Kaleidoscope is a solo keyboard recording. All tunes are arranged by Bob James. On this release Bob James uses a Yamaha CFIIIS piano with Midi system and The Disklavier. It is also a 2012 release…recorded in Tokyo Japan. There are twelve tracks with the eleventh being a medley.The medley includes Westchester Lady/Touchdown/Nautilus/Angela.
Hardly have we savoured the full taste of “Rhythm ’n’ Bluesin’ By The Bayou” than here comes another bucketful of steaming South Louisiana gumbo and this time it’s “Bluesin’ By The Bayou” – a spicy mix of guitars, harmonicas, and even the occasional accordion, accompanying those tales of despair or machismo that are the recipe for the blues. All the tracks stem from the studios of J.D. Miller in Crowley and Eddie Shuler in Lake Charles. These two men were wonders at spotting talent and getting the best out of the performers, as illustrated on the 28 tracks on this CD.
Ketil Bjørnstad previously explored the life of Edvard Munch in his acclaimed 1993 novel Historien om Edvard Munch. When invited to compose music for choir in 2011 his thoughts turned once again to Munch and to the writings, still not widely known, of the proto-Expressionist Norwegian painter. With these as his guide, Bjørnstad shaped Soloppgang (“Sunrise”) subtitled “A cantata on texts by Edvard Munch”. In his liner notes, Bjørnstad observes that “the texts written by Munch can be compared to his paintings in their power and intensity.
He wanted to be a writer as well as a painter… texts from different periods in Munch’s life have been used in Sunrise. They all portray existentialist dilemmas: surviving or being destroyed, believing or observing”…
The likelihood is that Bruno Walter designed his transcriptions of Mahler’s First and Second Symphonies for public performance. Dynamics, phrasings and accents have been dropped in with forensic clarity, a concentration of detail unnecessary had the purpose merely been to demonstrate the broad outlines of Mahler’s works to potential interested parties. These transcriptions were meant to spread the word, reaching out to audiences during a time when performances of Mahler symphonies were still rare events.
“There’s a galaxy of piano trios in today’s jazz universe,” the BBC Music Magazine has noted, “but few shine as bright as Marcin Wasilewski’s”. On its seventh ECM album the multifaceted Polish group illuminates a characteristically wide span of music. On En attendant, collectively created pieces are juxtaposed with Wasilewski’s malleable “Glimmer of Hope”, Carla Bley’s timeless “Vashkar”, The Doors’ hypnotic “Riders On The Storm” and a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Fluidity is the hallmark , allied to the deep listening made possible by more than a quarter-century of collaborative music-making by pianist Wasilewski, bassist Kurkiewicz and drummer Miskiewicz. En attendant was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in August 2019, and produced by Manfred Eicher.