2-disc set.

Maestro Terry Riley returns to the transcendent brilliance of his mprovisatory All Night Flights from the 1970s in this spectacular two-hour solo performance for just intonation keyboard. Originally created for the Aleph-Bet Sound Project that John Zorn organized for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the music has been sitting in Terry’s archives for years and now finally sees the light of day in all its glorious entirety. Recorded at Terry’s private studio at Moonshine Ranch at Midnight, the music captures a magically mystical vibe, timeless, meditative and entrancing. A modern classic from the godfather of minimalism who continues to surprise and challenge us with each new release. 

Despite the explosion of Feldman’s popularity and recordings of his works in recent years, his orchestral music has not received the attention it deserves. This new CD presents four first recordings plus the first recording of Intersection I with full orchestra — all performed in the studio, a coproduction between Deutschlandradio and Mode.

Intersection I is a pivotal early graphic score, presented here in a realization by Samuel Clay Birmaher. Muscular and dynamic, it sounds like nothing else in Feldman’s oeuvre — the raw sound of an orchestra untamed.

Structures and On Time and the Instrumental Factor are sister works from a transitional period in Feldman’s music. Both pieces explore an atmosphere of suspended time, with the instruments acting like an orchestra of tolling bells.

Voice and Instruments puts the sibylline voice in a wordless dialogue with the orchestra. Emphasis here is on the beauty of a single sound, with each moment connected to the next by a spider’s thread.

Orchestra is a walk through the orchestral landscape. Patterns come and go of their own accord as the music moves into unexplored territories. An important bridge between Feldman’s middle and late works.

The American conductor Brad Lubman was Assistant Conductor to Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94, and has since emerged as an unusually versatile conductor of orchestras and ensembles all over the world. He has worked with a great variety of illustrious musical figures including Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Zorn.

The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin was founded in 1946 in the American sector of Berlin as the RIAS-Symphonie-Orchester. As its first principal conductor, from 1948, Ferenc Fricsay established the orchestra’s future course: commitment to contemporary and stylish interpretation of the traditional repertoire. Their expertise with contemporary music is evident in this committed and warm recording.

The next release in Mode Records’ Feldman Edition — a compilation of works for orchestra, with Brad Lubman conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchestra Berlin — will bring us tantalizingly close to having Feldman’s entire published ouput available on recording. Chris Villars’s most recent list of unrecorded pieces contained thirteen items. The new disc knocks off four of them: Structures (for orchestra), On Time and the Instrumental Factor, Voice and Instruments, and Orchestra. These are exceptional performances by Lubman and company, lacking the tentative, tiptoeing quality that sometimes mars large-ensemble attempts at Feldman. The program is filled out with a large-orchestra rendition of the graphic score Intersections I. Surely it’s time now to record Feldman’s arrangement of the “Alabama Song”!  — Alex Ross, the rest is noise, October 11, 2011

This 2-CD set recorded live at the Velvet Lounge a year before the legendary Fred Anderson passed away, is a fitting tribute by 3 Chicagoans to one of their own, the master tenor player, teacher, Velvet Lounge owner, advocate and AACM member, who has helped foster the musical scene in that city possibly more than anyone else. This artistic outing is a pilgrimage in sound taking us into the deepest recesses of this eclectic medium known as “jazz”. These pieces conceived/composed by the 3 reflect all phases of their erudite abilities, their singular as well as collective approaches to the music both compositionally and improvisational while specifically highlighting Dawkins’ virtuosity as a player and showing the masterful abilities of Bankhead and Drake as well. The music crosses barriers displaying every conceivable aspect of the “jazz” language with an almost religious zeal.

Recorded live on August 11th and 12th 2008 by Sal Vito at Velvet Lounge, Chicago, IL, USA.