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LP
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ABST 021LP
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Reissue of this amazing 1986 album where drum machines meet improv jazz. Wayne Horvitz gathers together his drum machine and synths along with his talented friends -- Elliot Sharp included -- for this really original record that is both composed and improvised. An obscure gem by one of the most spirited musicians to populate NY '80s avant-garde, a golden era for vanguard attitudes and sounds. Horvitz, keyboard player at Naked City (along with John Zorn, Bill Frisell, and Fred Frith) had classical musical education and an ulterior demise of the discipline; radical jazz sensibilities, and rock n' roll vitality. That made up for a very unique, highly distinctive, breed of cutting-edge music. The boundaries of contemporary composition are expanded, breathing from improvisatory strategies and awareness of both the pop world and the most experimental milieu's discoveries. Large is the importance of his long-time collaborator Butch Morris' Conduction method, a system of structured free improvisation. Dinner At Eight offers new turns on the development of these mixed approaches by being both composed and improvised but also neither fully electronic nor fully acoustic. Written mostly in the loneliness of a San Francisco apartment, the project is less collaborative than others by Wayne, and its sound palette becomes more electronic and rhythm-based. Nevertheless, the helping hand of the most stellar musicians in New York becomes crucial as it rounds the timbral and structural magic of the project. The rhythmic and sound design experiments of tracks such as "Dinner At Eight" or "Conjunction For C" go hand in hand with the machine funk of "This New Generation" (where angular bass and guitar are provided by Elliot Sharp). You can find a robust synthetic marimba and bass jazz in "Extra Extra" or insistent dry percussions on "Second Line" that wouldn't be far from Marc Barreca's investigations. "True" and "These Hard Times" are also harmonizing with these mechanic sounds. Joyous, exotic, and whimsical songs that prove how an ear for experimentation is an open ear to all sounds, including the most melodic and overtly fun. Brilliant fresh sensibilities and musical interests collide in Dinner At Eight to form a very special milestone of NYC avant-garde music, offering an even richer vision of that amazing fertile scene.
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CD
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NW 80672CD
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"Perhaps the best way to characterize Wayne Horvitz's (b. 1955) Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices, and Soloist (2004) -- based on the life and times of the legendary labor activist and organizer -- is as a radio play that tells the story of a man's life in words, instrumental music and songs. Like a song cycle, Joe Hill incorporates much previously written material (nearly all of it re-harmonized). There are songs by Hill himself, such as 'The Rebel Girl' and 'There is Power in the Union,' but also by others, including the folk poem 'The Lumberjack's Prayer,' Mississippi John Hurt's 'Spike Driver's Blues,' and an old English street cry, 'Chairs to Mend.' It also employs spoken word, including Joe Hill's famous 'Last Will and Testament,' plus words used as narration and dramatic dialogue. But 'song cycles' don't usually include ravishingly beautiful stretches of chamber music, much less a completely open line in the score for an improvising guitarist -- in this case, the most influential one of our time, Bill Frisell. This Rubik's cube of jazz, folk, classical and popular music is strikingly elegiac and autumnal in tone, more requiem and lament than celebration or call to 'action.' This is appropriate to its theme of martyrdom, though there are also many exhilarating, jaunty, and humorous sections. Apart from classical music and the blues, its other major influences are what has come to be called Americana -- to be more specific, Appalachian music's nasal vocals, affection for open fifths, ambiguity between major and minor thirds, and the jazzy Broadway writing of Leonard Bernstein, particularly his penchant for rapid time-signature changes. Horvitz has chosen to tell Hill's story in music that is both complex and direct, ironic and sentimental, dissonant and gorgeous, popular and artful, and that relishes a well-wrought song as much as long-form development."
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