Moving forward to continue the catching up of some older and newer releases that appeared over the last year.  Today a host of new chamber music is the focus starting with an unique release of saxophone quartet music by Jonathan Badger.  Released as an EP through Ravello Records (RR 8048), these three brief Piano Quartets (for piano with sax trio and electronics)  are the composer's first art (i.e., classical) concert pieces.  The music is a sort of eclectic blend of post-minimalist styles, jazz, and contemporary rock elements making for an interesting hybrid of music that attempts to bridge genres.

There have been quite a number of saxophone chamber recordings popping up of late and Nicki-Roman's new album Unquiet Waters (Ravello Records RR 8055) features mostly pieces for alto sax and piano.  There is an intriguing transcription of Leonard Bernstein's Clarinet Sonata here which perhaps brings some of the jazzier components more to the foreground.  The album takes its name from the opening work by Kevin Day that is a sort of philosophical exploration that depicts in music our own thought processes that move from the sort of jumbled chaos into moments of clarity.  Olivia Keefer's work Floating Bones is a work placing great technical demands on the soloist with sung texts that add to the sometimes mesmerizing quality of the music.  Lucie Robert's Cadenza focuses on a couple of specific motives that are then treated to a variety of rhythmic and technical complexities in an often rather intense work with dense textures when the piano appears.  Bug by Bruno Mantovani also requires Roman to show off his versatility on the instrument.  The album closes with a nice transcription of Grieg's Lyric Piece "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen".  This provides a fine relaxed conclusion to some of the more intense music on this release.

Some intriguing jazz is on hand for I Am Not a Virus, a timely release featuring the Jordan VanHemert Quintet on Big Round Records (BR 8966).  There are six original jazz combo works which allow VanHemert to show off his own technique and improvisational styles.  Most interesting though is his adaptation of the traditional Korean folk song Arirang which closes off the album.  The titles of some of these pieces are reflections of our past couple years of unrest and pandemic life and these jazz musings are an interesting opportunity for release easily recommended to fans of contemporary jazz.

Of equal interest is the premier release featuring the Gruca White Ensemble.  This is delicious album of jazz, folk influences, new music, and popular song (like a rendition of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish") featuring guitarist Robert Gruca and flautist Linda White.  The selections are quite eclectic but held together with good sequencing of the album.  It is a great Saturday afternoon disc that shifts well from more contemporary modernism to rock influences all handled well by the excellent performances here.  A Different Take (Big Records BR 8964) is well worth tracking down to add to your regular playlist.

Music for percussion is certainly among the more unusual of concert music works.  Ralph Sorrentino's release Lo and Behold (Ravello 8052) attempts to expand that repertoire in an intriguing collection of five works.  There is a piece for a variety of drums (Askell Masson's Rhythm Strip) as well as multi-movement pieces for timpani (David Corkhill's Five Structures), snare (Robert McCormick's Portraits of a Waltz), and bass drum (Molly Joyce's Lo and Behold).  For a bit of contrast, Maurice Wright's Duo Fantasia blends flute with a variety of percussion instruments.  The album is a sort of microcosm of potential contest repertoire pieces for percussionists that explores how one can create a variety of sounds without tonal anchors.  Certainly percussionists should check this out!

Semir Hasic's album No More War It's Time for Love (Navona 6327) is a fascinating musical journey that invites listeners to contemplate the horrors of war and its impact.  The pieces here are a reflection of the early 1990s Croation War and the Battle of Vukovar.  Hasic is an accordionist and this instrument lends the music a somewhat more popular feel at times.  He also incorporates a variety of sounds (sirens, battles, gunfire, screams) that filter across the textures while the lyrical melodic lines play against this accompanied by a smaller chamber orchestra.  The music has that quality of folk music within a concert context with the Eastern European inflections adding an additional poignancy to the music.  "War Rhapsody", which opens the album, could be a miniature short film score with its sense of dramatic effects.  Other tracks also feature titles that connect to contemporary events and provide additional reflective moments.  Hasic's excellent melodic sense really comes through well in these pieces making them all quite accessible from one delight to the next.  (The music has a sort of Piazzolla-like lyricism, further emphasized by the use of accordion.)  One also feels the reach of COVID 19, in the final track which offers a minute of silence--a rather interesting take in an era where streaming will miss out on the concept of a physical album and its sequencing.  The result is an enthralling, and engaging album that comes highly recommended!

 Haney: Birth of a City

Jason Kao Hwang, violin. Melanie Dyer, viola. Adam Lane, bass. Tomas Ulrich, cello.
Julian Priester and Steve Swell, trombones.
Dave Storrs and Bernard Purdie, percussion.
Big Round Records 8956
Total Time:  52:14
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Composer David Haney’s new album Birth of a City is an intriguing collection of conceptualized improvisations.  There are two works here that explore blends of percussion with trombones and string instruments.  The title work is a series of eight different sections that explore rhythmic, or melodic fragments.  These are then improvised between whatever combos Haney intends to explore.  A host of percussion instruments are used to add a variety of intriguing sounds and punctuations with an occasional rhythmic idea providing a foundation from which the other material then springs.  The use of the trombones in the opening section gives the music an almost noir-ish quality.  When this switches to add strings, the music takes on a more intense quality and moves closer to a more classical avant-garde style.  Haney uses interesting bent pitches alongside gongs and different cymbals.  Even the melodic contours of the third part have an almost Asian-quality in their aesthetic.  As each of these different sections plays out, we get a sort of musical birthing image of different parts of this single thematic thread that provides the link between these different sections.  It connects with this concept of birthing sections of a city where different ideas will interact and where the listener seems to stand at one corner that can take them in any one direction.  The music overall has this jazzier underpinning upon which Haney also crafts music that might be more on the aleatoric classical realm, but the harmonic ideas are built around jazz progressions laid against these various explorations of line.  The music moves toward more intense writing as the parts build on one another gradually moving towards using all the different instrumental sounds.  Dissonance becomes far more pronounced as the piece progresses adding to this bustling intensity.  Sometimes, as in the seventh section here, the music has moments of emotive lyricism that move into extreme dissonance.  The work thus moves towards these denser textures becoming more forceful and dramatic culminating in the final smashing together of all the instrumental ideas in an atonal jumble of ideas and sounds.  It is as if the opening music has been deconstructed away from its harmonic and melodic roots to an exhaustive conclusion.  Part three explores a waltz tempo

The five parts of Variations on a Theme take a specific part of a thematic idea for improvisation and development.  This allows for the creation of a variety of different sonic textures and sounds.  The piece opens with the modified string quartet which lends the music a more classical sensibility.  The cool bass ostinato pattern in the second part, coupled with the brush snare, moves us more into the jazz realm.  The music dissolves into a trombone duet for its final part.

Birth of a City is in that third-stream universe that brings in aspects of classical chamber music with jazz for a more cerebral experience of musical material.  However, Haney’s lines are quite clear and this allows for an instantaneous entry into the soundworlds that he creates in both of these improvisatory works.  Certainly an album worth exploring for those who like their jazz and classical combos a little chunkier.