Emily Scott Topless Photoshoot March 2006 Part 3

While most classical composers attempt to spread around their artistry among various mediums, Stephen Scott has put all of his eggs into the proverbial one basket, specializing in bowed piano music as founder/leader of the Bowed Piano Ensemble, est. 1977. This is not as limited a resource as it sounds; in 1930, Henry Cowell stated he had discovered 165 ways to play the inside of a piano, though if he made a list of all those methods no one has been able to find it. Moreover, Stephen Scott doesn't seem to mind being regarded as "the Bowed Piano Guy." New Albion's The Deep Spaces is his sixth bowed piano CD and demonstrates some measure of stepping out of the box on Scott's part; The Deep Spaces is a song cycle, set to poems by Shelley, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Pliny, and Pablo Medina and sung by soprano Victoria Hansen.

There were intermittent soundtrack and score contributions of varying magnitudes, as well as a couple other low-key projects, but The Drift is Scott Walker's proper follow-up to 1995's Tilt, an album that also happened to trail its predecessor by 11 years. If 1984's Climate of Hunter put the MOR in morose, Tilt avoided the road completely and went straight toward the fractured, fraught images inside Walker's nightmares. It was entirely removed from anything that could've been classified as contemporary. The Drift isn't an equally severe leap from Tilt, but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening. Maybe it'll make your body temperature drop a few degrees. Working with what Walker has referred to as "blocks of sound," only a few of the album's 68 minutes have any connection to rock music, and many of those minutes are part of a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references "Jailhouse Rock" as Elvis Presley cries out ("I'm the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother. The songs swing from hovering drones to crushing jolts.

Throughout her career, singer Marilyn Scott has straddled a line between traditional jazz vocals and the poppier side of fusion. Innocent of Nothing tilts slightly toward the latter, with catchy R&B-based tunes like "Icebox" and "Round and Round" alongside an oddly overwrought version of Bob Dylan's "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" that brings Scott Walker's melodramatics to mind. However, Scott's jazz side reasserts itself on her challenging take on the Thelonious Monk standard "Round Midnight," which Scott approaches with the rhythmic fearlessness of Jeanne Lee or indeed Monk himself. Throughout, producer and bandleader George Duke keeps the emphasis on Scott's vocals, using the tropes of contemporary smooth jazz…