What jazz have you been listening to today?

[intet_at_tabe]

So let´s Carry on (like J. J. Cale would have sung and played it) with two other albums by Egberto Gismonti of a later date. The first album "Infancia", recorded at the ECM Records 1991. The second album "Musica De Sobrevivencia", ECM Records 1993 with the same musicians as on the first album, but not the quartet/band Academia De Dancas, I mentioned earlier this morning.

The musicians on both albums:

Egberto Gismonti - piano, 8 and 10 string acoustic guitars, indian wooden flutes and indian percussion
Jacques Morelenbaum - cello
Zeca Assumpcao - double bass
Nando Carneiro - synthesizer, 8 string acoustic guitar, classical guitar and caxix

The music here obviously different because of the synthesizer and the cello involved. Nando Carneiro, a former student of EG in playing the specially built acoustic guitars by EG.

For those of you who digg the english rock el. bass player and vocalist STING (former The Police), you will have noticed the name Jacques Morelenbaum - cello, who also played with STING on albums like "Fields Of Gold", by A & M Records 1994 and "All This Time", by A & M Records 2001.

 

[intet_at_tabe]

The caxix drums and the small bells in front:





Who is Egberto Gismonti?


Egberto Gismonti was born in 1947 in Carmo, Brazil. He began his formal music studies at the age of six on piano. After studying classical music for 15 years, he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger (orchestration and analysis), and composer Jean Barraqué, a disciple of Schönberg and Webern. Returning to Brazil, Gismonti began to glimpse a reality broader than the classical world of music. He was attracted by Ravel's ideas of orchestration and chord voicings, as well as by "choro", a Brazilian instrumental popular music where varied kinds of guitars are featured. To play this music he made the transition from piano to guitar, beginning on the 6-string classical instrument and switching to the 8-string guitar in 1973. He spent two years experimenting with different tunings and searching for new sounds, which is also reflected in his use of flutes, kalimbas, sho, voice, bells, etc. By the early '70s, he had laid the groundwork for his current conception was listening to musicians as wide-ranging as Django Reinhardt and Jimi Hendrix... For him, Hendrix's achievements were proof that "popular" and "serious" idioms need not remain opposite poles: "There's no difference between the two kinds of music...". Gismonti's first ECM record Dance Das Cabecas (ECM 1089), and a duet set featuring percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, dating from 1977, was nominated Album Of The Year by Stereo Review and received the "Großer Deutscher Schallplattenpreis". Sol Do Meio Dia (ECM 1116) found the duo augmented by saxophonist Jan Garbarek, percussionist Collin Walcott and guitarist Ralph Towner; the session following on a tour featuring Gismonti, the Belonging Quartet and Oregon. Gismonti dedicated this album to the Xingu Indians of the Amazon, with whom he had lived for a period of time in the jungle. On his following 1979 ECM recording "Solo" (ECM 1136), he plays 8-string guitar, piano and bells, expressing a pure and comprehensive view of his music. Tha next album to present Gismonti was a trio recording entitled Magico (ECM 1151) with bassist Charlie Haden and saxophonist Jan Garbarek, recorded in 1979. The same year, the trio toured Europe, including a concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival, and recorded a second Magico album, entitled Folksongs (ECM 1170). In 1981, Gismonti again toured with Haden and Garbarek, performing throughout Europe. The album Sanfona (ECM 1203/04), is related to the Brazilian roots of his music. It features both group and solo work within the context of a single release. On the first record of his two-disc set, Gismonti is joined by his Brazilian group Academia De Danças: Mauro Senise (saxophone and flutes), Zeca Assumpçao (bass) and Nene (drums and percussion). On the solo disc, the emphasis is more decidedly on his guitar playing and on Indian organ improvisation. In his liner notes for Sanfona, Geraldo Carneiro characterizes Gismonti's offeirng as "a trip through Brazilian rhythms, musical forms and popular festivals... symbolizing Brazilian culture in all its breadth from solemn to burlesque".

