What are you listening to and WHY might anyone be interested? (Vol. XIII)
Posted by: Richard Dane on 01 January 2017
2017 has arrived today, so time to start this thread afresh.
Last year's thread can be found here;
Sparse, beautiful, & gorgeous sounding.
G
Like Chopin’s Barcarolles, Fauré’s work shows equal measures of limpidity and gravity, brightness and great depth. Delphine Bardin started playing the piano at the age of five and went on to study piano as a graduate at the Paris Conservatory under Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and chamber music under Christian Ivaldi.
Highly recommended.
1983 - Tidal...
Haim Ronen posted:
Like Chopin’s Barcarolles, Fauré’s work shows equal measures of limpidity and gravity, brightness and great depth. Delphine Bardin started playing the piano at the age of five and went on to study piano as a graduate at the Paris Conservatory under Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and chamber music under Christian Ivaldi.
Highly recommended.
Support your recommendation - one of those special albums...
While Grammophone wasn’t so impressed...
Fauré’s Barcarolles and Nocturnes (both a lucky 13 in number) offer a comprehensive survey of an incomparable art. And listening through the Barcarolles from Op 26 to Op 116 is to be made aware of a remarkable journey. This takes us from Gounod-inspired lyricism and the intricacies of Barcarolle No 5 to darker regions of the mind and finally to music which resolves all former complexity in a strange and unearthly transparency, the valediction of the final Barcarolle. Delphine Bardin’s performances show an admirable and recognisably French clarity and taste but her brightness is limiting and never more so than when Fauré is at his most painfully introverted and crepuscular (Nos 7 and 11). Indeed, as one Barcarolle follows another you become aware of a disturbing assumption that if you play the notes the rest will somehow look after itself. Poetry quickly becomes prose, and insufficiently interesting prose at that. There is too little sense of surprise in No 2 with its feline, shot-silk modulations and a besetting literalism in No 4 where the melody should float magically above its rising and falling accompaniment. The playing is lucid and clear but at too heavy a price.
In short, Bardin gives you little more than the outward manifestations of the score and you only have to turn to Jean-Philippe Collard, Paul Crossley, Kathryn Stott and most of all Germaine Thyssens-Valentin to witness playing of another poetic range and commitment. Bardin is well recorded but while Alpha offers us six photographs of their artist there is no biographical information. These are hardly the sort of performances you return to for a confirmation of Fauré’s genius.
Old school...
Now Playing........
Avishai Cohen - Into The Silence
Avishai Cohen (trumpet), Jonathan Avishai (piano), Bill McHenry (tenor saxophone), Eric Revis (double bass), Nasheet Waits (drums)
Streaming on TIDAL......... Revisiting this album that I played last week, a beautiful album to start the day!
Note from the ECM Records website here:
Avishai Cohen impressed a lot of listeners with his soulful contributions to Mark Turner’s Lathe of Heaven album in 2014. Now the charismatic Tel Aviv-born trumpeter has his ECM leader debut in a programme of expansive and impressionistic compositions for jazz quartet (trumpet, piano, bass, drums), augmented by tenor saxophone on a few pieces. Into The Silence is dedicated to the memory of Avishai’s father David, reflecting upon the last days of his life with grace and restraint. Avishai’s tender muted trumpet sets the emotional tone of the music in the album’s opening moments and his gifted cast of musicians explore its implications. Israeli pianist Yonathan Avishai has played with Cohen in many settings and solos creatively inside the trumpeter’s haunting compositions, sometimes illuminating them with the phraseology of the blues. Cohen and drummer Nasheet Waits have a hypersensitive understanding and their interaction can, from moment to moment, recall the heyday of Miles Davis and Tony Williams or Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. Yet this music, while acknowledging inspirational sources, is very much of our time. Bassist Eric Revis, a cornerstone of the Branford Marsalis quartet for two decades, provides elegant support throughout. And saxophonist Bill McHenry, a subtle modernist who has worked with Paul Motian and Andrew Cyrille, shadows Cohen’s lines with feeling.
2013 - Tidal...
John Abercrombie Quartet
Charles Rosen - Bach: Goldberg variations
Disc One of this four-disc (three CDs, one DVD) anthology of a very British, and, in their day, rather splendid, group.
No reason really, so, as old Bazza would say, "why not?"
case/lang/veirs - "case/lang/veirs" (2016) Neko, k.d. and Laura doing their collective thing. A bit too smooth and lightweight IMO, but all are talented individually and I'm glad they tried it. Not everybody would. Worth hearing a few times a year and the video available on YouTube is worth seeing a few times a year.
Jackie McLean - Destination Out! 24/96 flac.
Fleetwood Mac - "Tusk" (1979) I am listening to a playlist. Someone/somewhere (perhaps here) had mentioned editing it down to 11 tracks. So I click/drag those tracks on Spotify and made a playlist for myself.
Track listing if you wish to do it is 1/Over And Over 2/Think About Me 3/Sara 4/Storms 5/Not That Funny 6/Sister Of The Moon 7/Angel 8/Brown Eyes 9/Honey Hi 10/Beautiful Child 11/Tusk. Comes out to a tidy 46 minutes play time.
In the mood for some sixties sounds so I'm going with a 2001 compilation of these girls and boys, happy daze.
From the Stax/Volt/Atco Definitive Albums mono vinyl box set:
Now Playing.......
Tracy Chapman - Let It Rain
Streaming on TIDAL....... A mention from GRAEMEH above had me reach for the album. I enjoy Tracy's music and had not listened to one of her albums for awhile, so taking 'Let It Rain' out for a spin on this bright, sunny, cold day........... She is sounding mighty fine!
Bill Frisell - "Blues Dream" (2011)
(1967)
Another one from the sixties, The Monkees got a bad rap on this side of the pond but a lot of their music was just fine by me at the time backed up of course by their TV show on a Saturday afternoon after Grandstand.
On s/h vinyl
Why? It's an antidote to all the crappy Xmas music that's everywhere.
steve (Bah humbug)
Paper Plane posted:On s/h vinyl
Why? It's an antidote to all the crappy Xmas music that's everywhere.
steve (Bah humbug)
Full marks for that rationale, I'm trying to do something similar.