Daniel Lentz, River of 1,000 Streams

River of  1,000 Streams (Cold Blue Music CB0050) has a logical horizontal flow that has to do with an experiential "aha" moment Daniel Lentz had while standing on the banks of the Colorado River one early morning. What he felt inspired him to conceive of this EP length work for solo piano and "cascading echoes," the latter of which appear very subtly and organically in the course of the work. Vicki Ray brings life to the part with sureness and sensitivity.

Just as you cannot step in the same river twice, you cannot hear this work each time without feeling a new aspect of what you hear. And as a reviewer, if your original article was somehow wiped out as mine was sometime this past Tuesday, you cannot write the same review twice! Technological life is filled with such temporal anomalies. We no longer need Star Trek to experience virtual worm holes in the space-time continuum. Involuntary erasure gives us all we would ever want, which in fact is very little in this case!

There is the constant of the dramatic arc of the music, beginning quietly and gradually building in developmental sequences of sostenuto shimmers of radically tonal rolls of chordal clusters that flow along river-like, adding embellishments and thematic directional cues that turn it all after all into musical syntax and not just atmospherics, though even if Lentz kept it entirely primal we would be transfixed. But no, he wants us to embrace its long sprawling arc of cosmic event unfolding as a very long whole.

This is an excellent example of the Cold Blue school of mesmeric tonality. It speaks with a sprawling yet disciplined eloquence and takes us on a trip as would a river's endless flow. Beauty is there for us. We only have to stand (or sit) and hear the music go by.

Excellent!