Michael Byron: Halcyon Days
Cold Blue

Nicholas Chase: Tiny Thunder
Cold Blue

Peter Garland: The Basketweave Elegies
Cold Blue

Whereas fascinating connections often emerge between Cold Blue releases, an even more explicit through-line ties this latest trio together. Listen first to Peter Garland's The Basketweave Elegies, which features nine vibraphone studies performed by renowned percussionist William Winant, and then move to Michael Byron's Halcyon Days, where three pieces again played by Winant are followed by two piano-based works; that ending makes for a seamless transition into Nicholas Chase's Tiny Thunder and its two solo piano travelogues. While each release invites individual appreciation, they're as rewarding when broached as a 134-minute collective statement (note that, at thirty-five and thirty-one minutes, respectively, the Chase and Garland releases are more mini-albums than full-lengths; at sixty-eight, Byron's is fully album-length).

Bringing clarity to the release title, Garland states on the inner sleeve, “My admiration for basketry and basket makers also extends to a kind of traditional lifestyle and art practice, one that is often rural, attuned to the natural world and the seasons. . . . I want to write music that is well-made, sturdy, useful, and beautiful—like a basket.” His affection for natural purity, the eloquence of simplicity, and aesthetically elegant design are embodied by the nine-movement work, which, in his descriptions couples four “core” declamatory parts with five lyric “refrains.” It's fitting that Winant, who's appeared on over 200 recordings, is the performer, as he and the composer have been friends and collaborators for more than half a century, and the percussionist also appeared on two of Garland's first CDs thirty years ago. How wonderful that such a fruitful collaboration has endured for so long.

That the movements are related is intimated by descriptive titles—“Bright, clear,” “Peaceful, radiant,” “Bold, emphatic,” and so on. The opening “Very quiet, still” instantly establishes the work's poetic quality, and with the percussionist giving voice to graceful, at times hushed expressions, garish displays of virtuosity are the furthest things from the composer's mind. Both “Bright, clear” movements sparkle iridescently when their aural spaces flood with interlocking patterns. The “Lyric, expressive” and “Lyrical, tranquil” sections are particularly beautiful, especially when Garland's haunting compositions are direct and free of unnecessary embellishment. In the sixth spot, “Vigorous, declamatory” suggests a gamelan character in the chiming of its chordal patterns; “Peaceful, radiant” lives up to its billing with polyphonic figures executed with extreme delicacy. At the level of pure sound, the music entrances when the vibraphone produces such shimmering reverberations. There are moments where it's tempting to draw a comparison between The Basketweave Elegies and a prototypical mallet percussion-based one by Steve Reich; yet while such a move might be sustained, it's also clear that, in this piece and the many others he's written, Garland is operating within territory he's demarcated for his own explorations as opposed to mimicking another's.

Like Garland's release, Halcyon Days celebrates Byron's enduring relationship with Winant, the latter having performed and premiered every one of the composer's percussion pieces. Unlike The Basketweave Elegies, however, Halcyon Days features Winant performing alone and with his four-member percussion ensemble and follows those performances with piano-centred ones by Ray-Kallay Duo (Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay) and Lisa Moore. Interestingly, all of the pieces except for 2016's Tender, Infinitely Tender were composed in the ‘70s, though the passing of time has done nothing to lessen their appeal. All five might be called minimalistic, though the term here more refers to their use of modest instrumentation than stylistic character. That said, certain pieces do derive maximum mileage from modest compositional designs. As performed by Ray-Kallay Duo, Starfields, for example, unleashes an entanglement of clangorous chords that's so dizzying it suggests an accumulation of tolling bells. In similar manner, the opening Drifting Music limits its focus to reverberations produced by tubular bells, with Winant punctuating clouds of textures with loud strikes.

Elsewhere, he drapes marimba patterns across a streaming maracas-generated backdrop in Music of Every Night, the effect strangely calming, peaceful, and dream-like. The release's dominant work, the three-part Music of Steady Light, is performed by Winant's Percussion Group, which augments him with Tony Gennaro, Michael Jones, and Scott Siler and involves an arsenal of marimbas, xylophones, glockenspiels, and vibraphones. In the opening part, patterns gather into a vibrant, restless mass, their build suggestive of a biological organism seen in time-lapsed video developing at light speed, before reduction sets in and the whole becomes raindrop-like sprinkles. The second part casts a spell with streams of gleaming tinkles and flowing patterns that gradually come to resemble the natural dazzle created by wind chimes. Initially pitched at a softer level is the closing part, which blends all four instrument types into an increasingly animated pool before returning to its hushed beginnings. At album's end, Moore expertly navigates the intertwining pianistic terrain of Tender, Infinitely Tender for eleven ruminative minutes. One San Francisco Bay Guardian writer likened Byron's music to Alexander Calder's mobiles for being both fixed and moving. The comparison's apt, at least as far as Halcyon Days is concerned, in identifying two qualities that often co-exist in the release's five pieces. While development is present, there is a sense in which each setting hovers as if suspended in space.

Byron's two piano settings seamlessly lead into Chase's Tiny Thunder, which features Bryan Pezzone preceding the nearly twenty-minute title piece with Zuòwàng, a Chinese word that refers to a Daoist form of meditation involving sitting and emptying oneself mentally. Zuòwàng is, as expected, delicate, serene, and sparsely woven, rich in pregnant pauses—slow, drifting music custom-made to immerse oneself into. It's not bereft of activity, however, as indicated by the surge in energy that transpires halfway through its eleven minutes. Tiny Thunder unfolds at a similarly contemplative pace and develops even more patiently; it's also the more brooding and melancholy setting. It follows Zuòwàng, however, in the way its intensity escalates just past the midpoint and makes good on the promise of its title. As the music swells into dense, resonant clusters, it's easy to picture Charlemagne Palestine wholly absorbed at the keyboard during one of his own engulfing reveries.

March 2023