American Dream
Amstel (saxophone) Quartet
Amstel Quartet AR018 (amstelquartet.nl)

The Amstel Quartet is based in the Netherlands and describes itself as “the world’s most colourful saxophone quartet.” They have an active concert schedule (currently employing livestreaming) and have released over ten albums of music in many genres including classical, contemporary and popular music. American Dream is their survey of selected American composers who represent different aspects of musical culture which (the quartet writes) include the influence of jazz, working from modernism to post-modernism and employing unique rhythms. 

Paul Creston (1906-1985) is well known to saxophone players for his Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano which is a mainstay of the repertoire. His Suite for Saxophone Quartet, Op.111 was written towards the end of his career and illustrates his craftsmanship in the opening fugue, the rhythmic elements and the Pastorale written, strangely, in 15/12. Michael Torke’s May, June and July combine to demonstrate the “rhythmic dynamism” of his writing. May is sprightly and leaping with lush and melodic interplay; June is more sombre and July returns to a lighter form. John Cage’s Four5 is a series of instructions that can be played by almost any four instruments and includes percussive and tonal parts. The YouTube video the quartet produced playing this piece is well worth enjoying: it is the perfect COVID-era work combining Cage’s structure with the quartet’s own musical proficiency, isolated performances and sense of humour. American Dream is rounded out by Marc Mellits’ Tapas and Christian Lauba’s Mambo. 

The Amstel Quartet plays precisely and warmly and this collection of American saxophone quartet music is thoughtfully assembled.

Personal Demons
Lowell Liebermann
Steinway & Sons STNS 30172 (steinway.com/music-and-artists/label)

Composer-pianist Lowell Liebermann has just released a two-disc testament, expertly curated and impressively executed. It is a witness statement to five decades of life in music – a glimpse into an artistic practice that consistently hits its creative stride, fuelled by flames that still burn bright. The album has been adroitly produced, edited and mastered by Sergei Kvitko of Blue Griffin Recordings (featured in the November 2020 issue of The WholeNote.)  

Three of Liebermann’s own works are included in his debut solo recording as a complement to music by Liszt, Busoni, Schubert and little-known Czech composer, Miloslav Kabeláč. Each composer has galvanized – even haunted – Liebermann throughout his career. Such “demons” are presumably specters of the inspirational sort and Disc One opens with Liebermann’s most popular piano work, Gargoyles, Op.28. He swiftly introduces us to a forthright and individual brand of pianism, one with roughcast textures and crystal-clear melodic lines, obliging our ears toward resonant, robust and irresistible soundscapes. We perceive a virtuosic abandon, underpinned with an urgent, restless vitality. 

Such forthright modes of expression carry into the next tracks: the Eight Preludes, Op.30 by Kabeláč. These pieces are especially significant for Liebermann and he unveils them to us consummately. Finely etched, bearing echoes of Benjamin Britten, these evocative miniatures have absorbed Liebermann for decades and are here bestowed like building blocks: compositional models at which to marvel. The final work on Disc One is Liszt’s stalwart Totentanz, S525, a vivid, dazzling pianistic essay. The music’s economy of means – characteristic of Liszt’s best writing – remains of discernable influence for Liebermann hinting at the American composer-pianist’s own Lisztian lineage.

Disc Two’s Four Apparitions, Op.17 are followed by the extemporaneously tender Variations on a Theme of Hüttenbrenner, D576 by Franz Schubert. This unfamiliar set proves an ideal platform for Liebermann’s lyrical abilities at the keyboard. Next is Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, BV256. Likening it to a “Mount Everest that he wanted to climb – a challenge in a way,” Liebermann’s affinity for Busoni is striking, with an audible reverence for the Italian master’s intellect and formalism on full display. 

Finally, the intimately benevolent Nocturne No.10, Op.99 ushers in a denouement. Highly personal for Liebermann, this music hums and swells, waxing poetic like a lucid conversation between lovers, revealing truths of a lifetime. Shades of Samuel Barber and Carl Vine drift in a dusky, sonic bloom as Liebermann’s piano now quietly sings this album to a whispered, nocturnal close. And so, what might the morrow bring, we wonder?

