Dowland / Mangore - Santa Allegrezza - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

'Down by Avalon frontman Alan Martin writes about relationships with the wisdom of someone his age... he considers life and love with energy inherited from singers like Van Morrison, Ray Davies and Paul McCartney. [The band] matches Martin's outlook with it's arrangements and accomplished playing. Built ground-up from simple rhythms and developed with tasteful guitar leads and Dan Bryk's omnipresent piano and organ flair, Down by Avalon is an elegant, precise pop production. The layers are simple and direct like Stiff Records perfection, and the harmonies are spare but like a distillation of so many '70s charms.' -Grayson Currin, The Independent 'Chapel Hill, N.C. quartet Down By Avalon steer clear of modern bells and whistles and find solace of the simplicity of the '60s and the '70s for it's debut. Like last summer's next-big-things Peter Bjorn and John and I'm From Barcelona, Down By Avalon seek to let relatively unembellished melodies do the talking, and the end results reflect a deep admiration for traditional pop music. However, though the band prides itself in it's ability to write classic pop music, the real strength lies in the warm, folk, almost hippie vibe it projects into and onto the listener. Down By Avalon's debut stands as a reminder that music is not merely about the arrangement of notes or words, but about the feelings it brings when listened to.' -Melinda Hanna, Performer Magazine.

A transformationDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world shut down and many lives were lost or changed forever, I experienced a serious transformation. A commitment to sobriety unleashed new creative forces. The world's new normal of quiet and introspection led me to return to a more formal branch of my musical upbringing fully-inked acoustic music. Untethered from the backbeats and lead sheets of my career in jazz and pop music, I once again immersed myself in scores and music literature. An exciting new sense of freedom filled me with inspiration. I discovered a wellspring of patience and subsequent understanding and became obsessed with form. Hyper-focussed and pencil in hand, I wrote tirelessly from dawn until dusk. When I spoke about this newfound passion with one of the biggest supporters of my lifetime, my Dad, he told me it sounded like I had Inchseen the lightInch - a remarkable turn of events during an otherwise difficult time for us all.About the music...String Quartet No. 1 InchThe OrphansInch (2023)The idea of writing a string quartet began to haunt me as this hallowed can be intimidating. After what initially seemed like fruitless labor, I sidelined this ambition to work on some other music. Then one day while walking in a forest preserve in Chicago, a tune popped into my head which later developed into a promising base movement for a string quartet. Despite a failed attempt at a second movement, my confidence grew, and again inspired by nature, movements I, II and III were written with the base movement now as IV. Just when I thought the whole piece was done, the inspiration for another, shorter, livelier, and more cohesive movement came to me, and outdoors no less! Following my intuition I completely abandoned the germ of it all, the mother of this string quartet, for four of her offspring. It was an unpredictable process.Three Poe Excerpts (202

Dowland / Camerata Trajectina - Dowland in Holland [COMPACT DISCS] Jewel Case Packaging date 01/08/2016