Jaffe

A unique recital of 20th-century chamber music, essentially melodic but expressively rich, woven seamlessly together by a Spanish-based duo.

Throughout her career, Texas singer-songwriter Sarah Jaffe has allowed her sound to expand and evolve in exciting ways. From the beginning, she's had a tremendous knack for heartsick ballads, but she's also grown increasingly adept at vibrant electro-pop that incorporates her career's detours into film scoring and even hip-hop. Jaffe's two most recent albums, 2012's The Body Wins and 2014's Don't Disconnect, showcase a fascination with science and machinery, with a futuristic sound to match. Now, on Bad Baby, she sounds as versatile as ever in songs that mix spiky synth-pop with softer, slower-burning reflections on the way human beings interact.

For the fourth volume of music by Stephen Jaffe, the composer writes that he is "searching for sounds and musical relationships to create something new, like a poetry–where listeners may discover lyrical expression and an arc of narrative." These premiere recordings of three works written between 2006 and 2009, offer a program featuring Jaffe's collaborations with the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Borromeo String Quartet, and National Symphony Orchestra members David Hardy, cello and Lambert Orkis, piano.

Fra il 1956 e il 1961 Aniela Jaffé, psicoanalista e allieva di Carl Gustav Jung, trascrisse le conversazioni tenute con l'ormai anziano maestro durante gli ultimi anni della sua vita. Non è un caso che Jung avesse affidato a lei le riflessioni sul proprio vissuto, riflessioni che confluirono parzialmente in un celebre libro biografico pubblicato nel 1962 e considerato da molti una forma di «autoanalisi». Il materiale originale che, per varie ragioni, non fu incluso in quella pubblicazione viene ora presentato, per la prima volta e dopo non poche traversie, in questo prezioso volume composto da due parti. La prima metà accoglie sessanta ritratti autobiografici, memorie e aneddoti di Jung, narrati in prima persona e liberamente trascritti da Jaffé..

From the opening swells of this striking debut recording, one can sense that there is deep listening taking place among this trio’s members. Entirely improvised in the afternoon of their first meeting, Speak, Moment cascades from gorgeous mountaintop revelation fanfare to rough hewn and ragged noise. Altogether, it is an opening salvo, a profound and unrepeatable moment in the lives of these three remarkable musicians. Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, and Patrick Shiroishi have bewilderingly stacked CVs and accolades from here to the moon. Together, on Speak, Moment, they establish hypnotic and richly textured guitar-driven tapestries colored with the effervescent thread of a yearning saxophone melody that might be torn loose in an instant by thunderous percussion or febrile grooves.

Meditation Music is the fourth album by Joss Jaffe, a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, tabla player and record producer who has traveled the world performing at large-scale yoga events and transformational festivals. This is Jaffe’s first release on the Be Why Music label which has won the New Age Grammy Award twice in the last three years. Quoting the liner notes of the CD, “The music was created for the purpose of relaxing the body, soothing the mind and facilitating a state of deep rest and peacefulness.