True Stories & Rational Numbers
Chris P. Thompson
Independent (chrispthompson.com)

New York-based percussionist Chris P. Thompson is a longtime member of Alarm Will Sound, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and other groups. His album True Stories & Rational Numbers a nine-movement 43-minute work, however showcases him as composer and pianist. 

True Stories & Rational Numbers reflects Thompson’s large-scale exploration of piano music in just intonation, the tuning system based on tuning notes to simple mathematical ratios of the natural harmonic series. He also employs whole-number rhythmic and harmonic relationships in his score. Taken together, he likens listening to this music to having his “eyes re-opened to music and seeing it in colour for the first time.” was composed and programmed in modern piano roll notation, an extension of how 20th-century commercial piano rolls were made. Thompson’s main inspiration here was American composer Conlon Nancarrow’s boundary-pushing experimental player-piano compositions. Other influences were German scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, the author of the landmark book, On the Sensations of Tone, and the music of Aphex Twin and modern drumline. The chamber music of Ben Johnston, which liberally employs unorthodox tunings, is cited as another important influence, as is Johnston’s elegant notations of just intonation.

Thompson states his goal in True Stories… was “to marry the machine with the warmth of human emotion…” Listening to it not only gradually reveals an unorthodox musical mind, but also what “in tune” in music is.

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Firefly Songs
Melia Watras
Planet M Records (meliawatras.com)

While we continue to endure the extended shutdowns and performance cancellations, there was a particular joy in discovering Melia Watras’ Firefly Songs. Listening to what feels like a personal diary of her inner thoughts, one could almost call this an album of accompanied poetry, yet it is so much more. At times deceivingly simple, more often there are complex musical pairings to thoughts, poems, literary references, inspirations and memories. American violist and composer Watras wrote these 13 individual pieces between 2015 and 2018 for combinations of violin, viola, cello and voices, and the flow of the album is both unique and comforting. 

Full of surprises, from the charming Mozart Doesn’t Live in Seattle to the trancelike tones and rhythms of overlapping voices in Seeing Cypresses with Catherine C, this is an album of singular gems as well as a complete collection. A work belying its complexity, Firefly Songs also stands strongly, piece by piece as beautifully expressed miniatures, each feeling free and spontaneous. Watras’ solo viola work, Lament, written for the passing of her father, expresses a delicate nuance of emotion delivered with depth and presence. In William Wilson, the complexities hidden between the lines of Edgar Allan Poe are beautifully unveiled both with voice and on the violin by Michael Jinsoo Lim. Lim also stands out in the operatic (one). It would be hard to pick a favourite from this box of gems, but Vetur öngum lánar liō (Winter aids no one) was the perfect accompaniment to my icy walks on the beach.

This collection would be enjoyable either in the suggested order or as random treats that would slip easily into any playlist.

Against Method
counter)induction
New Focus Recordings FCR278 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

The New York new music collective counter)induction celebrates 20 years of committed contemporary musical performance with the release of Against Method. The five players, augmented by guests, playing music composed by members and other guests, perform six fascinating pieces: all challenging, all worth the time and effort. As one reviewer has already commented, writing anything useful about the disc is beyond challenging; best just take the thing and hear for yourself.

Clarinetist Benjamin Fingland and Caleb van der Swaagh, on cello, split the greater part of the playing. In the opening track, The Hunt by Night by Douglas Boyce, they are joined by pianist Ning Yu in a rollicking fun exploration of rhythmic, unison pointillist melody. “Ransack” describes the method: the three characters turn over every note with happy frantic energy, perhaps looking for Messiaen. The closing unisons between cello and clarinet are breathtaking.

Fingland performs a solo piece for bass clarinet and loop pedal, written by his life partner Jessica Meyer. Intimate and mysterious, the repeated breath effects sound like nothing so much as sobbing. The title is a giveaway: Forgiveness. 

Each piece is my favourite. I love Ein Kleines Volkslied, the piano quartet by Alvin Singleton. Born in 1940, he’s three decades older than the rest, but his piece kicks it like it’s 1966. They close with the brilliant Scherzo by Argentine composer Diego Tedesco. Plucks, slaps, pitch-bends, melodic fragments, col legno… all in an ABA format. Great fun, fantastic disc.

