano portion doubled by bass string pumps moves the players to a moderated sequence that also reprises the title track’s reflective beginning. Don’t assume that Cécile Cappozzo is deferring to the elders, however. On the extended Dance what elsewhere is emphasized as processional comping almost immediately turns into a kaleidoscope of arching piano chords and dense key clips. Eventually she propels the narrative to a stop-time swing feel, toughened by drum breaks. In the horn responses, including downward flowing reed multiphonics and half-valve growls, her lyrical glissandi mean the tune retains a relaxed Sunday-in-the-park feeling despite the dissonance sprayed around its resolution. 

Just as French chefs added new ingredients to create nouvelle cuisine and other forward-looking fare, so a group like Die Hochstapler does so with its music on Within (Umlaut TSCD3 umlautrecords.com). The reason for the German name, translated as The Impostors, is that Italian bassist Antonio Borghini and German drummer/vibist Hannes Lingens live in Berlin where these two instant compositions were recorded. Meanwhile, the front line of alto saxophonist Pierre Borel and Louis Laurain, who contributes trumpet, bird calls and vocal sounds, are as French as Camembert. Although the lineup is consistent with contemporary jazz groups, the POMO mélange the quartet creates bounces along echoing Free Jazz, classic jazz, jazz-rock, bebop and touches of swing at various tempos without losing the linear thread. Often moving in and out of focus, each member is spotlighted. For instance, Borghini, responsible for bouncy, andante tracking throughout, has a string thumb pop and walking bass line feature on Part 2 backed by aviary cackles from the horns. On the same piece Lingens uses backbeats, ruffs and rim shots to harmonize with the others, who begin the piece with rhythmic hand clapping and later intensify the bop quotes from soloists. Leaving his aviary excursions to a minimum, Laurain usually expresses himself with half-valve intensity or ornate triplets, with quotes as likely to reference Dixieland warhorse When The Saints… as Ornette Coleman’s Focus on Sanity. Usually though his elevated peeps and plunger tones move in a linear fashion and dovetail into Borel’s reed expression. This is particularly notable during Part 1, when following a continuous drone of sax honks and brass triplets, the two slow the pace and for 60 seconds, minutely examine every tone variable possible. As for Borel, whether it’s speedy bebop riffs or hearty Jazz-Rock-like quotes, his flutter tonguing, honks and altissimo smears always lock into the overall groove, even if he has to project and thicken tongue slaps to prod bird-call squeaks into cohesion. It may have German and Italian spicing but overall Within becomes a perfect French dish.

Listen to 'Within' Now in the Listening Room

So too does Dernier Tango (Jazzdor Series 13 jazzdor.com). Yet while the repast is the product of only two cooks, alto/baritone saxophonist Christophe Monniot and guitarist Marc Ducret, there are enough local and international ingredients during its 12 tracks for musical nourishment. Eschewing the controversial eroticism of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film, the two still project a bouncy dance beat, not only on the title track, but on other numbers where syncopation lightens the performance. Ducret’s this-side-of-metal harsh flanges and jagged runs are emphasized on tunes such as Chant/Son and Back Train with various motifs in the exposition. Meantime, Monniot, who at one point was a member of l’Orchestre National de Jazz, knows exactly how to accentuate the compositions, either with broken chord vibrations from the alto or scooping continuum from the baritone sax. He does both in sequence on many tracks, preserving the storytelling in counterpoint to the guitarist’s up and down clangs and flanges. Most of the time however, as demonstrated on the introductory Yes Igor and the brief concluding La Lettre du Caire, his intersectional reed vamps and flattement travel in lockstep with guitar fuzztones and hardened strums. In these cases and elsewhere the result is a moderated ending. Quiet connection is often ascendent as well. The best illustration of this is on A Sign of Mood, where Ducret’s folksy frailing on 12-string guitar is decelerated in tempo by reed scoops, leading to a melding of sonic strands.  

With the varieties of jazz and improvised music now as numerous as there are types of wine, it’s impossible to delineate one particular French style. One thing is certain however: a dependence on North American idioms is part of the past.

At the beginning of 2022, Supraphon released a 15CD box set of Karel Ančerl Live Recordings with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (supraphon.com). Unearthed from the Czech radio archives, this collection includes some previously unpublished recordings making this set a must-have for collectors of one the 20th century’s greatest conductors. All will recognize the orchestra’s signature sound and be thrilled with this collection of music from well-known names and many little-known Czech composers.  

