Northern Soul's Modern Monsters

With J Jazz volume 4, the BBE J Jazz Bullet Train continues its journey traversing the expansive landscape of modern Japanese jazz. Volume 4 is the latest in the universally praised compilation series exploring the best, rarest and most innovative jazz to emerge from the Far East. Please take your seats for a first-class ticket to J Jazz central.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich may have found inspiration through introspection, but her music is anything but introverted. Concerto Elegia and Commedia dell'Arte unpack disparate themes—mourning a loss and the joy of theater—each within the framework of the concerto, exhibiting Zwilich's creativity and imagination in addition to her compositional prowess. While the concerti are naturally inviting, as if to allow you to partake in an intimate discussion, Symphony No. 5 grabs one's attention by introducing its own unmatched scale and grandeur. The listening experience pivots from a conversation to a Socratic debate, where a plurality of ideas shape a prevailing vision among its participants.

With J Jazz volume 4, the BBE J Jazz Bullet Train continues its journey traversing the expansive landscape of modern Japanese jazz. Volume 4 is the latest in the universally praised compilation series exploring the best, rarest and most innovative jazz to emerge from the Far East. Please take your seats for a first-class ticket to J Jazz central.

One of the first Modern Jazz Quartet albums on Atlantic - a 1957 set that finds the crew in one of their freshest periods - laying down their soon-to-be trademark style in a fashion that warrants the self-titled tag! The set kicks off with a stellar medley of standards, all given the tight MJQ touch! The crew strolls through "They Say It's Wonderful", "How Deep Is The Ocean", "Body And Soul" and more in that 10 minute stretch. Other album highlights include the drum-heavy "La Ronde", a sweet reading of "Night In Tunisia", "Baden Baden", "Bag's Groove" and "Yesterdays".

Tom [ Scherman, of the Little Orchestra Society ] came to me and said, “Hey Kubik, I’m being pestered all the time by the pianist in my orchestra, Frank Glazer, for a solo appearance, and by Bob Nagel, my trumpet player, and the principal violist [ Theodore Israel ] .” And so Tom, figuring to kill three birds with one stone said, “Can’t you write me a piece for piano, viola, trumpet, and orchestra, and I’ll have my three players do the solo parts and they’ll get off of my back?” I said, “Sure.” And since it came within a month or so after I’d finished recording the score to the film C-Man, which had exactly those three solo instruments, I just re-wrote it as the Symphony Concertante. Don’t do that thinking that you’re going to save time. It’s twice as hard, it’s ten times as hard, than to just write a new piece.

John Corigliano is a difficult composer to pin down stylistically. The generally tonal orientation of his music and the cinematic quality that made his score for The Red Violin such a success have brought him a beloved status rare among contemporary composers. Yet, it would be wrong to call him neo-Romantic; his music has deep rigor and sometimes, as in the Symphony No. 2 on offer here, a quite grim quality. This 2022 release from the Boston Modern Orchestra does not include his most famous works – The Red Violin in either its film score or violin concertos forms, The Ghosts of Versailles, or the Symphony No. 1 – but it offers an excellent window into the richness of Corigliano's music, in which a great variety of elements collide in unexpected ways. One of those elements is quotation, on display in the opening work, To Music; it is based on Schubert's song An die Musik, which is assembled with great subtlety over five and a half minutes.