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Imaginary Landscape
Stefan Hussong; Rumi Ogawa; Yumiko Meguri
Thorofon CTH2664 (bella-musica.de/?s=imaginary+landscape)

The illustrious German accordionist Stefan Hussong’s audio catalogue was launched with his audacious 1987 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and has since grown to an impressive discography of some 40 albums, many of which feature his mastery of the most challenging contemporary works. This latest album opens with Magnus Lindberg’s Metal Work (1984) for percussion and accordion, originally commissioned by the pioneering Finnish accordionist Matti Rantanen. This dazzling and virtuosic work features a swiftly evolving kaleidoscopic duel to the death between the accordion and an arsenal of ten metal instruments, effortlessly dispatched by percussionist Rumi Ogawa. 

Among the subsequent solo works expressly written for Stefan Hussong, one finds Elena Mendoza’s Découpé (2017), an essay derived from the Dadaist tradition of the random cutting and mashing up of fragments of text, or in this case, a random jumble of hackneyed clichés that, for my taste, went on a bit too long. Much more compelling is Martin Smolka’s intimate Lamento metodico (2000), in which strongly contrasting melodic elements are paired against each other in an expressively memorable composition. Two Canadian works are featured from the husband-and-wife team of composers Hope Lee and David Eagle. Lee’s work, Imaginary Garden V (2016), scored for accordion with Yumiko Meguri on piano, is part of an ongoing series of works under that title; this instalment features seven contrasting scenarios demonstrating an admirable stylistic diversity that kept this listener thoroughly engaged. Eagle’s innovative Refracted Tones (2016) for solo accordion involves replacing the normal reed ranks of the accordion with inserted sets of quarter-tone tuned reeds, creating an exotic, hallucinatory 24-tone octave guaranteed to bend your ears. Betwixt these two we find Heera Kim’s finely crafted The Art of Shading II (2019), which adroitly exploits the deepest registers of the accordion interspersed with percussive assaults on the instrument. 

Hats off to Herr Hussong for yet another well-balanced and compellingly performed album.

Songs for the End of Time Volume 1
Founders
Independent (foundersmusic.org)

What might a purist think of this reimagining of one of the 20th century’s most totemic works of chamber music? Fortunately for me, I’ll never have to answer that question, and instead can allow myself to take delight in the creativity of the young gang who call themselves Founders. 

Olivier Messiaen wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps while languishing in a Nazi prison camp. The work has taken on a mystique beyond what is usually accorded musical works that remain in the repertoire, owing especially to that circumstance. So what brazen chutzpah this quintet has shown (!) by introducing implied harmonies into originally unison lines, or playing call and echo in the Abîme des oiseaux, which turns into a bluesy duet for clarinet and trumpet. Not only do they not have a pianist on board, they all put aside their instruments (add violin, cello and bass to the other two) to sing quotes from the Apocalypse and the Dies Irae. And wait a goshdarned second, did they just introduce humour into the whole thing with that wacky Interlude? SMH. Millennials!

They offer the work in homage to Messiaen, and I’ll allow it shows us a way to hear the original piece with fresh ears. It is also cheeky and, while never disrespectful, playfully affectionate. The writing is smart and the playing skillful. The quintet ranges easily back and forth between “popular” and “classical” idioms. You’ll be forgiven if you find suddenly you’re hearing something by Miles Davis, or for that matter, Darius Milhaud, or Guillaume de Machaut.

Louis Karchin – Five Compositions (2009-2019)
Various Artists
Bridge Records 9543 (bridgerecords.com)

American composer/conductor/professor Louis Karchin has composed for such musical genres as orchestra, chamber music, vocal and opera. Here, five contrasting instrumental works written from 2009 to 2019 are performed.

Karchin conducts The Washington Square Ensemble in his three-movement Chamber Symphony (2009). He writes he was able to explore a range of colours and fluidity in this group of “approximately one of each instrument.” Sparkling opening arpeggiated tonal flourishes and tempo and instrumental contrasts lead to a march-like section with intermittent horn lines building tension. The slower second movement, scored for smaller ensemble, has calming tonally diverse pitches and piano-pedalled note vibrations. Karchin’s accurately self-described “rambunctious” third movement is in modified rondo form with energetic instrumental chordal interplays, flourishes and dramatic low-pitch held notes. 