Ančerl was born into a prosperous family in Czechoslovakia in 1908. Very well educated, after graduating from the Prague Conservatory he pursued conducting under the tutelage of Hermann Scherchen and Václav Talich. His career was halted for World War II. He and his family were sent to a concentration camp in 1942, and ultimately to Auschwitz. Tragically his wife and young son did not survive.  

After the war he became artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic where he stayed for 18 illustrious years. While there, he established the orchestra as one of the world’s premier ensembles and won them international fame with frequent extensive concert tours abroad and numerous recordings on the Czech Supraphon label. He is still credited with establishing the distinctive Czech sound. He was well known as a great champion of the music of his homeland as well as for his broad repertoire of modern music. 

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 resulted in his emigration to Toronto. He had been a guest conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra the year before, in 1967. He was immediately appointed permanent music director of the TSO and remained there until his death at age 65 in 1973. His death was attributed to illnesses resulting from his time in prison camps in WWII. 

Now to the music! Many of you will already be familiar with some of his many studio recordings but this collection of concert recordings, wonderfully remastered, offers us music, from a wide range of composers including the conductor’s contemporaries, that was never recorded in the studio. There is one exception, Ma Vlast which Ančerl did record in studio. These concerts were recorded between 1949 and 1968 including the Prague Spring Festival concert in May 1968 just prior to his departure to Toronto. 

I’ve been happily making my way through these discs and have found that there were many outstanding performances.  

I particularly enjoyed Vítězslav Novák’s (1870-1949) Pan (Symphonic Poem), Op.43. It’s a very exciting and dramatic piece of music written in 1910. His Autumn Symphony for chorus and orchestra is also included. Both pieces I have not had the pleasure to enjoy until now. 

This new collection manages to fill gaps left in Ančerl’s studio recordings. Dvořák Symphonies Nos. 7 & 8 as well as world-renowned repertoire of the 20th century, notably Debussy, Ravel, Strauss and Prokofiev. One is left wondering if there was anything that Ančerl couldn’t do, conducting such diverse composers all with a profound understanding of the music. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra is joined by the orchestra’s choir as well as numerous admired soloists. 

This box set comes with very richly detailed annotations, much thanks to Petr Kadlec. Although the sound quality varies, this is to be expected of detailed mono concert and radio recordings.

I cannot remember my first encounter with the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams but through the years his music has never failed to speak to me. SOMM Recordings has issued Volume 1 of a proposed series of Vaughan Williams Live, commemorating the 150th anniversary of his birth (somm-recordings.com/label/Ariadne) with performances conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. This first volume contains Symphony No.6 in E Minor, played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1964) and a brilliant Symphony No.9 in E Minor played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded in Royal Festival Hall in 1958. As expected of Sargent, this is a scintillating and definitive performance. This is the premiere of the Ninth Symphony written not long before Williams’ death in 1958. The cover photograph is of Sargent and the composer discussing the performance during rehearsal. It gives me chills knowing that Vaughan Williams was so intimately involved in this recording.

The opening work on this disc is a wonderful performance of a very exciting The Wasps Overture, recorded live in Royal Albert Hall by the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1957. Once again kudos to Lani Spahr the American musician and award-winning audio engineer whose astonishing true-to-life restorations really capture the sounds of the dynamic original audio.

Many years ago, when Decca completed The Golden Ring, Wagner’s mammoth Ring of the Nibelungen with the Wiener Philharmoniker under the direction of Sir Georg Solti, there was some concern about just how many copies they would sell. The story goes that the Americans’ first order saved the day. Decca need not have worried as The Golden Ring was ultimately “the big hit” and has been selling well for them ever since. The original analogue master tapes were remastered in 2022 with engineers using all the technological advancements to extract more information from the original tapes and using the latest noise reduction software they have been able to achieve the truest possible sound. For this we are eternally grateful. If this single disc is any indication of the anticipated complete Ring Cycle we are in for some incredible listening. Decca has produced a beautifully packaged single disc of Great Scenes from Der Ring des Nibelungen (deccaclassics.com/en/catalogue/products/the-golden-ring-solti-12797) with choice pieces from each of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. The complete Wagner Ring Cycle is being released as individual operas on SACD and vinyl as well as in complete sets on both platforms.     

