Out this week: Songs from Home, beautiful solo piano from Fred Hersch. 🎶
Posts in: Music
Coffee + grading while listening to Mahler’s Sympony No. 5, prompted by this touching anecdote from Alex Ross. 🎶 ☕️ 🔗
Here’s 58.5 hours of Glenn Gould playing Bach for y’all. See ya next week. 🎶
Billy Hart Quartet, Live Streaming at the Village Vanguard 🎶
I just caught the Billy Hart quartet live at the Village Vanguard, thanks to the club’s streaming series. (Vijay Iyer’s trio is up next weekend.) Hart and his conspirators were excellent. All original pieces, I believe. I particularly love Turner’s piece, “Nigeria,” with which they closed their set. Personnel: Billy Hart, drums Ethan Iverson, piano Ben Street, bass Mark Turner, tenor Partial set list: ? (I missed the intro & half of the first tune) Aviation (Iverson) Teule’s Redemption (Hart) Showdown (Iverson) Ira (Hart?
Current listening: Pat Metheny, *From This Place* 🎶
I’ve been listening to Pat Metheny’s outstanding new album From This Place. From the compositions, through the arrangements (Metheny called in Alan Broadbent to help), to the musicianship of drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, & pianist Gwilym Simcock. Highly recommended—& also available on Bandcamp.
Singers, among many others, have had their livelihoods cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19.
But it turns out you can still make beautiful music together virtually. Here’s my sister-in-law singing Mauricio Duruflé’s Ubi Cartas, as part of a virtual octet. 🎶
Learning to play the piano without a piano 🔗🎶
This is a remarkable story, though disappointingly brief.
I was in Fargo for a couple days for my mom’s birthday. While there, I enjoyed an all-too-rare gift: an hour of free time to play jazz with my dad.
Our set list:
- Midnight Mood
- Little Waltz
- Stolen Moments
- Lucky Southern
- Autumn in New York
🎶
Ethan Iverson's ECM Artist's Choice Playlist 🎶
I’ve been exploring the ECM Artist’s Choice playlist curated by pianist Ethan Iverson (available on Apple Music & Tidal). It was cool enough to have these ECM tracks hand-picked by him. But then I discovered that he has also annotated each selection. Iverson’s notes illuminate the music—but they also provide a window into the listening biography and musical development of a great jazz pianists.
Silence & Music: two of my favorite things. Also the name of a beautiful album by the Gabrieli Consort. 🎶