Gestart door PM95, oktober 24, 2005, 02:23:28
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Citaat van: Bernard Hi-5 op december 04, 2008, 01:29:40Welke uitvoering? Ik vind zelf de uitvoering door Gardiner uit 1995 met het Monteverdi Choir en het Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique op Philips Classics erg goed. Als je daar het Dies Irae lekker hard aanzet wordt je zowat uit de zetel van je stoel geblazen en lijkt het alsof ze je uit de diepste krochten van deze aardkloot persoonlijk komen halen
Citaat van: Paul op januari 02, 2009, 19:30:31 25th Anniversary - TotoLive in Amsterdam
CiteerReview by Thom JurekIs it still art when you can fingerpop to it? Finally, it's arrived. In 2003 jazz songwriter, pianist, and bandleader Patricia Barber received a Guggenheim fellowship to create a song cycle based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Barber is that rare kind of jazz artist -- she appeals to non-jazz fans. She's as ambitious as they get and her poetic, sometimes brainy compositions sit well with sophisticated pop audiences everywhere. On Mythologies, Barber has taken the heart of Ovid's text (he was a Roman poet doing his own intertextual take on Greek mythology) and created 11 pieces, each based on one character in his cycle. She's in turn written a different piece -- in style, linguistic content, and feel -- for each character she was drawn to. Much like the poet, philosopher, and playwright Anne Carson, Barber uses the present vernacular to recontextualize these seemingly eternal characters in the bedrock of jazz and her own brand of sophisticated and literary pop; she places Ovid's poems where they belong -- in song. Barber is accompanied by her crack band -- guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Michael Arnopol, and drummer Eric Montzka -- and employs as many guests as it takes to get her songs across. This isn't the gutting of ancient high culture; it's the presentation of it as something instructive, personal, and revelatory in the inner life of the songwriter. Musically, beginning with the spacious yet knotty piano notes that usher in "The Moon," Barber takes Ovid's characters, sets their context in the present vernacular (mostly), and allows them to manifest the faces of those we know, have known, or have been: "With whitecake/On my face/The actress backstage/Contemplates/Laying a universal egg/Still a broken heart/Is a broken heart...." The stillness of the moon witnesses all, and we enact our life scenarios under it, whether true or false. Alger underscores the vocal lines with small single-line runs and effects, as does the near constant bass of Arnopol. When the skittering hip-hop drums kick in after the verse ends, the band takes off, cracks the groove open (Barber's lower-register notes usher in the blues and then arpeggiates out of them), and works it.The elegant sensuality of "Morpheus" is a dreamy tune for the king of dreams, who suffers from and witnesses ever-unrequited love -- because everyone has. The single-note bass pulse of Arnopol is hypnotic as it underscores Jim Gailloreto's soloing. The melody is dressed for the evening by Barber's gorgeous chord voicings. But it is in "Pygmalion" and "Hunger" that Ovid's truth becomes plain. Mythologies is about want and its many, many faces, about passage and arrival and return. Alger's guitar is beautifully twinned with Barber's voice as she sings "....Wildly attractive and seductive as sin/The closer you come.../The more you want to be free.../When the gods get even/They think of me/While you're fast asleep in your bed as I flee/As...I give you a kiss/As I take my leave/I leave you with this.../That there's never enough to eat...." Alger's guitar kicks it up a notch and is propelled by cowbells, rim shots, and cymbals, countered by the bass which creates the swirl of dream and desire out of silence and harmony. In fact, both "Pygmalion" and "Hunger" are sick with desire; they reflect our own sickness with it. It's all craving: "Like Narcissus and his lover/You can never have the other/You can never lick the plate/Clean...." "Icarus," written for Nina Simone, is ushered by strummed, rubbery, yes, perhaps even melting guitar chords and a slippery, fluid bassline as Simone's tale -- as interpreted through Ovid's Icarus via Barber -- is revealed in the subjective moment. It's nocturnal, dreamy, picaresque, and full of swirl and swoop, with a memorable melody. The dark, minor-chord voicings that usher in "Orpheus" offer the blues as isolation, as the interlocutor of emptiness. The sensuality is in the void, but it remains smoldering with want in the flesh and with hope in the heart. The tender "Persephone," with its lushness and the languid ease of its night lounge wishes, gives voice to the following "Narcissus," together these are among the most beautiful songs Barber has ever written. She finds the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglo tenets, the secret faces of her characters, and sets them in the looking glass viewing themselves and/as one another. Yet all of them in song are communicated from an airy shelter of reverie. Jazz falls down around each one, as pop (think Joni Mitchell after a mellow bottle of red wine) caresses them. They are not statues, but instead have the ever-thinning appearance of the lost, the forgotten, the wished for, the never possessed.The hard truth of all -- as Ovid saw in his own looking glass -- lies in Barber's lines: "Brazenly object/Willingly subject...." "Whiteworld/Oedipus" funks, rocks, swerves, and spills over the lip of the cup to reveal thievery and non-subjective will as their own gift and reward: "I have institutions in the West/To make institutions in the East/I historically revise/With deconstructionist ease...I'm a gangster in a Hummer/And this culture will yield to me/Whiteworld...." "Phaeton," fleshed out by a hip-hop choir, displays the cycle in its most questioning face. Barber's band plays emotively and lushly before the rapping voices fall down like a sequence of apocalyptic environmental prophecies that are coming true in the present. They reveal the coming darkness in the spatial moment when the bill comes due, as the band attempts to comfort these prophets in their anguish. The set ends with "The Hours," where loss, regret, passage, and transformation -- indeed metamorphosis -- all come out of the closet, rolling down with desperate bargains and false hopes in their open hands. Barber nearly whispers her character's preparation in balladry so impure and unsentimental that its sensuality is raw but iconoclastically beautiful. The band enters seamlessly, and fills out the passage of night as the sun asserts its rise to a rock & roll backbeat. The group rises, too; the tempo becomes more pronounced and the choir is heard once more, nearly gospel-like -- except for the syncopation in its utterances -- as it follows Barber toward the emptying out of this ragged but sultry vessel.Here is where those left off and left over beg for Heaven to wait one more day before it claims them, even as it arrives with its wry smile and bared teeth. The simple melodic structure belies the sheer want and need of the hopeless request. When the refrain "Who'll save us now?" comes reverberating back from the choir with a vengeance, one realizes that there really is no vengeance, only recurrence as the dream begins anew. Mythologies is a single moment in jazz when the entire music moves forward because it engages the culture as it is. Blues and swing are embedded in these complex, ever-shifting harmonics and melodic songs; they shape-shift through pop, balladry, rock, post-bop, and even hip-hop. They stand on their own in the full poetic view of the written and sung word. Indeed, as a whole they become something wonderfully new, generated from the meat, bone, and sinew of the past as it enters the here and now. Mythologies is Barber's masterpiece -- thus far.
CiteerReview by Alex HendersonI Thought About You, Christy Baron's first album, demonstrated that a singer doesn't need the massive chops of Dianne Reeves or Dee Dee Bridgewater in order to deliver a convincing jazz vocal date. Instead of going for hard bop or providing a lot of complex, horn-like scatting and vocalese, the Pittsburgh native favors a light and melodic approach that is best described as "acoustic jazz with R&B and pop elements." One of the things that makes the CD successful is the fact that Baron doesn't bite off more than she can chew -- though soulful and capable of depth, someone with as sweet and youthful a voice as Baron probably wouldn't have been very convincing on Billy Strayhorn's world-weary "Lush Life." But the singer shows how tasteful an interpreter of lyrics she can be on selections ranging from the standards "Night and Day" and "Body and Soul" to no less than three Stevie Wonder pearls: "Summer Soft," "Knocks Me off My Feet" and "If It's Magic." And her performance of Noel Brasil's "Columbus" is simply gorgeous. Thankfully, Baron realizes that great popular music didn't die with Cole Porter, and her ability to find the jazz potential in songs by the Beatles ("Got to Get You Into My Life"), Bill Withers ("Ain't No Sunshine") and Wonder is a major asset. Though not well-known, I Thought About You indicated that Baron was someone to keep an eye on.
CiteerReview by Steve HueyOut to Lunch stands as Eric Dolphy's magnum opus, an absolute pinnacle of avant-garde jazz in any form or era. Its rhythmic complexity was perhaps unrivaled since Dave Brubeck's Time Out, and its five Dolphy originals -- the jarring Monk tribute "Hat and Beard," the aptly titled "Something Sweet, Something Tender," the weirdly jaunty flute showcase "Gazzelloni," the militaristic title track, the drunken lurch of "Straight Up and Down" -- were a perfect balance of structured frameworks, carefully calibrated timbres, and generous individual freedom. Much has been written about Dolphy's odd time signatures, wide-interval leaps, and flirtations with atonality. And those preoccupations reach their peak on Out to Lunch, which is less rooted in bop tradition than anything Dolphy had ever done. But that sort of analytical description simply doesn't do justice to the utterly alien effect of the album's jagged soundscapes. Dolphy uses those pet devices for their evocative power and unnerving hints of dementia, not some abstract intellectual exercise. His solos and themes aren't just angular and dissonant -- they're hugely so, with a definite playfulness that becomes more apparent with every listen. The whole ensemble -- trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Richard Davis, and drummer Tony Williams -- takes full advantage of the freedom Dolphy offers, but special mention has to be made of Hutcherson, who has fully perfected his pianoless accompaniment technique. His creepy, floating chords and quick stabs of dissonance anchor the album's texture, and he punctuates the soloists' lines at the least expected times, suggesting completely different pulses. Meanwhile, Dolphy's stuttering vocal-like effects and oddly placed pauses often make his bass clarinet lines sound like they're tripping over themselves. Just as the title Out to Lunch suggests, this is music that sounds like nothing so much as a mad gleam in its creator's eyes.