The cast really is golden, with too many names to list. I would single out Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde, James King as Siegmund, Christa Ludwig as Fricka and Wolfgang Windgassen as Siegfried. Don’t come after me if I have failed to mention your favourite. The entire cast of all four operas is really first class.

Listening to these well-chosen excerpts has whetted my appetite for the complete set! [Editor’s note: At time of publication both Das Rheingold and Die Walküre are available from deccaclassics.com with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung to be released in the coming months.]

A new set of live performances recorded between 1953 and 1972 of Christian Ferras has been issued on four CDs by SWR Recordings (SWR 19114 prestomusic.com/classical/products/9329040--the-swr-recordings-christian-ferras-plays-violin-concertos-and-chamber-music). Ferras was renowned as the finest violinist of his day. He was an artist who seemed deeply in touch with the composer and profoundly felt the music beyond just the score. 

I remember seeing a video of a live performance and as he played the tears rolled down his face. 

These discs are all recordings of Ferras with the SWR Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg. Whether with orchestra or in chamber music his playing reflects his wonderful musical sensibilities. Ferras plays with beauty and harmony. I admit to being very moved listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op.61, however, all pieces are played with incomparable musicality and thoughtfulness. The set includes Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Enescu, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Berg. The chamber music for violin and piano is with Pierre Barbizet. Again, the remastering has been done from the original tapes and sounds as if it were recorded yesterday. 

Violinist Hilary Hahn was planning to record the Dvořák Violin Concerto in A Minor Op.53 with Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, pairing it with Alberto Ginastera’s Violin Concerto Op.30, which she had yet to learn, and Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, which she loved but had never played, when the COVID outbreak put plans on hold. In the booklet notes to Eclipse, the resulting album, Hahn discusses the emotional journey through lockdowns and personal doubts that finally bore fruit (Deutsche Grammophon 486 2383 deutschegrammophon.com/en/artists/hilaryhahn/hilary-hahn-eclipse-2225).

The Dvořák concerto was live streamed from the orchestra’s hall at the radio station in March 2021, with no audience. It’s a beautifully expansive and committed performance; “Our playing,” says Hahn ”was vivid and palpably redemptive.”

The June concert at the Alte Oper hall’s reopening also marked Orozco-Estrada’s farewell as music director as well as Hahn’s personal premiere of the other two works. The challenging Ginastera concerto, which Hahn calls “nearly unplayable” is a fascinating and unusually structured work that draws an exceptional performance from all involved; the Carmen Fantasy is played with suitable brilliance.

A new CD of music by Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann presents a quite outstanding performance of the Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A Minor Op.102 featuring violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and cellist Pablo Ferrández in a live January 2022 Prague concert recording with the Czech Philharmonic under Manfred Honeck. It’s paired with a studio recording of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio in G Minor Op.17, where Lambert Orkis is the pianist (Sony Classical 196587411022 sonyclassical.com/news/news-details/anne-sophie-mutter-and-pablo-ferrandez-1).

Mutter’s playing in the Brahms is a revelation, her tone, phrasing and dynamics in the opening movement in particular all contributing to one of the most beautiful renditions I’ve heard. Ferrández, who incidentally plays two Stradivarius cellos on the disc is an equal partner throughout. 

Orkis adds his own special talents to a captivating performance of the Schumann trio to round out a superb CD. Concert note: Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Mutter Virtuosi perform on Tuesday, February 7 at Roy Thomson Hall.

Pianist Yuja Wang is joined by cellist Gautier Capuçon and clarinettist Andreas Ottensamer on a CD of Works by Sergei Rachmaninoff & Johannes Brahms (Deutsche Grammophon 486 2388 deutschegrammophon.com/en/artists/yujawang).

Wang and Capuçon have been playing together since the 2013 Verbier Festival, and Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata in G Minor Op.19 was part of that debut recital. The quality of their playing and ensemble work here is of the highest order.

There are two works by Brahms. Capuçon brings a warm, deep tone to the Cello Sonata in E Minor Op.38, with Wang’s empathetic accompaniment a real joy. Ottensamer, the principal clarinet with the Berlin Philharmonic joins for the Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114 – not as frequently heard as the Clarinet Quintet Op.115, perhaps, but a real gem.