For more info and reviews on albums by Egberto Gismonti: http://www.amazon.com/Dan%C3%A7a-Das-Cabe%C3%A7as-Egberto-Gismonti/dp/B0000261H0

 

[Corno Dolce]

*Les Incontournables* by McCoy Tyner - released in 2000.

 

[Contratrombone64]

As always some postings are too long for me to be bothered to read, life's too short. I was listening to some Joplin, I guess that's proto-jazz?

 

[JHC]

Contratrombone64I agree with you concerning long winded posts
================
For me the old timers, Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, MJQ, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman + a good serving of Dixie, The Dutch swing college etc. and just to show that I am not a relic of the past The Gordon Brisker quintet and the New York Jazz collective taking special note of a great pianist Mike Nock

 

[intet_at_tabe]

On the album "Arvore", originally recorded on the brazilian label Carmo for the Tom Brazil Productions 1973, Egberto Gismonti has challenced a symphony orchestra in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The album was re-released on ECM Records 1993.

One of the few albums, where Egberto plays electric instruments like synthesizers as well as classical guitar, 8 string acoustic guitar, Steinway Grand piano and on this particular album, he does not only use his voice for accompaniment, but actually the original lyrics to the older more traditional popular songs from the folkklore from another time in Brazil in the past. Popular songs known throughout Brazil, which can be heard on radio 24/7, which make every brazilian feel that typical, rare for other nations, brazilian emotion - saudage - which can not be translated to just one sentence, like "miss your country when abroad" - because the word - saudage - in Brazil rooms everything emotional brazilians feel about their country and it´s history and culture, before Christopher Columbus and the caucasion white race arrived with christianity forced upon the indians, and the genoside of the native indians in songs like:

"Aquarela do Brazil" - "Rio de Janeiro" - "Tango" - "Salvador" - "Variacoes Sobre Um Tema" - "Encontro No Ba" - "Adagio".

All songs that remind brazilians of the beauty of their country and how proud they are of their country, the Amazon Rain Forest with its incredible forever changing flora, the rain that continues for 8 months of the year, all the animals and 3500 different reptiles. On top of the animals, the king of the big cats, the Jaguar, which is the native indian´s word for - The cat that only bites once. The wide long white beaches to the east to the Atlantic Ocean from south to north for instance on Cobacabana (Rio de Janeiro), where more than one Pele´, Garinha, Sokrates, Junior, Ronaldo learned to play soccer in the sand from the age of 2 in bare feet. But also the extreme unimaginable poverty and injustice, where you find hundreds of thousands beggars who´s home are the streets, like in the USA, as well in the metropols like Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Manaus and Salvador. The carnivals, which are basicly a feast for the poor, the Samba schools, the city Manuas one of the oldest cities in Brazil to the far west deep inside the Amazon Rain Forest and the end of the Amazon river, where ships for centuries have traded every commodity with the river people on both sides and have retrived diamonds and gold and other precious stones and minerals from the north-west of Brazil in the big mines etc. etc.

When brazilians are abroad, they get this almost painful, but also proud and happy longing for their country, equals - saudage.

 

[intet_at_tabe]

As always some postings are too long for me to be bothered to read, life's too short. I was listening to some Joplin, I guess that's proto-jazz?

CT64 :grin::grin:

You mean like this one?


Jun-12-2008, 04:38 #1 (permalink) Contratrombone64
Vice Admiral Virtuoso



Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 2,789
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Articulate...will you??
This is a snippet of some advice Tony Pay provided about articulation (in his case the work in question was/is the Mozart clarinet concerto). Which we all know was most definitely NOT written for a "clarient" at least, not the clarinet that has evolved into the modern, 20 something key nightmare (I speak from experience as clarinet was my first instrument).

Here's Tony's text ...

David Blumberg wrote some generous words about my K622 recording. I'd like to take the opportunity say something about that performance, which has been criticised several times, here and elsewhere, for being 'over-articulated'.

