Skip to main content

Force Majeure

I was delighted and a little surprised to hear a harp in the mix of the opening tracks on Makaya McCraven's 2018 album Universal Beings, and looked up the musician responsible: Brandee Younger. I watched and enjoyed several YouTube videos featuring her playing solo and as part of a quartet. It seemed her own recordings weren't readily available in the UK at that point, but when Force Majeure (a collaboration with her partner, bassist Dezron Douglas) came out in 2020 I was eager to listen. 

It's an album that grew out of a series of (I think) Facebook videocasts from their New York apartment in the early months of the pandemic, under the title 'brunch in the crib with Brandee and Dezron'. So it's domestic music-making but for public consumption, and serves as a record of that strange time and the ingenious ways some musicians found to reach out and find an (often captive) audience. It's also a beautiful album with tremendous charm, and vividly-recorded too.

There's one original composition written by the pair, but all the other tracks are arrangements of either classic jazz pieces or pop songs. Of the latter, I especially enjoy the versions of 'Never Can Say Goodbye' and 'This Woman's Work'. Of the former, their take on John Coltrane's 'Wise One' is exquisite, and is prefaced by Douglas sombrely dedicating the performance to the memory of the then recently-murdered Ahmaud Arbery. I have it on CD - which, most unusually nowadays, has a 'hidden' bonus track at the end: after some apparently closing remarks, the final track continues in silence for a few minutes before an additional uncredited number begins.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more