Michael Daugherty Jackie O (1997)

Recorded at Santo Studios in Oakland California over the past 3 years with a mostly new cast of musicians, Bloom continues the trajectory of JOMF’s explorations of song and sonic experimentation. The band is moving more slowly these days, with core members Tom Greenwood and Michael Whittaker living in the more rural corners of Northern California. Bloom is a patiently crafted record that tells its story through shifting emotional and sonic environments, starting in a vacant lot in far west Oakland, where the freeway meets the edge of the city. The lot was a storage area for the 50 ft. long and 8 ft. high steel pipes that would become the footings for the new Bay Bridge, sunken into the floor of the San Francisco Bay. The band met there regularly to play, and recorded dozens of hours of sounds from the beautifully reverb drenched atmosphere inside the pipes. The lyrically reflective songs that follow are coming through the lens of solitude, propelled by simple and often fragile structures.

The circumstances surrounding the composition and first performance of the Suite in B flat major, Op 4, were to prove enormously significant for Strauss’s career. Von Bülow decided to give the premiere of the new work in Munich in the winter of 1884 during an orchestral tour. Furthermore, since the players had already familiarized themselves with the music in Meiningen that autumn, he thought it would be appropriate if the composer himself conducted this performance according to his own interpretation.