Laments

Westminster Abbey has been the focus of British royal occasions for centuries, and the early seventeenth century saw the most dazzling musicians of the age writing music for the Court in all its various incarnations. This fascinating disc presents a selection of works from the reign of King James I. The most celebrated name on this disc is that of Orlando Gibbons, and some of his most masterly works are presented on this CD.

Keith Jarrett - Mysteries / Shades (1976) {Impulse! Remaster 2011}
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© 2011 Impulse! / Verve | 06025 2780951
Jazz / Post Bop / Avant-Garde Jazz / Piano

Great Impulse Records material from Keith Jarrett – almost overlooked, as it's from a time when most folks concentrate on his recordings for ECM! Mysteries is dark and moody work from Keith Jarrett – a record that builds strongly off his ensemble feeling of the Impulse years, but which also seems to carry a bit more of the introspective vibe he was building up in some of his more stripped down solo recordings! The group's still a great one here – with Dewey Redman on reeds, Charlie Haden on bass, Paul Motian on drums, and Guilhermo Franco on percussion – and the tunes, although long and somewhat free, still show Jarrett's great ear for a lyrical melody – carried off wonderfully without cliche, and still with more sharp edges than you might expect.

The familiar declaration that Enrique Granados’s suite Goyescas—Los Majos enamorados (The Majos in Love) and Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia form the twin peaks of Spanish keyboard music is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not go far. The good intentions behind this declaration ultimately parochialize, if not to say diminish, Goyescas as well as Iberia by qualifying them in relation to other piano works by composers from the Iberian peninsula, not in relation to the varied topographies of all piano works. From an international or cosmopolitan perspective, the Goyescas suite may be suituated between Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a memorial to the work of the artist Victor Hartmann, and Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), a memorial to both Couperin “le Grand” (in particular, the French Baroque keyboard suite) and friends of the composer who died in the Great War.