Rochester Celebration (2017) is a solo piano commission celebrating Karchin’s undergraduate Eastman piano professor, Barry Synder. A “must listen to” virtuosic Romantic-feel composition for all pianists, as Karchin’s thorough piano high/low pitch sounds and effects knowledge are captured in Margaret Kampmeier’s exquisite performance.

Postlude (2019) has Sam Jones on trumpet with bucket mute play beautiful slower melodic lines with resonating high-pitch held notes to pianist Han Chen’s accompaniment. Love Alice Teyssier’s flute trills emulating Ashley Jackson’s harp rolls in Quest (2014). Violinist Renée Jolles and harpist Susan Jolles drive the exciting closing track Barcarole Variations (2015) forward with their sensitive instrumental effects.

Louis Karchin is a fabulous contemporary composer with thorough instrumental knowledge.

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Paolo Marchettini: The Months have ends
Various Orchestras and Conductors
New Focus Recordings FCR280 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

The notes D, E-flat, F and G walk into a bar… this set-up describes the opening of Mercy, from a collection of the orchestral music of Paolo Marchettini. An E-natural creeps in, bringing ambiguity with it. Sometimes the E sounds a note of warmth, other times it harshly clashes with two neighbouring pitches.  Where is mercy, one might ask? The walls of this perfect fourth confine the ear, or protect it: prison or sanctuary? The gentle tone, and palette limited to the colours of strings, senza vibrato, gives way to menace in the middle section, brassy bombast overpowering the opening textures. Mercy is deferred until the final minutes, where a violin solo offers kindness.

The Months have ends sets five Emily Dickinson poems for soprano and orchestra. Alda Caiello has the necessary vocal power to match the forces accompanying her, but the mix sometimes favours the instrumentals to the point of overpowering the voice. I find the brashness of the music at odds with my feeling for Dickinson’s words, but it is bracing to hear her poetry brought into the contemporary idiom. There are audible artifacts of live performance here and elsewhere, some emanating from the podium!

Notturno follows the pattern of Mercy, exploring relationships of pitches and tone within a limited frame, here juxtaposing a perfect fourth against a contrasting whole-tone dyad. Marchettini performs ably as soloist in his Concertino for Clarinet, an effective introspective addition to the contemporary rep for the instrument. The orchestra of the Manhattan School of Music mostly keeps their end of the bargain in these two pieces. Aere perEnnius is an homage to Marchettini’s compatriot colleague, Ennio Morricone; it alternates between melancholia and bombast.

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Honeysuckle Rose
Aubrey Wilson Quartet
AW Music AWM001 (aubreywilsonmusic.com)

Vocal standards albums get a worse rap than they should. Sure, it can sometimes be monotonous to hear the same old songs sung by a vocalist who sounds like about a thousand other vocalists. However, I would argue that for every derivative example there’s an original take on the style, and the latter can be some of the more exhilarating music that exists. 

Aubrey Wilson and company’s renditions may help refresh the listener’s memory of what makes these standards so standard in the first place. In terms of staying faithful to the tunes, starting with the opener Nature Boy, it becomes pretty plain that this is a group that won’t allow the pressure to compromise their sound. The quartet of Wilson, pianist/arranger Chris Bruder, bassist Tom Altobelli and drummer Sean Bruce Parker have been going strong for nearly a decade and they have honed an effortlessly prodigious feel for each other. Bruder’s arrangements are tight, danceable and audacious. The band’s interpretive abilities are most notable during the melancholic title track, completely turning Fats Waller’s masterpiece on its head in a way that would almost be sacrilegious, if it didn’t work so well. That isn’t to say there are no bones thrown for the more traditional-leaning consumers, but even when the ensemble isn’t subverting, they’re grooving. Wilson constantly impresses, both with her improvisational savvy and chutzpah. Well executed all around.

