This is a Recording

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....

It took me years to figure out that, as a general rule, my preference was for chamber music over orchestral music; trios, quartets & quintets over concertos and symphonies. As with most general rules, however, there are exceptions, notably when it comes to the works of Jean Sibelius. The Finn wrote a good deal of undistiguished chamber and salon music, but, given a bigger band to play with, he could work wonders. I went through a Sibelius phase around 15-20 years ago, collecting several CDs of his music, and gaining an appreciation for such justly-popular pieces as the 'Karelia Suite' the 5th Symphony, and 'Tapiola'. The only Sibelius LP I currently have is this 1975 recording by the USSR Radio and Television Large Symphony Orchestra performing Symphones 3 & 5, with that man Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. It was one of half a dozen classical albums I picked up at the Oxfam shop in Thornbury last autumn. I'd previously had another version of the 5th on vi...

Morphine are another of the many bands and artists I first heard on the radio - in their case my initial exposure would have been the tracks 'Super Sex' and 'Honey White', ca.  '95 or so, promoting their third album Yes . Did I buy any Morphine albums on cassette? Probably: but not, I think, Cure For Pain , which I believe I've only ever owned on CD. My copy is no longer in its original Rykodisc green-tinted jewel-box, which must have suffered a fatal mishap at some point. Released in the apparent trough between the crests of the Grunge and Britpop waves, Cure For Pain sounds like it was drawn from some other ocean altogether. That might be partially attributable to singer & bassist Mark Sandman being half a generation older than most of his musical contemporaries. The blend of baritone sax & bass was never going to be to everyone's taste, but I'm among those who like how they kept it all down low. For all their unique atmosphere, and the excell...

Thanks to his day-job as a research chemist (among other commitments), Alexander Borodin wasn't the most prolific of composers, and this 3CD set suffices to include all of his chamber works. It's a 2009 issue on the budget Brilliant Classics label of recordings made in the mid-'90s. The performers are The Moscow Trio and The Moscow String Quartet, with a further four musicians helping out here & there. None of the players are famous enough that I recognise their names, but all are highly accomplished. The recordings themselves are excellent too. The majority of the works are early ones, written when Borodin was in his twenties. According to Malcolm MacDonald's booklet notes, the String Quintet in F minor on disc 2 is among his first serious compositions. It, like a few of the other pieces, was never fully finished. There are only two movements of a String Sextet in D minor, and the Piano Trio in D has three movements, but, seems to be lacking a fourth to serve as a ...

On hearing their fascinating track 'Winterland' on the radio just over two years ago, I immediately looked up Northwest on-line and saw it was part of their then recently-issued second album II . Unsurprisingly, that was the follow-up to a debut release called I , which had come out in 2018. Not much later I ordered both albums on CD direct from their Bandcamp page . Both discs came signed and inscribed with handwritten messages. Northwest are a Spanish duo (Ignacio Simón & Mariuca García-Lomas) who, I gather, were based in the UK for most of the period in which these albums were made. While their first record blended electronic and acoustic instrumentation, this one uses mostly the latter, with the pair helped out my a supporting cast of eight other musicians. Strings and clarinet feature prominently, as do piano and harmonium. There are drums on some tracks, but it doesn't feel much like rock'n'roll or jazz, and it's adorned with classically-inspired flour...

Naruyoshi Kikuchi's 'Dub Sextet' is a conventional jazz quintet (tenor sax, trumpet, piano, bass & drums) augmented by a sixth member, Pardon Kimura, who is credited as providing the dub. Kimura's contribution seems to entail moments where reverberating echo has been added; others where blooping oscillators come in; and others still where the acoustic sounds break up into glitchy electronic static, etc. It's not obvious to me which, if any, of those effects were applied 'live', or if they were all varieties of studio post-processing. In any case, they strike me more as decorations than as structurally-integral parts of the music. I wouldn't imagine the album would have sounded radically different if it had been a dub-less quintet performance. The musicianship is excellent: Kikuchi is the saxophonist, leader and principal composer; Shinpei Ruike on trumpet is no lesser player; and drummer Tamaya Honda is terrific, often threatening to steal the show...

There are many more famous and - by virtually all measures - objectively better 19th-century concertos than Giovanni Bottesini's 1853 'Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra in B Minor', but this relatively obscure piece has brought me more pleasure than Beethoven's 'Emperor' piano concerto; or Brahms' for the violin; or Dvořák's for the cello, etc. There's something about the way he makes the lugubrious voice of the bass sing so sweetly that never fails to delight me. Part of the piece's charm for me, is its brevity - it clocks in at 16:13 on this recording. The first two movements have wonderful yearning melodies which aren't allowed to outstay their welcome, while the shorter third wraps things up in a brisk Allegro finalé. Also on this disc is Bottesini's later and longer F sharp minor concerto, a work I've never enjoyed as much as the B minor one. Rounding out the disc is a further charming piece: a 'Gran Duo Passione Amorosa...