Communist Cats

My Name Is Buddy is the second in the so called California trilogy released by Ry Cooder on his return to mainstream, as opposed to world music oriented, recording. It is a socio-political concept album revolving around the depression years of the 1930s and a regular Cooder pre-occupation from back to his earliest albums. There are many threads that will be familiar to long term fans. As well as the depression era setting, Cooder's odd penchant for extra-terestrial visitors makes an appearance on the track Green Dog. Long term musical collaborators make returns such as singers Bobby King and Terry Evans, accordionist Flaco Jimenez, drummer Jim Keltner and Van Dyke Parks on piano. His son Joachim is now a regular contributor and there are significant contributions from old timers Mike and Pete Seeger, one of the formers last recordings. Chieftain Paddy Moloney is on a couple of tracks adding pipes and Roland White's mandolin and Jon Hassell's jazz trumpet deserve mention. The overall feel of the disk is old timey, hillbilly country but despite what one senses is a reluctance for Cooder to unleash many slide guitar licks, the blues also crops up together with a smidgen of gospel and on a couple of tracks some cocktail jazz. It makes for an entertaining and thought provoking whole, although I remain unconvinced by the central conceit of having the protaganists of the saga take the form of cartoon animals; Buddy the red ( communist ) cat who is a dead ringer for Woody Guthrie, Lefty the political rabble raising mouse and the Reverend Toad representing oppressed black minorities. There is also the melancholy feel that even after the credit crunch banking fiasco we have just endured, American society remains no more willing to accept the views and solutions of such as Buddy and his friends.

This Year We Will be Playing Mostly......

Anniversary obsession continues for BBC Music magazine with the new cover disk celebrating Chopin's 200th anniversary. They give the title Chopin Piano Masterpieces including Sonata No 2. In fact, for some variety, they include two orchestrations of Chopin as well as the piano pieces played here by Martin Roscoe. He is featured playing two Nocturnes ( in E flat op 9 and in F sharp op 15 ) and a Polonaise ( in C sharp minor op 26 ) in addition to the highlighted Sonata in B flat minor op 35. This is the sonata featuring the ubiquitous funeral march and it is good to hear it here set in the correct context with the rest of the work. The famous theme is so thoroughly connected with its' subject matter that it is easy to forget that even within that movement there is some lightening of the mood. Roscoe's playing throughout is perfectly respectable and while perhaps not being library sandard recordings of these works they are fine to have. As mentioned the disk also features two orchestrations played by the BBC Philharmonic under Vassily Sinaisky. These are Chopiniana by Glazunov, in four short movements featuring polonaise, nocturne, mazurka and tarantella plus the Nocturne in A flat by Stravinsky. Both of these orchestrations were for the Ballet Russes and serve that purpose admirably.

Modern Ensemble Playing To Value

The most recent disk of music by Martin Butler is a disk called American Rounds featuring the talents of the Schubert Ensemble, both as a whole and as individuals. The title piece is a four part chamber work for piano quintet and is inspired in part by American folk music but also by more modern sounding motoric rhythms. There is that open ait Copland fell in parts but it is very much its own piece and refers back to some of Butler's earlier works too. This is followed by three solo pieces that first surfaced in Butler's chamber opera A Better Place. Siward's River Song features the cello of Jane Salmon, Nathaniel's Mobile the piano of William Howard and Suzanne's River Song the duo of Howard and violinist Simon Blendis. Howard also plays another extended piece for solo piano Funerailles. The inspiration of chiming bells is clear in this piece. Butler then shows the gift for arrangement displayed by one of his mentors Berio in the two Scarlatti Sonatas which he has adapted for the quintet. here is also a berio conncion to the other substantial piece for piano quartet Sequenza Notturna, written in the month after Berio's death in 2003 and referencing in the title one of his most noted works. The final piece, Walden Snow, acts as a gentle coda for a few minutes after the Sequenza with the viola and piano winding down as it were. A thoroughly enjoyable chamber disk proving that the art lives and flourishes. It also shows the Schubert Ensemble to be one of the best currently operating in the chamber field.

