Twelve Factor

In a period in which the boundaries between musical genres are rapidly dissolving, there still exist major differences between what we still call a “jazz” band and those of other musical classifications.Perhaps the most significant of these is that longevity in a jazz ensemble will nearly always have an entirely positive effect on the music. That’s clearly a huge factor when listening to the high-caliber international quartet put together over a decade ago by the New York-based guitarist-composer Scott DuBois.

The Gramophone-award winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake turns to perhaps the most celebrated song-cycle of them all. Schubert’s Winterreise is a masterpiece of despair, astonishing in its bleakness and enthrallingly mesmerizing as the journey continues. Finley brings all his considerable dramatic powers to his performance—and all but submerges them under the ice.

Very recently passed away at age 89 Simeon ten Holt was the Icon of Dutch minimalism. His works for multiple pianos include his most famous work, ‘Canto Ostinato’, which gained cult status with a large audience not necessarily familiar with traditional classical music. The slowly shifting repeated patterns in Ten Holt’s music have a hypnotic and hallucinatory effect on listeners, during concerts which may take several hours. Dutch pianist Jeroen van Veen is “the leading exponent of minimalism in Holland” (Alan Swanson in Fanfare), a close acquaintance of Ten Holt, the ideal interpreter of his music.

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.