Monday Nights
Sophie Bancroft; Tom Lyne
LisaLeo Records LISALEO 0901 (bancroftlyne.com)

Scottish singer/songwriter/guitarist Sophie Bancroft and her husband, Canadian bassist/songwriter Tom Lyne, are respected UK-based musicians whose latest release was inspired by their weekly COVID-isolation, Monday night livestream sessions from their living room begun in spring 2020. The five originals and five covers here were recorded perfectly at Castlesound Studios. 

The covers are their own very personal take of famous tunes. Highlights include Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To, with a moving bass backdrop supporting the virtuosic scat singing and subtle vocal back phrasing; and a happy and positive feel for our difficult times in their rendition of Lerner and Lowe’s On The Street Where You Live. Bancroft sounds like she is singing only to her husband in the folksier emotionally charged Tom Waits’ tune Grapefruit Moon.

Lyne’s composition, Far From Mars, is a great jazz tune featuring his electric bass playing. Wish it was longer!! Bancroft’s Fragile Moon is slow, peaceful and delicately performed. Her Miles Away is so COVID isolation, with its storytelling lyrics about love at a distance and pitch leaps adding to the feeling of loneliness. Blue Room is mellow and enticing. Comfort, with more folky singalong qualities and repeated descending vocal melody, has a stress-busting calm, controlled feel.

Bancroft and Lyne are first-class jazz performers, improvisers and songwriters. Their performances here are upbeat, musical and subtle, and surprisingly made me totally forget our COVID outbreak isolation lockdown.

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Vegetables
Lina Allemano Four
Lumo Records (linaallemano.com)

Permanent Moving Parts
See Through 4
All-Set! AS014 (seethroughmusic.bandcamp.com)

These two CDs, both recorded by jazz quartets in Toronto in winter 2020 at Union Sound Company, both featuring trumpeter Lina Allemano as a lead voice, suggest very different approaches to band formation and conception.

The Lina Allemano Four’s Vegetables is the sixth CD by a band that’s been together since 2005 without a change in personnel, still made up of alto saxophonist Brodie West, bassist Andrew Downing and drummer Nick Fraser. Allemano’s compositions are touchstones, brief but distinctive rhythmic and melodic patterns that shape some of the patterns of development, but the group is tied together by a telepathic understanding of one another’s spontaneous processes. On Brussel Sprouts, Maybe Cabbages, it’s hard to draw a line between composition and improvisation in West’s dancelike repeating figure, even more so when he and Allemano happily land on exactly the same spot. Much of the music is conversational collective improvisation, whether it’s West’s whispered lyricism, Allemano’s exploration of mutating timbres, Downing’s spontaneous counter melodies or Fraser’s creative rhythmic chatter. Then there are the inspirations. I’m not sure how one might make sonic distinctions between Onions, Champignons and Leafy Greens, but I know all three are organic and their precise forms vary from any one to another, functioning as metaphor for the group’s intertwined creative evolution.

A bassist may be the least conspicuous member of a band, usually the quietest, confined to a fundamental role, and often the last to solo. Bassist-composer Pete Johnston, however, stands out as his See Through 4’s one consistent element. Last year, the quartet – all first-rank Toronto musicians – released False Ghosts, Minor Fears. A year later, there’s another CD, but the other members have changed; while roles remain the same, the lead instruments have changed too. The place accorded saxophonist Karen Ng now belongs to trumpeter Lina Allemano; the chordal element is no longer Marilyn Lerner’s piano but Michael Davidson’s vibraphone; drummer Jake Oelrichs replaces Nick Fraser. There’s little change in quality, but there’s a completely different collective sound, with trumpet and vibraphone bringing a brighter sonority, even a certain brashness.   

Those “permanent moving parts” are also the building blocks of Johnston’s evocative compositions. True to its title, Weathering Teenage Hopes is a study in evolution, Allemano’s melancholy trumpet initially accompanied by Johnston’s empathetic bass alone; Davidson eventually enters, the vibraphone’s bell-like brightness carrying the piece and the band to a certain comfortable groove, which continues right down to Allemano’s ebullient bursts and wandering, scintillating lines. Other pieces may eschew such narrative development, but Johnston’s compositions seem knitted from experience, expressing ambiguous states of mind, here conveniently named, whether it’s Everything Happens Once, Possible Daylight Dreams or the tone painting of Imperfect Sunlit Room. Allemano, Davidson and Oelrichs are here to provide colour, bringing each piece to life, but the forms and their patterns of development are definitely Johnston’s department.

