wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

New Sounds

Saturday, April 05, 2008
  • Glenn Kotche and host John Schaefer
    Glenn Kotche with host John Schaefer (WNYC)

    Mobile, Solo Kotche

    The percussionist Glenn Kotche, best known as the drummer for the band Wilco, joins host John Schaefer for a tour through his new solo CD "Mobile," on this edition of New Sounds. It's an incredible feat that somehow Kotche plays with the patterns of Steve Reich's "Clapping Music," takes apart the Nonesuch Explorer recordings of Shona Mbira music, works through mobile sculpture, negative space and Wilco drumbeats, and nods to percussionists Tony Allen and Ed Blackwell in just 8 tracks. For the crowning masterpiece of the CD, he uses live crickets (looped), plastic piping, vibraphone, springs, gongs, orchestral bells, and a fruit basket to create an original percussive rendering of the "Monkey Chant," based on the Ramayana story of the abduction of Sita and her subsequent rescue by an army of monkeys.

PROGRAM # 2532, with Glenn Kotche (First aired on Thursday, April 6, 2006)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Glenn Kotche

Mobile

Mobile Pts 1 & 2 [5:30]

Nonesuch #79927 ** www.nonesuch.com
see also www.glennkotche.com

Steve Reich

Works 1965-1995

Clapping Music, excerpt [3:00]

Nonesuch #79451, (10 CD Box set)
www.nonesuch.com

Glenn Kotche

Mobile

Clapping Music Variations [5:00]

See above.

Bali

Gamelan & Kecak

Kecak (Monkey Chant) [3:00]

Nonesuch/Explorer #79814 www.nonesuch.com

Glenn Kotche

Mobile

Monkey Chant, excerpt [7:00]

See above.

Zimbabwe

The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People

Nhemamusasa, excerpt [2:00]

Nonesuch/Explorer #79704 www.nonesuch.com

Glenn Kotche

Mobile

Fantasy On a Shona Theme [4:00] Mobile Part 3 [2:30]

See above.

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, excerpt [4:00]

Nonesuch #79669 www.nonesuch.com

Leave a Comment

Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.

Your comment


* required
The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party.
 

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.