David Borgo's "Chance, Discovery and Design" DVD

David Borgo, musician, composer, conceptualist and educator, has much going for him. He plays fluent sax and flute in the jazz-improv-new-music mode, he combines at various times electronics, electro-acoustics, his "metric" music (which has an African sound to it), improv, modern jazz and modern classical. He also has a flair for visual video creation. All of these facets of his art are well in evidence on his DVD Chance, Discovery and Design (Circumvention).

The visuals: they are extraordinarily interesting. They actually go completely with the music. There's animation, computer graphics, and altered visuals of the musicians in action. They enhance the experience of the music in palpable ways.

There is a cast of some 16 musicians that come in and out of play on any given piece.

Chance runs the gamut from quasi-tribal to avant-fusionesque to high-impact improv. The vibrant visuals ought to help those who might not be familiar with these musical styles because they give them a "total art" context. But even if you know about these sort of sounds the package makes for a very stimulating foray into new music today.

Excellent.

KaiBorg: David Borgo and Jeff Kaiser

The world of electronic music has altered drastically since the days of Milton Babbitt and the RCA Synthesizer. . . one man in extended real-virtual time with a wall of glowing tubes and tediously compiled punch cards. You can do things on a laptop or two live that used to take months in the studio to accomplish, tape splicing block in hand. New software gives improvisers the ability to incorporate live electronics into their performances without a mass of equipment. Of course making things easier does not always lead to more "masterpieces." You get what the musicians' ideas can accommodate. Happily there is nothing ill-considered, unimaginative or hastily conceived in the music of today's posting.

KaiBorg's new CD Harvesting Metadata (pfMENTUM 058) reflects contemporary technical developments with music that entertains, challenges and stimulates. KaiBorg consists of reedman-composer David Borgo and composer-quarter-tone-trumpeter Jeff Kaiser. Together they explore the electro-acoustic interstices with a varied program of pieces that alternately overwhelms the senses and gives pause for contemplation. There are moments of thick electronic texture and quieter way stations of comparative repose. Free-style improvisations have counter ballast in the electronics that give form to a dialog between two imaginative players and their performance resources.

This music can at times be a bit abrasive but always expressive. It's an impressive outing.

Alvin Curran's Remarkable Musical Collages

Alvin Curran is one of those composers-performers-improvisers that should be heard by anyone with designs on a complete understanding of modernity (whatever that will turn out to be when looking back 200 years from now).

He was the co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva, one of the very first (and best) groups to combine live electronics and improvisation. They did things then that were so influential that improv groups are still trying to follow in their footsteps. He's since done a great deal of improv per se with some of the luminaries of the field.

It's his solo collage-like work that we look at today. The John Cage of "Fontana Mix" and "Variations IV" is a precursor, certainly. Sliced, diced and transformed snippets of sound, noise, musical excerpts of high. low, middle, folk, jazz, electronics, vernacular and what have you form the raw material. Where Cage had a kind of anti-structural, aleatoric stance, Curran perhaps is more sensitive to dramatic impact, the audience if you will, and there is more of a sense of structure and immersion in the distinctive sensuality of sound to what he does.

Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden was one of his earlier masterpieces in the collage idiom. If you haven't heard it, you should. Today, though, we're concerned with his work Toto Angelica in its realization released in 2005, I believe (i dischi di angelica). The CD release has this fascinating version of the piece, plus several shorter works. It is a continuous barrage of various vocal, instrumental and extra-instrumental sounds, and if you listen a number of times it really starts to make sense. Well, more than that. Mr. Curran is one of the most creative musical minds at work today.

Toby Driver and His New Music

Composer-instrumentalist Toby Driver is the creative force behind the group Maudlin of the Well/Kayo Dot. From what I understand, the group manages to combine new metal styles with classical form and orchestration. I have not had the pleasure of hearing them, but I have had the pleasure of hearing Driver's second album for Tzadik, To The L...L...Library Loft.

There are four pieces on the record, each a world of its own. Driver's hyper-electric ensemble guitar gives three of the four pieces some added metallic weight. Greg Massi is the guitarist on the fourth work. Every piece makes a convincing case for the viability of Toby's vision. Metal and new music can indeed be transformed into a powerful amalgam.

The instruments and participants for each work form a particular chamber/rock configuration. A series of moods and sound environments result. Some are soundscapes where atmospheric sounds conjoin with metal-derived musical washes; others are more hard-edged.

I don't know of anyone else creating music like this. And it's not just that Toby Driver dares to create such hybrids; he does so with absolute musicality. These are works to live within and grow into. They are so unique that a first hearing left me mystified. By the fifth hearing I began to appreciate concretely what was happening on this disk. I still need to listen another, say, five or six times to really get to grips with it. That is how unprecedented and unusual Driver's music seems to me. What could be more interesting?

Trombonist David Taylor in A Most Unusual Recording

David Taylor has played his bass trombone with all kinds of people, from Sinatra to Boulez. He has his own virtuoso approach to the instrument and has made a number of interesting albums under his own name and in the company of fellow trombonist Steve Swell. His Tzadik album Red Sea breaks with a conventional jazz improvisational approach to enter uncharted territory. It's an exploration of Jewish roots, most particularly the cantorial vocal style of Pierre Pinchik. What he does with that is not what one might expect.

The CD is filled with all kinds of unusual musical colors, instrument combinations and moods. There are soundscapes, klezmer-like interjections and so much in between that description almost cannot do the music justice. It is most unusual, most interesting and highly absorbing music with Taylor's trombone expressions the center of it all, but with the surrounding drapery of musical discourse taking the entire project into a rather new realm. It's orchestrally rich without there being an orchestra involved. It's thematically Semitic without having much in the way of the traditional trappings or the instrumentation one might expect. It doesn't groove so much as sprawl. It's almost indescribable. But it's good.

New Music from Mario Diaz de Leon

Composer Mario Diaz de Leon ignores the boundaries between modern concert-classical, electronics, free improvisation, metal and noise. His recent Enter Houses Of (Tzadik) shows this clearly, albeit with the emphasis on the first two categories. It is a music that has a narrative flow. What he ends up with is all his own.

For this recording a nine piece chamber-oriented group, the International Contemporary Ensemble, matches sonorities with de Leon's electronic manipulations of timbre. The pieces juxtapose related musical events in ways that keep the ear refreshed.

Winds, strings, and percussion-piano, respectively, tend to occupy the forground at various points, with the electronics often entering the blend to create sprawling amalgams. De Leon seems to conceive of the music as moving event-blocks. The focus is on the achievement of distinctive sonorities that have an improvisational looseness but a keenly contrasting brilliance of sound design. They mark the time passing like various cloud formations drifting across the horizon on a briskly windy day.

This is not music that overwhelms. It invites you into its world and then does not hurry to express everything it has to say. That takes time. In the end the visit is worth the trouble.