sounds like now

This past Sunday was the last day of Artscape, the largest free art and music festival in the United States, and the Pramus skate shop decided go guerilla and have an unsanctioned, impromptu concert on the sidewalk in front of the shop at the corner of Mt Royal Ave and Calvert St. As pictured above, Hybrid Groove Project was on the front lines, turning heads and making them nod. It was a nice end to the weekend’s festivities, which also saw HGP perform on John Berndt’s exciting and super-ambitious Exotic Hypnotic series (the events of which have been blogged wonderfully by new Baltimore transplant, composer and audio guy Devin Hurd, over at Hurd Audio).

Oh, and HGP isn’t the only thing on the streets—American Voices is now officially released.

The first review of American Voices has appeared on the august website Sequenza21. Here’s a sample: “American Voices is, without doubt, a CD you need. The performances by Mr. Sacawa are amazing and the music selected is equally so. This is music that every sax player you know needs to perform and that every music listener you know needs to hear.” Stop, stop! I’m blushing. Okay, go on!

I returned to my apartment today to find four large boxes deposited on my doorstep. And within these boxes I was delighted to find many, many copies of American Voices. And let me tell you, it’s about time. I remember taking introductory Ph.D musicology courses with Richard Crawford at the University of Michigan. We’d constantly write, and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. You get the idea. And finally after one rewrite, I remember Prof Crawford saying that as hard as it is to do, there comes a point when you just have push the damn thing away from you, throw up your hands, and say, “I’m done.” That’s kind of how this went.

Okay, now the basics: The CD is available directly from the Innova website until the official street release date of July 24, at which time you’ll be able to get it from Amazon, iTunes, eMusic, or in record stores. Of course, you could also come to the recital and “unofficial” CD release party I’ve got coming up on April 25 to pick up a copy. There’ll be all sorts of celebrities there. Finally, there are many people to thank for making this CD a reality and you should know about them. So read the liner notes.

American Voices is currently in production. Official announcements to follow. Stay tuned.

Nostalgia reigns recently on SLN. Look for the American Voices CD release on Innova in about 2 months. Glass. Hyla. Gordon. Theofanidis. Spangler. Hurst. Makan.

Last Friday’s performance of Unsilent Night in Baltimore lives on! Among the throngs of participants and supporters was one of Mobtown’s most renowned experimental percussionists, Bob Wagner, who came to the event packing a recording device and a microphone on the end of a very long boomstand. Bob herocially braved frigid fingers and tired arms to document the event in sound. Bob writes:

The mic I used is a Sennheiser hypercardiod, so there is very little side sound. (Actually I was hoping for a bit more traffic and city noises.) The sound of the boomboxes is very primary. Also, the recording is a mono two track recording- both sides are identical. I did almost no editing . . . [The recording] is slightly normalized. No other effects.

Download the complete performance here.

Update: Photos from the performance are can be viewed here.

Recording session today at Solid Sound in Ann Arbor. Rob Martens is a master at capturing a sound exactly. And he’s got a great set of ears and an easy-going studio manner to boot, making it a pleasure to work with him each and every time. Rob calls the studio “a million dollar facility” but truth be told it’s probably worth much, much more. Simply a gem. We knocked out Chris Theofanidis’ Netherland and then I layed down Pre-Amnesia by Lee Hyla and Bacchanalia Skiapodorum by Derek Hurst, a piece that I swear sounds like Milton Babbitt’s funk band (if he had one). All that’s left to finish up on the American Voices album is Wuorinen’s daunting Divertimento and Keeril Makan’s Voice within Voice. Almost there.

Some sharp satire from Alex Ross over the Hyperion Records case. How about the Alex Ross edition of Prokofiev’s Sarcasms?

As part of restructuring their classical music division, Sony BMG announced yesterday the creation of a new classical label, Sony BMG Masterworks. With Gilbert Hetherwick at the helm, the label intends to “put the focus on classical music,” which means putting a damper on the crossover projects that were once deemed the only way to sustain a classical line. Mr. Hetherwick reports directly to Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s chief operating officer, Michael Smeille, who although professing to knowing nothing about classical music, registered some pretty insightful comments about crossover projects:

I don’t buy the reports that the classical record market is collapsing. It’s just a question of recording the right repertory, marketing it convincingly and applying the right discipline. And in my view, getting rid of crossover allows people to be focused. Crossover distorts people’s values. You have a record that sells a million copies, and the universe shifts towards finding the next one. That’s not what we want to do.

Well, his comments about crossover are pretty insightful, but one wonders who he’s trying to kid with that first sentence. (And maybe what he means by “marketing it convincingly” is to use “babeness” as a strategy. What do you think, Jerry?) At any rate, although the label intends to support classical music and not crossover artists, classical music means the core classical repertory. So expect new releases of the same old stuff, only this time mined from the back catalog of the combined label, in the form of reissues. In fact, over 100 releases a year would most likely be reissues, compared to the 20 to 25 new recordings.

And where’s new music in this equation? Not completely absent, although it would be nice to see contemporary composers get a bigger slice of the major record label pie. Contemporary music will have to be happy being marginalized, for the most part, to the internet ghetto:

[The internet] would be ideal for some of the contemporary-music recordings that Sony has: avant-garde productions from the 1960s that are important but that we couldn’t afford to remaster, put into a plastic box and sell in stores.

Huh? If they’re important, why not remaster them, put them into a plastic box and sell them in stores? Or how about just putting them into a plastic box and selling them in stores? It’s important to note here that any sort of attention to new music that the label will pay, is attention to “old” new music, rather than “new” new music. Mr. Hetherwick says some things that make me jump for joy, but he also says some things that leave me scratching my head.

The Tower Records in Harvard Square has been singing its siren song to me all week long. It lures me in seductively, flaunting its assets–a good sized section devoted entirely to new music–while simultaneously draining mine. Ever since the Borders in Ann Arbor scaled down its classical music section I haven’t had many opportunities recently to thumb through the bins and discover an interesting and exciting CD. My safaris through Tower these past few days have yielded four trophies: a box set of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano (Wergo); Still Lives (Lovely), a CD featuring three works by Alvin Lucier, including Marilyn Nonken performing Music for Piano with slow sweet pure wave oscillators; Salvatore Sciarrino’s La bocca, i piedi, il suono (Col Legno) for a quartet of alto saxophones with a back-up band of one hundred saxophones; and Vespertine by Bjork.