RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Rhythms & Blues
Samuel BARBER (1910-1981)
Excursions (1942-44) [12:07]
Amy RUBIN
American Progressions (2000-02) [12:27]
Martin SCHERZINGER
When One Has the Feet of Wind (1999) [10:35]
John ADAMS (b.1947)
China Gates (1977) [5:25]
William BOLCOM (b.1938)
The Garden of Eden, Four Rags for Piano (1969) [17:46]
Jelly Roll MORTON (1885-1941)
Finger Breaker (1938) [2:59]
Jocelyn SWIGGER
Afterward (four improvisations) (2009) [9:15]
Jocelyn Swigger (piano)
rec. August 2009, Majestic Theatre, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA
CON BRIO RECORDINGS CBR21046 [70:33]
This is a fantastic surprise. Every year, it seems a piano recital of unusual
material curated by the performer drifts into my shortlist for Recording of
the Year, and Jocelyn Swigger’s Rhythms & Blues is no doubt
the 2011 contender. Her lineup is a great deal of fun, and essential for lovers
of contemporary piano music too: we range from short explorations of American
folk rhythm by the great Samuel Barber to a series of living composers - Amy
Rubin, Martin Scherzinger, John Adams, William Bolcom and four improvisations
by Swigger herself.
The program’s theme, if it has one, is America as musical melting pot;
we have here much that is jazzy and much that is altogether new. Amy Rubin’s
American Progressions brings together blues tunes, agbadza drumming
patterns from Ghana (in the stunning “Grace” movement), and a
page in the last movement notated only with chord progressions and demanding
the pianist improvise. South African Martin Scherzinger, now resident in New
York, contributes a four-movement sonata, When One Has the Feet of Wind,
in a single ten-minute arc, impressively built, with moments (like around
3:15) which do seem to take flight. Just as the sonata reaches perilously
“easy-listening” territory near the end, it begins to speak a
fascinating new language. The first three movements use only white keys; the
finale introduces black keys and thrillingly colorful dissonances.
Book-ending these works are two by more established composers: Samuel Barber’s
wartime Excursions, and John Adams’ China Gates. Barber
explains his work as excursions “into regional American idioms,”
and we do indeed get boogie and blues filtered through the sophisticated harmonies
of Barber’s classical language. Although the score is carefully notated
to mimic improvisation, you would never know it; Swigger excels here in making
the carefully planned phrasing really work, really sound not like fake
improv but the real thing. In China Gates, Adams’ repeated cells
of material take on a wonderfully mystical quality; it’s surely one
of the most instantly attractive of minimalist works, and Swigger projects
it beautifully.
There are some good old-fashioned jazz numbers, too. William Bolcom contributes
four rags, a suite called The Garden of Eden. “Old Adam”
is a particularly glorious example of the ragtime art. “The Serpent’s
Kiss” is indeed a devilish number, and among its array of ideas (one
senses the serpent using every last trick in its book to seduce the hapless
couple) are calls for finger-clacking, tongue-clicking, and whistling. Jocelyn
Swigger is, I have to say, a tongue-clicking virtuoso. Jelly Roll Morton’s
“Finger Buster” is an even more devilish jazz number - for the
pianists getting their fingers busted, anyway.
The collection ends with its most daring conclusion of all: four tracks of
Swigger herself improvising at the end of the recording sessions. The first
improvisation gets off to an unpromising start, with a series of repeated
notes that smack of trying to decide what to do next, but it takes off as
a sort of upside-down rag: the left hand is there, in the grand old tradition
we’ve heard earlier, but the right hand won’t go down without
a fight, and plays dissonant, angular lines. A similar story recurs in the
movement which sounds most ‘finished’: “Ragged,” the
title presumably meant halfway between tired and done playing rags.
There’s really very little competition for this; the Bolcom rags have
occasionally been recorded elsewhere, Adams’ China Gates has
popped up on a few recital discs - though not as much as one might expect
for such an appealing work - and the Barber has been recorded several times
though the Naxos performance is more soft-focus than this. But Jocelyn Swigger’s
lineup here meshes extremely well, and the pieces she has chosen both go naturally
together and make a very satisfying program. She digs into the rags with relish
- though, wisely, not too much relish; Scott Joplin warned that the only way
to play a rag poorly was to play it fast. She projects the blues rhythms very
well, and feels at home in the more abstract visions of Scherzinger and Adams,
where the repetition never wears. The Jelly Roll “Finger Buster”
does sound rather finger-busting; Jelly Roll himself dispatches it with jaw-dropping
ease, but then, as Swigger herself admits in the booklet, the composer “had
much larger hands than mine.” There’s also a YouTube clip of Dick
Hyman absolutely demolishing the piece on a 1986 BBC appearance. But I can’t
imagine better advocates for works like Scherzinger’s, and Amy Rubin’s
own recording of her piano music is now very hard to find.
Jocelyn Swigger’s booklet essay is superb and does a terrific job explaining
her musical choices; the engineering is mostly very good - nothing spectacular
- but I was a little disconcerted by how closely-miked the tongue-clicking
in “The Serpent’s Kiss” seemed to be. It’s a quirk
well worth living with, because this back-roads tour of the lovely, unexplored
bits of American classical and folk music is a one-of-a-kind journey. Rhythms
& Blues is my most pleasant surprise of the year so far.
Brian Reinhart
What a great surprise: American rags, blues, and minimalism together in a
superb program.