Rhythms & Blues - American Piano Music

Album review

The connection between minimalism and African American vernacular styles is widely recognized among fans of popular dance music, but in the concert music sphere it has been little explored. American pianist Jocelyn Swigger claims in her notes that she simply programmed music she wanted to play, and that the themes of the program occurred to her only after the fact, but it doesn't matter. The sequence of works is a fresh one. There is only one minimalist work, John Adams' China Gates, and only one piece of true jazz, Jelly Roll Morton's Finger Buster. All the rest of the works are concert pieces that explore African American (or in one case African) rhythms and/or blues and jazz tonal structures. The music is unfamiliar, and even the works by established composers take on new resonances when heard in this context. Samuel Barber's Excursions (1942-1944) are among his few works that incorporate jazz elements, and his general idiom is nicely expanded upon by Amy Rubin in her American Progressions, for piano (2000-2002). Martin Scherzinger's When One Has the Feet of Wind is based on interlocking percussion rhythms from his native South Africa, and it makes an excellent counterpoint to the better-known Adams work. Swigger writes that her job "as performer is to ... try to make the notated music sound improvised," which isn't quite germane to much of the music: the charm of William Bolcom's The Garden of Eden, four rags for piano, lies in their carefully planned tensions between ragtime's fixed traditional forms and Bolcom's experiments with the genre. But she is not in the least uncomfortable with the doses of ragtime and jazz rhythms required here. An offbeat program strongly recommended to anyone interested in the relationship between classical music and jazz. Swigger's take on the issue is unique. The transformation of the lines of the UPC code, an invasion of the commercial into the artistic sphere, into note stems also deserves positive notice.
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