Great album by the top Japanese jazz players of the time (Sadao Watanabe, Akira Miyazawa, Hideto Kanai, Takeshi Inomata, Eiichi Fuji…).
In August 2022, Australia-based, French born fourth-world music legend Ariel Kalma was invited to participate in BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction series of special collaborations. The program pairs artists who have not previously worked together to create new music cooperatively.
Great album by the top Japanese jazz players of the time (Sadao Watanabe, Akira Miyazawa, Hideto Kanai, Takeshi Inomata, Eiichi Fuji…).
A solid singer who is superior at interpreting lyrics, gives a soulful feeling to each song, and improvises with subtlety, Lorez Alexandria was a popular attraction for several decades. She sang gospel music with her family at churches starting in the mid-'40s and worked in Chicago nightclubs in the 1950s. With the release of several albums for King during 1957-1959, Alexandria became popular beyond her hometown, and by the early '60s she was living and working in Los Angeles. In addition to the King label, her earlier recording sessions were for Argo and Impulse, while her later albums were for Discovery and Muse. Despite a long period off records (only a few private recordings during the 1965-1976 period), Alexandria survived through the many changes in musical styles and could be heard in excellent form up until she retired in the mid-'90s…
Alexander Ivashkin’s bold, confident cello-playing is the thread running through these works; he partners the organist Malcolm Hicks in the 1979 In croce, plays the Ten Preludes for the solo instrument from 1979, and leads a quartet of cellos in the remarkable Quaternion. Though many of Sofia Gubaidulina’s works have a religious dimension, In croce does not, despite its title; ‘On the cross’ refers to the way in which the two instruments exchange roles during the work, the cello beginning with microtones in the lowest register and gradually rising to a high diatonic end, while the organ starts off high in a pure A major and descends to the depths to a cluster that gradually collapses when the instrument’s blower is turned off. Though the Ten Preludes stretch the player’s capabilities to the maximum, they remain more or less within the conventional resources of the instrument. But Quaternion creates a whole new, ethereal, sound-world in which the cellos are tuned in pairs a quarter-tone apart, the players wear thimbles on their fingers in one section, and the music is persistently coloured by harmonics.
The music of the Bulgarian composer-conductor Emil Tabakov (b. 1947) explores the darker side of the human spirit in monumental scores as austere as they are powerful. Like many of his earlier symphonies, the Ninth, nearly an hour in length, is conceived on a massive scale. The opening Adagio forms an epic, glacial prelude to the driving Presto second movement. Two further slow movements follow: a Largo, which offers an island of relief after the tumult of the scherzo, and a finale which, after opening with an extensive Largo of its own, is transformed into a wild, driving, violent Allegro moderato. The symphony is prefaced by a virtuoso study for string ensemble written over 30 years earlier and remarkable for its contrapuntal fireworks and its explosive, almost elemental energy.