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“I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark,” classics professor Emily Wilson wrote on Bluesky after her brutal review of the film went viral. [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - The art of the duo
Elias Stemeseder (left) and Thomas Morgan The new album by the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan begins with variations on the piece from which it takes its name: Io Pur Respiro, a madrigal by the 17th century Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo. I love Gesualdo’s music so much that once, during a visit to Naples, I went looking for his tomb: it’s an inscribed stone laid into the floor of one of the chapels in the Church of Gesù Nuovo on the Via Benedetto Croce, should you find yourself in that extraordinary city. Whether intentionally or not, Stemeseder and Morgan spend the first 10 minutes evoking the harmonic restlessness underlying the beauty of all Gesualdo’s choral music, the sudden shifts that make you feel as though the ground is sliding under you. Titled “Madrigal, Variation, Courante”, it opens with a lyrical two-part invention, before accelerating into an almost pointilliste dialogue, staccato phrases flying back and forth until the pair reach a conclusion so perfectly formed that it might make you gasp with pleasure. Already it’s obvious that the combination of the Austrian pianist and the Californian bassist, both now based in New York, is an exceptionally empathetic one. I love the firmness and clarity of Stemeseder’s touch and the way, very often, equally interesting things are happening in both hands, bringing Lennie Tristano and Brad Mehldau to mind, although he never sounds like either of them. Morgan never ceases to demonstrate his ability to operate as an equal creative partner without neglecting the essential function of his instrument; in that respect, he’s the heir to Gary Peacock. The recording was made in the Sala Vanni at the Basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, during a short European tour in 2004. The two musicians reassembled there the following morning, with the idea of making what would be in effect studio versions of the material they’d been exploring during the series of concerts, but eventually they and their producer, Martin Brugger, decided to use the live recording, despite the occasional cough from the audience. Two of the five tracks are standard ballads. The first is Billy Strayhorn’s yearning “Love Came”, the second Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “I Have the Room Above Her”, from the musical Showboat, already familiar to the contemporary jazz audience as the title track of a Paul Motian album… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Naomi Osaka Helped Me Realize I Wasn’t A Bad Mother. More Black Women Need Her...“My husband will show me pictures, and it’s as if someone removed pages from a photo album.” [TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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