Painting With Sound

Earle Brown’s involvement with the fine arts led him to reject previously fixed ideas of musical form and supposedly sacrosanct rules of composition in the early 1950s. His graphic notations, which are primarily oriented toward Jackson Pollock’s painting procedures, guarantee the opening of time and space which leads to the liberation of the sound and the expansion of the meaning of form. “[…] mobility of the sound elements within the work and the graphic provocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-performance process – were for me the most fascinating new possibility for ‘sound objects’ as they had been for sculpture and painting.” (Earle Brown)

Takatoshi Naitoh’s 2001 album, "Birds in Paradise" intersects radiant, organic synth landscapes with deep field recordings of bird calls. The bird sounds gently descend the listener into a comfortable and low vantage point where the birds can be heard echoing through the vast land. They will prelude each synthetic segment and lead into the electronic counterpart quite nicely. Remarkable are the synth portions of this album. Not unlike a classical composition, Naitoh is showing us an aural movie with his fluid synthesizers arrangements. His music speaks of hesitancy, caution, relief, majestic conquest, mystical exploration, longing etc.

The tunes are instantly recognizable: well-known standards such as "All The Things You Are", "Over The Rainbow" or "Autumn Leaves". And yet the listener always has the impression of hearing something completely new. On "Painting Music", Danish pianist Carsten Dahl gives his own take on some of the great classics of the jazz repertoire in a way that is highly personal, resolutely individual and completely revelatory.