John Morton

The story of how Morton Feldman and John Cage first met has now become elevated to the status of legendary musical folklore. During a 1950 New York Philharmonic performance of Webern’s Symphony Op. 21, Feldman decided to leave the concert at the interval. In the lobby he met Cage. As Cage says, “we both walked out of a Philharmonic concert in which Webern had just been played, and we shared the desire not to hear anything else because we had been so deeply moved.” It was the beginning of a deep friendship that was to influence both their respective creative spirits. Morton Feldman became a friend, flatmate and student of John Cage.

Feldman’s 75-minute work dedicated to his friend John Cage was written in 1982. In this new version, Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano) set out to draw the listener into the charged space between the performers.

Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace. The three works on this disc are among Feldman's richest creations, yet the material in each piece is subtly layered and integrated so well that many details will escape detection on first hearing. In Piano and Orchestra, the piano is treated as one texture among many, receding to the background and blending with muted brass and woodwinds in a wash of colors. Cello and Orchestra might seem like a conventional concerto movement, especially since the cellist is centrally placed on this recording and plays with a rather lyrical tone. However, Feldman's orchestral clusters are dense and interlocked, which suggests that the cello should be less prominent and blend more into the mass of sounds behind it. No such ambiguity exists in the performance of Coptic Light, which Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra play with even dynamics and careful attention to the work's aggregate effect, which is mesmerizing.

In the jazz world, there are artists who are consistent but predictable and artists who are unpredictable but inconsistent. John Scofield, meanwhile, is an impressive example of a jazzman who is both unpredictable and consistent. You never know what the risk-taking guitarist will do from one album to the next, but he rarely provides an album that is flat-out disappointing. Überjam is a major departure from 2000's Works for Me, the Verve date that preceded it. While Works for Me is essentially a straight-ahead post-bop outing and employs acoustic-oriented players, like pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Christian McBride, Überjam is pure, unadulterated fusion. This album always has a jazz mentality - Überjam is as spontaneous, free-spirited, and uninhibited as any bop session that was recorded in Rudy Van Gelder's studio in the '50s…

Having cut an album of standards on his first Warner Brothers album, In a Sentimental Mood (1989), Dr. John turned for its follow-up to a collection of New Orleans standards. On an album he described in the liner notes as "a little history of New Orleans music," Dr. John returned to his hometown and set up shop at local Ultrasonic Studios, inviting in such local musicians as Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, and the Neville Brothers and addressing the music and styles of such local legends as Jelly Roll Morton, Huey "Piano" Smith, Fats Domino, James Booker, and Professor Longhair. The geography may have been circumscribed, but the stylistic range was extensive, from jazz and blues to folk and rock. And it was all played with festive conviction - Dr. John is the perfect archivist for the music, being one of its primary proponents, yet he had never addressed it quite as directly as he did here.

Morton Feldman’s “For John Cage” is the second of seven large-scale works dedicated to artists, a series which includes Frank O’Hara, Bunita Marcus, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, Philip Guston, and Samuel Beckett. Feldman met John Cage in 1950, at a time when Feldman’s composition studies with Stefan Wolpe had reached a kind of dead end. Cage gave him encouragement, enthusiasm and permission to be himself. They remained friends until Feldman’s death in 1987. In its austere texture, “For John Cage” gives equal weight to the violin and piano parts. The fact that the two instruments often play similar material makes the contrast between the sustained sounds of the violin and the decaying sounds of the piano especially clear.

In BIS' Chinoiserie, pianist Jenny Lin brings one of the most compelling and relevant themed recitals to be heard on disc in years, a collection of pieces by Western composers that attempts to explore the subject of China in some regard, not only musically but culturally.