First of all, I nowadays play many more passages legato. (It's over 20 years old, remember.) So I must have come to agree that a greater variety of articulation is preferable.

I should say that an aspect of the situation that's not often realised is that in many ways, it's much easier on a period instrument to produce flowing articulated passagework than it is to produce flowing legato passagework. Cross-fingerings and other acoustical unevennesses mean that adjacent notes can have very different responses, and the separation produced by articulation gives you the split-second that allows you to correct that.

So I suppose that as I've got better on the instrument, I'm able to play more of it legato On the other hand, Mozart's own Klavier playing was described as being particularly detached, so that might seem to justify erring on the side of over- rather than under-articulation in his music.

Of course, the absence of slurs in many passages of both first edition and the Winterthur fragment, as well as in many other Mozart autographs, doesn't necessarily mean that Mozart wanted those passages played staccato. The scores of the period were intended to be read against the background of a well-understood performance convention, according to which players would quite naturally have produced an articulation appropriate to their understanding of the musical gesture. Where Mozart felt he needed to be explicit, he wrote a slur; but where he could trust the performer, or where the precise details didn't matter to him, he didn't. This sort of notation is sometimes called 'descriptive', or 'thin' notation; in contrast to, say, the notation of a composer like Webern, which is called 'prescriptive' or 'thick' notation.

The important thing, in my view, is to encourage students to try to find an articulation 'appropriate to the musical gesture', as I put it above. And that, of course, demands that we have some notion of what classical musical gestures ARE, as well as some experience of putting them into practice.

A particularly important feature of 'thin' notation is that it leaves classical stylistic structures (things like appoggiaturas, bar hierarchy, phrase shape and so on) open to be applied to VARYING DEGREES. So two different interpretations of a passage -- say, one that sees it as dramatic and another that sees it as more lyrical -- may be best served by two different articulations. And THAT means, crucially, that performers need not fix their interpretation, but can play 'from the same score' in different ways on different occasions.

Player-editors who ignore this, preferring to apply the conventions of later, romantic music to the scores of the classical period, may well produce articulations significantly removed from what Mozart might have expected from a performer.

That's for two reasons. First, those player-editors have views about the nature of the musical gesture that may be much at odds with what is known about the musical conventions operating when the music was written; and second, they produce a version of the score that transforms the flexible, 'thin' notation into a prescriptive 'thick' one, drastically curtailing performance freedom by adding the dynamics and slurs that they personally happen to fancy. Indeed, it's rather frightening to see the degree to which Alamiro Giampieri dominated the Italian clarinet scene for decades via his editions for Ricordi, managing to mangle the texts of Mozart, Weber, Brahms and Schumann alike to suit his own indiscriminate taste -- and of course, to suit his pocket;-) He had the audacity to print, on those editions, 'It is obligatory in performance to publish on the programme not only the name of the composer, but that of the editor, Alamiro Giampieri.'

To go back to the original question: in a student performance, the difference between an unacceptable articulation and an acceptable one -- between one that damages the listeners' understanding of the musical structure and one that supports it -- is usually one that has to be explained both in the technical world and in the emotional world. So I try to characterise articulation choices for a student in those rather general terms.

Usually, an unacceptable articulation is one that obscures important note groupings. An example for me would be bars 81-84 of K622(i), where bar 81 is clearly in 4, bar 82 in 2, and bars 83 and 84 in 1: there is a progressive calming of the rhythmic impulse. In this progression, the equal division of bar 82 is created by the two downward-hanging loops of triplets; and those loops become the single double-length semiquaver loop of bar 83. A 'mistaken' articulation in that reading would therefore be to play bar 83 as 'slur two and tongue two', creating a division of the bar into 4 and interrupting the progression towards one-in-a-bar.

A student might not agree, of course; but the point is to link the emotional description 'calming' to the technical description 'going towards a bar in one from a bar in four'. To make it 'work' the other way around (becoming MORE energetic because of the move from triplets to semiquavers) is possible but difficult; you'd need to give particular directions to the orchestra too.

