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New Sounds

Friday, August 11, 2006
  • koto

    Vaults: EAR Magazine Benefit

    It’s the last in the week of highlights from the New Sounds Live concert series from the vaults. For this program, we’ll listen to part of a concert recorded live from Town Hall back in 1990, as a benefit for Ear Magazine, featuring a solo percussion-theater performance by drummer David Van Tiegham, who turns nearly anything into an instrument when he strikes it. Also on the bill, the Kazue Sawai Koto Ensemble and a new work for several kotos. Rounding out the show is short tasty hocket for horns by Les Miserables Brass Band.

PROGRAM #722: From the 'Live Benefit for EAR Magazine' at Town Hall
(Original airdate: September 26, 1991.)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

David Van Tieghem

live

untitled works {25:00}

Van Tieghem's CDs were released on the Private Music. Most seem to be hard to find. Try through www.allmusic.com, auction sites or gemm.com

Kazue Sawai Koto Ensemble

live

Homura {15:00}

Not recorded commercially. Other Kazue Sawai recordings have been released only in Japan.

Les Miserables Brass Band

live

"Nyoro" {2:00}

Northeastern Records. Try Amazon.com *

*, ** - Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

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Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.