One Dance Alone

This is the second SACD release by Wayne Horvitz's chamber jazz quartet (the first being Way Out East, 2006), featuring Wayne (piano), Peggy Lee (cello), Ron Miles (cornet) and Sara Schoenbeck (bassoon). Some of the new compositions sound even more like classical chamber music, but as before, improvisation plays a major role, and there's a lot of synergy in the way the music comes together: as Wayne says, "The compositions are so open, and the band is so flexible... " The performances are classical in their precision, jazzy in their mutable blends and their grasp of expressive possibilities. Wayne's writing is as emotionally resonant as ever, and in bringing the music to life the band spins webs of musical relationships. Ron Miles' cornet glances back in the direction of New Orleans and early Ellington, while Peggy Lee's cello free associates Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, and beyond. Sara Schoenbeck's bassoon provides wittily baroque counterpoint or contemplative melodic lead according to the circumstances, while the piano's runs, motifs and clusters suggest links to impressionism, and occasionally to atonality. In other pieces different sets of connections take shape. How to label this music is a marketing dilemma. If it's the Third Stream of today, it holds within it's sights the new thing, free improv, and indeed everything else that happened in jazz, popular and 'art' music in the twentieth century (and the 21st, given their cover here of Elliott Smith's "A Fond Farewell"). Horvitz comments that combining jazz and classical elements is in fact "a fairly obvious process, and it's one with a long history... Blues was the first music to really move and inspire me. As my friend Philip Johnston once said to me, 'You know how you are listening to a record of Japanese koto music and for a moment it sounds like John Lee Hooker?' I would say the same thing about a Bartok string quartet." Audiophile production in stereo and 5.0 reveals the music in all it's beauty.