Splinter Reeds - Gordon & Matthusen: Dark Currents - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Raised in California, Isaac Darche studied with jazz legends Kenny Burrell and Billy Higgins at UCLA. He has received numerous distinctions, including a Gluck Fellowship for the Performing Arts and Kennedy Center's Jazz Ahead program. His new CD Team & Variations contains five original songs, with memorable melodies that make use of uncommon rhythmic and harmonic phrases.

Ambitious wind quintet Splinter Reeds presents a bracing program of new works written for the group by composers Sky Macklay, Matthew Schlomowitz, Caro Haxo, Eric Wubbels, Theresa Wong, and Yannis Kyriakides. All of the works display an envelope pushing impulse that stretches the boundaries of this traditional instrumental , carving out new repertoire and provoking new aesthetic perspectives. This project was funded in part through grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the Amphion Foundation. Splinter Reeds is a fiscally-sponsored affiliate of InterMusic SF, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to small-ensemble music in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Uitti and Fanous spent 10 minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites western vs. Eastern, improvised vs. #through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says InchMusically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphases. In my case, these were non-western music, as well as chromaticism in both it's contemporary classical and free jazz expressions, all funneled through the techniques of classical and flamenco guitar. In Frances' case, it was a lifelong devotion to and mastery of parallel directions improvisation, as well as contemporary composition at the highest level. Both were made infinitely more powerful by the deployment of ingenious extended techniques, including her revolutionary two-bow methods. Our backgrounds contained enough shared common experience to allow for a tentacular interdigitation of our improvisational languages, which was effortless and natural.Inch The session began with bouzouki-cello duets, in which drones played a central role, calling up a middle-eastern sound-world. Fanous writes InchAs the pieces evolved, they gradually became unmoored and reverted to who they really were, but together. This process of feeling one's way through the darkness was like navigating towards some unknown endpoint, the way the ancients used the astrolabe to navigate using the positions of the stars - Negoum in Arabic.Inch