To end on a lighter note: the 'best' reason I ever heard for a particular articulation in the Mozart concerto was given me by one Valentin Zakharov, to whom I was introduced in 1975 in Australia. He was the then principal clarinet of the Sydney Opera Orchestra, and I was on tour with the Fires of London, which was a British group that specialised in the music of Peter Maxwell Davies.

We decided as usual to try each other's setups; but when we got our instruments out he treated me to such a dazzling squirt of clarinet virtuosity that I felt unable to compete. So, when he looked at me expectantly, I played him a bit of the Mozart concerto.

"Ah," he said. "You know, in Russia, we play that passage staccato!"

I was puzzled. "What do you mean, 'in Russia'?" I said. "Surely you don't mean, EVERYONE in Russia?"

"Of course!" he said, with that stunning blend of implausibility and total conviction that people like him often have.

"But,...why?"

"Well, because otherwise, in a competition, we would have no way of deciding who is the best player!"

Tony

I am in all with you CT64. :grin::grin:

 

[intet_at_tabe]

The multi-instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti with the equally incredible percussionist and berimbau player Nana Vasconcelos on the duo album "Duas Vozes", by the ECM Records 1985.

The american phenomena on guitars Pat Metheny, asked specificly for Nana Vasconcelos to join the Pat Metheny Group on a one year concert tour throughout the USA to take care of the percussion in the band. It can be heard on the double live album "Travels", by the ECM Records 1983.

Like I have stated before the two of them Egberto and Nana can transform all the sounds of the night of the Amazon Rain Forest, using each their instruments, hands and voices.

Egberto Gismonti - 8 and 10 string acoustic guitars, piano, indian wooden flutes, dilruba, voice
Nana Vasconcelos - berimbau, percussion, voice

The dilruba, which is not a brazilian instrument but an old instrument from India:

The berimbau:

 

[Corno Dolce]

*Live At The Musicians Exchange Cafe* by McCoy Tyner - released in 1987.

 

[intet_at_tabe]

As always some postings are too long for me to be bothered to read, life's too short. I was listening to some Joplin, I guess that's proto-jazz?

CT64, or is it Tony? :tiphat:

Did you know that under the United Nations program against diskrimination with references to the Human Rights, it is stipulated that it is:

"Every human beings right to be an individual in expression, behaviour and appearence", quote unquote.

So what can you join with and tell us about this proto-jazz type Joplin. Please sir Tony endulge all of us, the mike is your´s.

 

[rojo]

Uh, fellas? Cut it out.

 

[Corno Dolce]

Aloha Ms. Rojo,

Am I causing any problems here on this thread? Please PM me - Thanx.

CD

 

[intet_at_tabe]

On the album "Zigzag", by the ECM Reords 1996, Egberto Gismonti Trio introduce us to the acoustic 14 string guitar.

The trio:

Egberto Gismonti - 10 and 14 string acoustic guitars, piano
Nando Carneiro - synthesizers, classical guitar and 8 string acoustic guitar
Zeca Assumpcao - double bass

 

[Mat]

Uh, fellas? Cut it out.

Dear Rojo - I couldn't have said it better. Thanks for guarding this thread <kiss on the cheek>

On Topic:
Makowicz vs. Możdżer at the Carnegie Hall

 

[Corno Dolce]

*Counterpoints:Live In Tokyo* by McCoy Tyner - released in 2004.

 

[Jazz_Keys]

"Brazilian Classics" - Eliane Elias on piano with Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson sharing the bass duties. The version of Wave on that album is outstanding.

 

[Corno Dolce]

*Echoes Of A Friend* by McCoy Tyner - released in 1972.

 

[Mat]

Diana Krall - Love Scenes

 

[Corno Dolce]

*McCoy Tyner Plays Ellington* - released in 1964.

 

[Corno Dolce]

*Leucocyte* by Esbjörn Svensson Trio.