The Offering

There are many apocryphal stories in the classical-music world, but the one in which Frederick the Great challenged Bach to improvise a six-part fugue on a theme of the king's own invention is true, and The Musical Offering was, after a period of further reflection, the result. As with all the works of Bach's later years, the work is both great art and a "teaching piece," which shows everything that he thought could be done with the king's theme. The Trio Sonata based on the theme is the only major piece of chamber music from Bach's last decades in Leipzig, and that makes the work and essential cornerstone of any Bach collection. This performance, led by Neville Marriner, is both polished and lively, and very well recorded. At a "twofer" price, coupled with The Art of Fugue, it's the preferred version of the work on modern instruments.

Composer Douglas J. Cuomo’s new piece, Seven Limbs, is unique and unusual. The suite features the simultaneous performance of inspired improvisations by guitar genius Nels Cline and meticulously-notated music performed by the Grammy-nominated Aizuri Quartet. Inspired by an ancient Buddhist prayer, also called Seven Limbs, it is music of great power that is put in service to a spiritual ideal, in the tradition of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and the music of Arvo Pärt.

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

Travis & Fripp has proved to be one of the most enduring of Robert Fripp’s many duo projects – all the more remarkable really, given that both musicians are consistently involved in other projects; for Fripp, a renewed King Crimson has been a primary musical enterprise since 2014, while Theo Travis has, in recent years recorded and toured with David Sylvian, Steven Wilson, continues as a member of Soft Machine, runs his own band Double Talk & still somehow, finds time for an ongoing commitment to teaching a next generation of musicians.

Re-weaving link blesses between the jazz and the hip-hop, Movezom explores the furrow draw by John Coltrane by conferring on him an urban and current dimension. Voices and texts of MC' S here come to resound in the quoting of saxophones, ropes, of battery and of machines by embracing big themes with mark the work of the saxophonist. Compositions, sailing between beats hip-hop, Free jazz and contemporary music, are so much occasions to discover or to rediscover the most emblematic pieces of Coltrane, those notably last period of its life. Revisiting The Trane is vibrating homage to one of the biggest musicians of last century. It is also a disc which questions the today's jazz across its filiation with the rap and tries to give sense to the cultural inheritance of a music resolutely turned to future.