"Music may be an abstract art, meaning, as Stravinsky used to say, "nothing more than its own sounds", but when it's presented with a title like Organic Modernism, we have some food for thought.
The Daniel Levin Quartet makes music that is an expression of the present day post-post-modernist condition (this double "post" justified by the fact that the organized artistic movements are collapsing, including those of the so-called post-modernism, thereby giving room to a pulverized aesthetic reality with all imaginable concepts constellated freely). Here we have four musicians stating that the "modernism" factor is still in full effect. And why? Because this music is anchored primarily by the prototypical modernist musical genre of jazz, simultaneously incorporating a dizzying array of musical techniques, concepts, references, and aesthetic approaches, resulting in a very modern kind of modernism indeed.
The music presented here by Daniel Levin, Nate Wooley, Matt Moran and Peter Bitenc for the band's sixth cd emerges from the rich and fertile soil of regular and highly focused collaboration over the span of nine years. In other words, and as the music writer Art Lange mentions in his liner-notes, we find here the construction of a "system". It may be an open system, or a hybrid, but it's still a system, like jazz was 60 years ago. Brilliant."-Clean Feed |