Prologue
Alkaline
Pretenders
A Dream: Introduction
A Dream: Grave Mound
A Dream: An Artist
A Dream: Here He Lies
A Dream: He Began To Cry
A Dream: At Long Last
Exquisite Corpse I: Foreshadow
Exquisite Corpse II: Flashback
Epilogue
Remy Le Boeuf (alto sax, oboe, bass clarinet): Pascal Le Boeuf (piano): Ben
Wendel (tenor sax): Ben Street (bass): Martin Nevin (bass): Justin Brown
(drums): Peter Kronreif (drums): Christopher Otto, Ari Streisfeld (violin):
John Pickford Richards (viola): Kevin McFarland (cello) Paul Whitworth
(narrator)
Recorded April-May 2014, Brooklyn Recording
There are no notes to this release though it might have been helpful had
there been, given the literary source material and the use throughout of a
narrator, Paul Whitworth. The central panel of the album is devoted to A Dream, the Musical Imagination of Franz Kafka which takes the
narrative directly from a translation into English of Kafka’s short story,
A Dream.
The Le Boeuf Brothers have the support of the intrepid Jack Quartet for
this album and the results are hugely idiosyncratic and aurally intriguing.
The coiling tenor on the Prologue over deftly chugging support
generates textures not wholly unlike bagpipes on a distant glen, the
skirling Highland quality becoming more and more avid. But there are also
more stark landscapes to be encountered and Alkaline shows the
quartet’s propulsive rhythmic function as it spurs on the piano in a jagged
exploration: a good mediation between jazz and Classical tropes. Though
some passages are lyrical, Pretenders shows how interplay between
eager sax and drums can generate sonic sparks and colour.
The suite is cast in six brief movements with narration throughout: the
sections are march like, warm, dreamlike in gravity, with surrealist
elements, graphic in exploration of insistent dream imagery and even
sullenly mocking. It’s a fine piece of composition, revealing and evoking
the text but never in a way that diminishes or lampoons it. Its surrealist
cum carnivalesque ending opens the door, as it were, to a new adventure yet
to be explored.
Exquisite Corpses
, in two movements, has oscillating and fascinating textures though its
second part is the more rhythmically astringent and exciting. The Jack
Quartet bring their classical textures to the last track, the Epilogue, where Remy Le Boeuf’s command of other wind instruments
creates even more sonic allure and where an outdoorsy Pastoralism slowly
envelops the music.
Genuinely fascinating and in some ways exploratory, this won’t be to all
tastes largely because of its spoken texts, I suspect. But for creative
minds and enthusiasts for colour, nuance and the nexus between text and
music, this has a great deal to offer.
Jonathan Woolf