Jim Fox, The City the Wind Swept Away

Jim Fox, founder of Cold Blue Records and one of the most fertile, intriguing composers in "radical tonality" today, turns in a fine work with a single in the series, The City the Wind Swept Away (Cold Blue 0015).

It is a slow moving, somewhat mysterious, supremely atmospheric work for two trombones, two bass trombones, piano, two violins, viola and cello. The ensemble creates a kind of blue-green haze to depict a city that has vanished, the emptiness palpable and audible in no uncertain terms. And the performance is all you could wish for.

At the center are slowly moving piano patterns, broken arpeggiated chords swinging like a slow pendulum, sometimes breaking free, only to return to another ostinato pattern. The strings and trombones come upon us as variable translucent blocks, like mists rising over a flat, empty expanse, then dissipating, to be replaced gradually by other chordal blocks of heightened tonal colors.

It's music of beauty and wonder, something that goes well with a sunset or sunup in an otherwise silent room. This is strongly engaging associative music that unfolds in a sonic panorama with great calmness and grace.

It will give you pause, make you drift someplace good. Excellent.

Kyle Gann, Long Night, For Three Pianos

The Cold Blue series of CDs gives us access to many interesting works in an ambient, "radical tonality" soundscape zone. Today, one in their singles series, a 25-minute piece for three pianos by Kyle Gann. Long Night (Cold Blue 0019) features the totally appropriate playing of Sarah Cahill, who overdubs all three parts.

The music is a slowly unfolding, minor diatonic sonic map. It is as if you are traversing a landscape dotted with multiple features, each feature a note series. The three piano interplay has a post Satie-esque gentleness. At first a very slow ostinato pattern underpins the diatonic melodic simultaneity and it reminds in some ways like the slowly random dripping of rain from a roof after a storm. The ostinato has slow tempo regularity and the melodic figures occurring on top are nicely random in terms of periodicity. The ostinato and its recurrence has a quasi-drone way about it that gives this music an almost Indian classical quality, like the slow alap section of a raga only less purposive. From the initial ostinato comes new figures that play against the raindrop melodics. But it all flows together as a processual experience with a singleness of musical personality.

The sound is somehow like something out of nature, random seeming yet staying in the realm of the minor diatonic tonality consistently. Then, towards the middle, the key shifts and with it the melodic figures become more dense. It changes the music up nicely and allows our ears a refreshment that moves things forward.

There may be others in the Cold Blue series that I would get first if I hadn't heard any of them yet. But in the end Kyle Gann's Long Night opens up an ambient world that one can inhabit frequently as a place to repose, perhaps meditate on life. Well done.