Allan Holdsworth: Hard Hat Area; None Too Soon (MoonJune)

Never mind what you've been told by the hagiographers of more famous six-stringers -- the contest for "greatest living British guitarist" is between John McLaughlin (Miles Davis, Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Allan Holdsworth (Soft Machine, Tony Williams Lifetime [as McLaughlin's replacement], U.K., Gong), and Holdsworth is my choice. That so much of his solo catalog (around twenty albums) has been hard to find in the U.S. has not helped his case here. Both of these reissues are important albums, for somewhat different reasons. Read more »

Joe Henderson always had the respect of fellow musicians and hardcore jazz fanatics, but for a long time it seemed the closest he'd get to fame was his brief stint in Blood, Sweat & Tears (years later he reminisced, in one of my favorite interviews, about how that short period was when sax companies wanted his endorsement and gave him free horns). Hardly fair considering that he spent a quarter century ranked among the top three tenor saxophonists alive, along with Rollins and Shorter. Then, almost miraculously, Verve put together a masterful production/promotion campaign that made him more famous in his last decade than he'd ever been before. Alas, emphysema took him at age 64, but he'd managed to leave an impressive legacy with nary a misstep -- he never made a bad album, and his appearance on anyone else's album was always a mark of quality. (Why is Ptah, the El Daoud Alice Coltrane's best album? At least partly because Joe's on it.) Here are my favorites, in chronological order (dates in parentheses are recording dates).  Read more »

Bertrand Chamayou

The musical harvest of last year’s Liszt bicentennial continues even now; this young French pianist (who already, six years ago, gave us an excellent cycle of the Transcendental Etudes) celebrated it by presenting this mighty collection, which amounts to three cycles, in single concerts and then recording this three-CD set. For decades Lazar Berman’s set for Deutsche Grammophon has set the standard in this repertoire for an integral set, but Chamayou equals it.  

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The Band live at The Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, PA, November 1, 1970. Playing "Time to Kill," "The Weight," "This Wheel's on Fire," and "Up on Cripple Creek."

Eddie Daniels/Roger Kellaway: Live at the Library of Congress (IPO)

The surprising thing about this album is how wild it is. I didn't expect this clarinet/piano duo playing lots of very old standards to shoot off on weird tangents filled with such startling dissonances; I've heard Daniels and Kellaway in separate contexts before this, and they were less adventurous then. They play the themes straightforwardly, but sometimes open those tracks with left-field intros that would make even Erroll Garner smile a bit enviously. And once they get to their solos (mostly in the sense of "featured," in Daniels's case, though Kellaway really is solo and sometimes he drops out to let Daniels fly unaccompanied), you never know whether you're going to hear a sedately prim excursion on bebop-level harmonies or a spurt of exuberance that takes in a wider range of styles. Their reading of Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-a-ning," while not so big on the dissonance front, throbs with energy from Kellaway in particular, who unleashes some rowdy two-handed runs and also bursts into stride.

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Charles Daniels/Shannon Mercer/Matthew White/Jacques-Olivier Chartier/Tyler Duncan/Joshua Hopkins/Cappella Romana/Portland Baroque Orchestra/Monica Huggett

The four largest Bach choral works are the Mass in B-minor, the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion, and the Christmas Oratorio, and half of those are about today and tomorrow, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday (the work was written for performance at Good Friday Vespers). The St. John Passion is in some ways the most daring of the big four, especially as first composed -- the version heard here -- since the 1725 revision doesn't have the opening chorus "Herr, unser Herrscher." The roiling tension of the opening immediately sets the work apart from its peers, and throughout it is considerably more dramatic -- and much leaner than the St. Matthew Passion. Read more »

David J. Roch: Skin & Bones (Dram)

The punk aspiration that "everyone can" has been rendered by the digital age a democratic reality, and a jaundiced reward. A tsunami of silver discs panhandle the ears of listeners, and as a result an air of capable mediocrity holds sway, an invisible ether of downloads gas expectations with their average worth instant availability, and then, but only occasionally, something creeps out of the speakers that startles and stuns, demands proper attention, and soars above the parliament of ordinary birds and their common-place warblings. Read more »

Louis Lortie/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Edward Gardner

The major attraction here, with all due respect to the great Concerto for Piano & Orchestra of 1988, is the Symphony No. 4, because there have only been (to my knowledge) four previous recordings of it. All of them are reputed to be excellent, but I have only two to compare it to, both conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. He makes it sound by turns more mysterious and more passionate, and also more taut; this new one has more spectacular sonics and presents the work more as a piece of abstract modernism. With Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) one of the top five Polish composers ever, and one of the better 20th century composers, alternative versions of his masterpieces are worth having, and this one is very welcome. Read more »

Tuesday was already the traditional album release day in the U.S. by March 31, 1987. Music fans' choices among the new releases that day included Close to the Bone by the Thompson Twins, The Circus by Erasure, and the two albums I refer to in the headline: Prince's Sign o' the Times and Suzanne Vega's Solitude Standing. Both of the latter artists had proven their talent by that point, and these releases were eagerly anticipated.

Sign o' the Times (Warner Bros.) was a double LP (barely under 80 minutes), always a major statement (discounting live doubles). It is to Prince what There's a Riot Goin' On was to Sly & the Family Stone: an album of schizophrenic swings between dire warnings of social disaster, personal darkness and confusion, and seemingly desperate attempts to stave it all off by often-lascivious partying -- and also an artistic peak. Read more »

When Beethoven died on 26 March 1827 in Vienna, he had been ill for over three months, in which time he completed no compositions. It was the culmination of a long string of illnesses; his work was seriously interrupted in 1811, 1812, 1816-17, 1821, 1825, and from December 1826 to his death. (His extensive meddling in the lives of various relatives had also interfered with his musical productivity.)

We ran an ANNIVERSARIES piece for Beethoven's birthday in 2010 that looked at recordings of his symphonies. Now, to mark the anniversary of his death on, we look at his piano sonatas. Beethoven transformed the sonata nearly as much as the symphony, his 32 canonical works (which doesn't include the early C major sonata and F major sonatina without opus numbers or the three "Elector" sonatas Wo47) in the form varying greatly and achieving, especially in the last five or six, an epic, questing quality that's highly personal. Read more »

One of the more anticipated classical concerts this season will take place on Wednesday, March 21, when the Prague Philharmonia and its founder and honorary artistic director, Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek, bring an exceptionally interesting program to the Bohemian National Hall. They will be performing Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture, Janacek’s Suite for Strings, and Vorisek’s Symphony in D. The Mozart is well known, of course, but the Janacek is a relatively early work of his and the Vorisek -- the main work on the program -- is a masterpiece heard far too rarely in concert halls, especially in the U.S. Read more »

Leo Records' first batch of 2012 releases (some of which I already wrote about here) includes two featuring saxophonist/bass clarinetist Gebhard Ullmann, both featuring his bass clarinet work with special projects: his long-running group The Clarinet Trio with fellow clarinetists Jurgen Kupke (clarinet) and Michael Thieke (clarinet, alto clarinet), and another trio, BASSX3, wherein Ullmann teams with bassists Chris Dahlgren and Clayton Thomas. I not only immediately looked forward to reviewing both of them, as Mr. Ullmann is one of my favorite artists, I also relished these releases as an opportunity to look back on his earlier work on Leo Records, both with The Clarinet Trio and in other contexts. As before, dates in parentheses after album titles are recording dates, with release on Leo sub-labels also noted there. Read more »