Summer Afternoon Perfection

There are certain received opinions about the album Forest Flower : Charles Lloyd At Monterey. Of course, it committed the cardinal sin for many hard core jazz afficianados of being popular and selling well. The view has also come down that Charles Lloyd was a bit of a lightweight and that any interest the quartet had revolved around the soon to be stellar sidemen Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette ( the fourth member was the reliable veteran Cecil McBee on bass ) Listening to it again after almost forty years, I find these views to be deeply unfair and feel that it remains a special album. They certainly seemed to hit the mood of the times of those two summers of love in 1966 / 67 but there is no pandering to a hippie crowd in the music, no psychedelia or gimmicky effects ( Jarrett's playing of the strings inside of the piano being genuine experimentation and something used much earlier by such as Cage of course )The title track itself is a long extended latin influenced piece that develops a perfect hypnotic ambience suited to a sunny Californian afternoon and capable of transmitting that afternoon into any wintry sitting room. It expands and evolves like one of those liquid glass slide projections much loved at the time. Sorcery is a Jarrett composition and is much freer but still within formal structures, while Song Of Her written by McBee is a wonderful ballad. The original album ends with East Of The Sun, a storming straight ahead deconstruction of the standard which reflects back these days from Jarrett and DeJohnette's standards trio with Gary Peacock. I would be happy for the disk to end there as the original album did but in the name of giving value for money, this disk includes a whole other album from two years later called Soundtrack. By now, some of the criticisms aimed at Forest Flower have become more valid, the quartet was being booked into rock venues with rock bands and the whole approach is cruder. Ron McLure has replaced McBee on bass and DeJohnette's drumming is much more four square and rock oriented. Jarrett's solos are still worth hearing and Lloyd still shows he had much to say on both tenor and flute but the moment of pure magic represented by Forest Flower had gone and the parting of the ways was not far off.

A Celebration Of Woman

Like many of the offerings from Jordi Savall's Alia Vox label, this is a lavishly produced concept album by his wife Montserrat Figueras entitled Lux Feminae. It takes music from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance ( 900 - 1600 ) that pertains to the light of woman. There are seven aspects of womanhod that are considered, from the sacred to the sensual and from Christianity, Judaism and Islam ( a familiar theme of the Savall family )as well as ancient mythology. The disk follows that hybrid of early music and world music and the several talented performers appearing reflect this. here are contributions from such as Pierre Hamon on flutes, Andrew Lawrence-King on harp, Rolf Lislevand on lute and guitar, Driss El Maloumi on oud and Jordi Savall himself on viola da gamba. Montserrat Figueras's soprano is ideally suited to this repertoire with a light ethereal touch and she is occasionally augmented by a fellow soprano in her daughter Arianna and by mezzo Begona Olavide, contralto Laurence Bonnal and another soprano Tina Aagaard. Many of the songs featured are anonymous, others by little known names from Spanish or Moorish traditions and the disk is bookended by two glorious extracts from the Codex de las Huelgas.

Another Of Stalin's Victims

Nikolay Roslavets was another of those composers trying to pursue a career under the impossible strictures of Stalinist Russia. He was not as successful as more established names in doing this but the music on this disk indicates that we are the poorer for that. It is a disk by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov and the main piece featured is the Chamber Symphony. Only published in 2005, this is the first recording. It is almost an hour long and perhaps shares a soundworld with Schoenberg but there are echoes of others, the use of recurring leitmotifs that could be found in Shostakovich and Myaskovsky. There is a long and extremely atmospheric slow movement and the scherzo is in a wild dance form with folk tinges that may have been picked up in exile in Uzbekistan. The ecstatic feel of much of the finale shows Roslavets admiration for Scriabin and this is also apparent in the filler, a piece entitled In The Hours Of The New Moon. Contemporaneous with Stravinsky's Firebird, it also shows the orchestral palete of Rimsky-Korsakov and spotlights the playing of the BBCSSO's leader Elizabeth Layton.

Mementoes In Sound

This disk is described as a single, in olden times it would perhaps have been on a vinyl EP. It in fact contains a substantial 25 minute orchestral piece by contemporary British composer Richard Barrett entitled Vanity. It is performed here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Tamayo. The piece is in three movements ( Sensorium, Memento and Residua ) which are played through in one complete span. It is a piece built on the structure of a chamber music piece with the expanded forces of the orchestra used as discrete blocks whereby whole sections play en mass as if they were one instrument. Part of the inspiration comes from 17th century still life vanitas paintings ( hence the work's title ) where each seprate detail must be exquisitely portrayed and is of equal importance to the whole and this applied here to individual and group musical conributions. The strings play an important underpinning role, occasionally moving to the foreground. There are also parts for braying brass interludes, notably trombone, while the piano and cimbalom often augment the mutltiple percussion instruments which come to the fore in the final segment Residua and give the work a continual forward momentum. The piece ends mysteriously with a brief and ghostly quote from Schubert's Death And The Maiden. A disk that repays repeated listening where more detail and structure is revealed.