Proof
BLOOP
Lumo Records (linaallemano.com)

An awkward name for adroit innovators, BLOOP is actually Toronto trumpeter Lina Allemano extending her horn’s timbres with mutes, percussion and whistling as well as having them live-processed with effects by Mike Smith. Playful, pugnacious and profound, the eight improvisations multiply and mulch brass textures so that Allemano often seems to be playing more than one horn simultaneously, with a singular mid-range narrative and at least one other tone squeaking and peeping at elevated pitches. Below and beside this are percussion additions created by her maracas-like shakes, cow bell raps, bolo-bar-like smacks and synthesized rumbles, which are concurrently inflated electronically in real time. The trumpet bell shoved against the mic or metal, plus mouthpiece sucking and tongue pops, add to the jolting progressive impact. 

Digging deep into the horn’s body tube to produce growls and whines as on Recanting or propelling fluid melodies on tracks such as Actual Bloop, Allemano never really creates alone. Palimpsest-like, grainy processed pitches are always present, undulating below the narrative surface at the edge of hearing. She can dip to Taps-like ennui at points or inflate notes balloon-like to pressurized burbles, but she – and Smith – never lose the thread of communicative connections.

Want Proof of this local trumpeter’s skill as a soloist? You’d do well to investigate BLOOP.

Reflections of the Invisible World
Colin Fisher
Halocline Trance HTRA017 (haloclinetrance.bandcamp.com)

Colin Fisher has been a dynamic and industrious part of the Canadian music community for 20 years. He is a multi-instrumentalist with remarkable facility on saxophone, guitar, drums, electronics and other musical objects. With Brandon Valdivia he formed Not the Wind, Not the Flag, fronts the Colin Fisher Quartet and has played in many other groups and produced solo projects like his Gardens of the Unknowing.

The new vinyl and digital-only release, Reflections of the Invisible World, is another solo project with Fisher playing guitar, saxophone and electronics. Each of the seven pieces creates its own sonic environment and the tone and architecture is determined by the structure of the electronic sounds. The guitar and saxophone performances waft amongst the walls and corridors of those sounds which are sometimes melodic, other times primarily rhythmic. Salient Charm begins with a pulsing rhythm which develops into wafting, ephemeral melodies where the saxophone is barely discernible as a colour. Double Image has a moody, noir vibe with some edgy background sounds, while Fisher’s tenor saxophone plays great jazzy longer tones with just a touch of vibrato and eventually works into some full-blown wailing. It could be an updated Blade Runner soundtrack, though more experimental than Hollywood usually ventures. The sounds and shapes in Fisher’s album drift between ambient and arresting with each “reflection” offering its unique glimpse of another “invisible” world.

Kind Mind
Josh Cole
Independent (kindmind.bandcamp.com/album/kind-mind)

Kind Mind is Josh Cole (bass), Karen Ng (alto saxophone) and Michael Davidson (vibraphone). Recorded live on January 4, 2020 at the Open Waters Festival in Halifax, the music wastes no time getting straight to the point. The opening track, Inside Voices, begins when you press play. There is no prolonged silence and no gradual introduction of each musical element. There is Cole alone for exactly a second, and then the ensemble takes off. 

One thing that stood out for me is how effectively space and subtlety are used throughout the duration of this project. Despite being a trio, there are long stretches where only one or two instruments can be heard simultaneously. Phrases often seem deliberately tentative, and exclamations sometimes evaporate into question marks. Part of this phenomenon comes from impeccable listening on the part of all three players. The sparsity seems even more intentional when you hear the end of each idea, as the musicians step aside, allowing the person behind them to take centre stage. Karen Ng, especially, proves to be a master of restraint, really only contributing texturally at many points, and her astonishing timing is really the adhesive that makes this recording so seamless. The group’s use of space allows for their improvisations to possess distinctive shape and structure, so that when Kind Mind goes full throttle the element of surprise is on their side.