The Vivaldi Edition, the ongoing project to record some 450 works by Vivaldi in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, reaches its 69th volume with Vivaldi Concerti per violino X ‘Intorno a Pisendel’, with Julien Chauvin as soloist and director of Le Concert de la Loge (Naive OP 7546 bfan.link/vivaldi-concerti-per-violino-x-intorno-a-pisendel)

The six works here are all linked to the virtuoso violinist Johann Georg Pisendel (1687-1755), a major figure at the Dresden court who met Vivaldi in Venice on a court visit in 1716-17 and became a friend and pupil. Pisendel copied many of Vivaldi’s works and also received several dedicated manuscripts.

Three of the concertos – RV237 in D Minor, RV314 in G Major and RV340 in A Major – are from the dedicated manuscripts, and three – RV225 in D Major, RV226 in D Major and RV369 in B-flat Major – are from Pisendel’s hand-written copies. All are three-movement works with Allegro outer movements and Largo or Andante middle movements.

Chauvin is outstanding, his bright, clear tone, faultless intonation and virtuosic agility perfectly backed by the resonance and effective dynamics of the orchestra, all beautifully recorded. And yes, a lot sounds like The Four Seasons, but there’s a continual freshness to the music that makes each concerto a real delight.

Listen to 'Vivaldi Concerti per violino X ‘Intorno a Pisendel’' Now in the Listening Room

In 1997 violinist Rachel Barton Pine recorded four Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries with conductor Daniel Hege and the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Encore Chamber Orchestra. To mark the 25th anniversary of its release Cedille has reissued three of the original recordings on Violin Concertos by Black Composers Through the Centuries (Cedille CDR 9000 214 cedillerecords.org).

Included are the Violin Concerto in A Major Op.5 No.2 (c.1775) by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the Violin Concerto in F-sharp Minor (1864) by George Enescu’s teacher José White Lafitte (1836-1918) and the 1899 Romance in G Major by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose violin concerto wouldn’t fit on the original album. The original fourth work has been replaced by a new recording of Florence Price’s 1952 Violin Concerto No.2, with Jonathon Heyward conducting the Royal National Scottish Orchestra.

The Saint-Georges is an absolute gem with a glorious slow movement, the Lafitte a standard mid-19th century virtuosic Romantic concerto very much in the Max Bruch Germanic mould, but none-the-less effective for that. The Coleridge-Taylor is a lush melodic piece, again very much of its time.

Price’s music has been getting a great deal of attention recently. The concerto here is a rather uneven single-movement work with a truly lovely recurring hymn-tune melody but contrasting material that occasionally approaches the banal. Her orchestration can seem somewhat amateurish at times, probably more reflective of a personal sound and style than any lack of craft.

Performances throughout are top notch.

The UK-based Jubilee Quartet is in superb form on Schubert String Quartets, with outstanding performances of quartets from each end of the composer’s career (Rubicon Classics RCD1082 rubiconclassics.com).

The String Quartet in E-flat Major D87 was written when Schubert was only 16, but was already his tenth quartet. It’s light and joyful, with an all-to-be-expected song-like quality, beautifully captured here.

The String Quartet in G Major D887 from 1826, Schubert’s 15th and final quartet is a large-scale, groundbreaking masterpiece, the equal of the late Beethoven quartets. Words used in the booklet notes to describe its extreme emotions include dramatic, violent, painful, menacing, introverted and innocent. There’s a terrific range of dynamics and of touch and sensitivity in a quite remarkable performance of a quite remarkable work.

A warm, crystal-clear recorded sound captures every nuance.

Another really impressive quartet disc is Reflections, on which the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam presents works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Grażyna Bacewicz, two composers who often masked their true feelings in their music (Rubicon Classics RCD1099 rubiconclassics.com).

Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.5 in B-flat Major, Op.92 was written in 1952, four years after the composer’s second denunciation in the infamous 1948 Zhdanov decree; it’s given a deeply perceptive and emotional reading here. Five of his 24 Preludes Op.34 for piano from 1933 are heard in really effective arrangements for string quartet.

The String Quartet No.4 by Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz was written in 1951, with the booklet notes suggesting the influence of the oppression of the Polish people by the Soviet regime in the late 1940s; its frequent folk music references, however, made it acceptable to the authorities. It’s another deeply felt reading of a very strong work.

