New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records release The Blue Hour, a song cycle written collaboratively by the female composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider; this unique joint vision among a female collective is available October 14, 2022. The cycle was commissioned by, and is performed with, the Boston–based chamber orchestra A Far Cry. (Nova also is featured as vocal soloist.) Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s epic poem On Earth, the music follows one woman’s journey through the space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images. Exploring memories of childhood, of war, of love, and of loss, The Blue Hour amplifies the beauty, pain, and fragility of human life from a collective female perspective.
A quarter of a century after his death at 36, the astonishing saxophonist and flutist Eric Dolphy is still influencing and inspiring the most adventuresome jazz musicians. Dolphy was daring and iconoclastic while fully immersed in the jazz tradition. His musicianship was so thorough that innovators like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane held him in awe. In a dream partnership, Dolphy and trumpeter Booker Little made a handful of recordings in 1960 and '61, shortly before Little's own premature death. The first of them are in this album. Included is the rare "Serene," never before issued with the session's other material.