Paul Legato

Paul Chambers - Mosaic Select 5 (1956-59) [3CD BoxSet] {2003 Mosaic Records}
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© 2003 Mosaic Records / Blue Note | MS-005
Jazz / Hard Bop / Bass

Paul Chambers finally receives the Mosaic Select treatment and there's a surprise tossed in with his catalog for fans and connoisseurs: his material recorded for the Transition label. Also included on the Paul Chambers set are the albums Chambers' Music and Whims of Chambers from 1956 and Bass on Top and The Paul Chambers Quintet from 1957. Musicians on these dates ran the gamut from Elvin Jones to Donald Byrd, Clifford Jordan, Horace Silver, Kenny Burrell, Hank Jones, and Art Taylor – an overwhelming number of fellow Detroiters. There are some other odds and ends as well, but most importantly, the Transition material will be of prime interest to John Coltrane fans.

All the music on this Naxos release by violinist Reto Kuppel and pianist Wolfgang Manz receives its world premiere here. Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) was known mostly as a singer and hardly at all as a composer, and the music of her son, Paul Viardot, was conservative even in his youth. This all might seem pretty obscure, but the truth of the matter is that the program has a good deal of freshness and charm. Start right in with the biggest surprise of all, the Violin Sonatina in A minor of Pauline, whom Liszt admired.

Master drummer, composer, and bandleader Paul Motian's volume in ECM's fine Rarum series is a tough one to reconcile. It's not that it is in any way disappointing – far from it. It's more a case of what to choose and how an artist's choices are made when there is so much material to choose from. Motian has played as a sideman and as a leader for the label since he was first approached by Manfred Eicher in 1972. The nine tunes here range from that year's Conception Vessel, his debut album as a leader with Keith Jarrett, to a 1985 Paul Bley Quartet date on which he guested along with Bill Frisell and John Surman. While Motian did appear on the ECM label during the 1990s, none of that material was chosen. The 13 years that are reflected here are rich in not only musical diversity but cultural acumen.

International lawyer by day and piano virtuoso by night, Paul Wee made his recording début in 2019 with some of the most technically demanding piano music there is: Alkan’s Symphony and Concerto for solo piano. He now returns with music which presents a different, but not lesser challenge: how make the keyboard sing. The piano is by nature a percussive instrument – the sound is created by little hammers falling on strings. To create a true legato – or the illusion of it – has been the aim of generations of pianists, but few have taken the matter as far as Sigismond Thalberg.

Even if both of them were destined to die tragically of illness at a very early age (Weber at 39, Schubert just 31!), the two composers on this disc were healthy enough when they wrote these works, and were even beginning to taste success. Except that it was not to the piano sonata that they owed their fame: not without a twinkle in his eye, Paul Lewis has coupled their works in this genre in order to paint a different and highly elegant portrait of two musical dramatists who were emblematic figures of Austro-German Romanticism.

Athalia, first performed in Oxford in 1733 was enthusiastically received, bar the comment by a crusty academic complaining of ‘Handel and (his lowsy Crew) a great number of forreign fidlers’. All current recordings are of this version, perhaps explaining why Paul Goodwin chose Handel’s London revival from 1735.

Shred pioneer Paul Gilbert takes you into his world of intense guitar techniques and creative musicality as he explains the details of his album Silence Followed by a Deafening Roar on this instructional DVD. Along with in-depth guitar lessons are special sections on arpeggios, picking, phrasing, and legato techniques, plus a special shred annex of Paul Gilbert's favorite and fastest licks, rare concert footage, backing tracks, and downloadable guitar tablature.