There’s another CD of the Telemann: Fantasias for Solo Violin, this time by the outstanding Alina Ibragimova (Hyperion CDA68384 hyperion-records.co.uk/a.asp?a=A1677).

The 12 short works, described here as amply justifying the high repute in which Telemann was held, are deceptively easy-looking on the printed page, but don’t be fooled. The 1968 Bärenreiter edition stated that they were intended “for the amateur or the instrumental student” but also noted that “the double-stopping and chordal work can naturally only be tackled by a competent player.” Well, there’s an Understatement of the Year winner for you. 

The 12 Fantasias, in 11 different keys, display a variety of different moods, never deeply emotional but never facile or shallow either; even the shortest sections – some only a few bars in length – display taste and craft.

Always in complete technical control, Ibragimova simply dances through them, seemingly enjoying every minute to the fullest.

L’Aurore is the first solo album by German violinist Carolin Widmann for the ECM New Series label ECM 2709 ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1647418055).

Hildegard von Bingen’s Spiritus sanctus vivificans opens the CD and also reappears later in a slightly different take. George Enescu’s brilliant Fantaisie concertante from 1932, which should surely be better known, is followed by the Three Miniatures from 2002 by George Benjamin (b.1960) and a really striking performance of Ysaÿe’s Sonata No.5 in G Major Op.27.

A contemplative performance of Bach’s Partita No.2 in D Minor BWV1004 ends an excellent disc. Nothing is rushed, and Widmann is never too strict rhythmically, the intelligent use of slight stresses and stretched phrasing injecting life into every movement.

Violinist Emmanuele Baldini and violist Claudio Cruz are the performers on Mozart and Pleyel Duos for Violin and Viola (Azul Music AMDA1781 azulmusic.com.br).

The two Mozart pieces, both of three movements, are the Duos for Violin & Viola in G Major K423 and in B-flat Major K424. The work by Pleyel, a student of Haydn and a direct contemporary of Mozart (he was born a year later but outlived Mozart by 40 years) is his Three Grand Duets for Violin and Viola Op.69 Nos.1-3. The first two duets have two movements and the third three.

There’s nothing earth-shattering here, just some beautifully competent music given stylish and sympathetic performances by two excellent players.

Driftwood is the second album released by the Calgary-based guitarist Ben Lahring, with six of the 11 tracks his own compositions (Alliance Entertainment 198004147064 benlahring.com).

Liona Boyd’s really nice Lullaby for My Love opens the disc, with short pieces by William Beauvais, Seymour Bernstein, Graeme Koehne and a Miguel Llobet arrangement of a traditional Catalan melody balancing the original Lahring compositions – the three-movement Firstborn of the Dead, Over the Pacific, Fair Winds and Following Seas and the title track.

There’s clean playing with lovely tone and colour in an attractive and fairly low-key program that doesn’t vary much in style, sound or mood. 

Finally, two updates on previously-reviewed Beethoven series:

My May review of the digital release of the first volume of the complete music for cello and piano by the Montreal-based duo of cellist Yegor Dyachkov and pianist Jean Saulnier noted that a 3CD physical set was to be released in October, and it’s here: Beethoven Intégrale des Sonates et variations pour violoncelle et piano (ATMA Classique ACD2 2431 atmaclassique.com/en).

I previously described the playing as “intelligent and beautifully nuanced, promising great things for the works still to be released,” and the complete set more than fulfills that promise. Outstanding playing and a superb recorded sound quality make this set hard to equal, let alone surpass.

Listen to 'Beethoven Intégrale des Sonates et variations pour violoncelle et piano' Now in the Listening Room

The Dover Quartet completes its set of Beethoven Complete String Quartets with Volume 3 The Late Quartets (Cedille CDR 90000 215 cedillerecords.org).

This final 3CD issue features the String Quartets No.12 in E-flat Major Op.127, No.13 in B-flat Major Op.130, No.14 in C-sharp Minor Op.131, No.15 in A Minor Op.132, No.16 in F Major Op.135 and the Grosse Fugue in B-flat Major Op.133. My previous reviews noted performances of conviction and depth, and the standard has clearly been upheld to the end of an outstanding addition to the quartet’s discography.