Articles
Peter Broderick
Peter Gregson

Albums
2methyl
Alphaxone
Ariadne
Gregg Belisle-Chi
Black Eagle Child
Brutter
Cardopusher
Francesco Cataldo
Benjamin Damage
Isnaj Dui
Harris Eisenstadt
Fantoom
The Foreign Exchange
fryadius
Stavros Gasparatos
Peter Gregson
Hatakeyama + Durand
Hieroglyphic Being
ICE / Thorvaldsdottir
Chuck Johnson
Kita Kouhei
K. Leimer
John Lemke
James Brandon Lewis
The Lickets
Tobias Lilja
Robert Logan
Lymbyc Systym
Robert Matheson
[MIIIIM]
Moon Zero
M. Mucci
Nick(ed) Drake
Offthesky & Pleq
Olan Mill
Peter Prautzsch
Radio Citizen
Red Light New Music
Kai Schumacher
Serries Verhoev. Webster
Robert Scott Thompson
Urheim & Kvien Brunvoll
Scott Worthington

Compilations / Mixes / Remixes / Reissues
Robbie Basho
Kosemura
Ten Million Sounds

EPs / Cassettes / DVDs / Mini-Albums / Singles
Bruce Brubaker
Michael Byron
Peter Garland
Tyler Higgins
Gary Martin
Saskatoon
Chas Smith
Talk West

Bruce Brubaker: Glass Piano (Versions)
InFiné

At the risk of sounding overly precious, the idea of remixing certain classical composers' works strikes me as a largely unpromising proposition: what can possibly be gained by re-working a Mahler symphony or Stravinsky's Petrouchka into some alternate form when the original is already so incredible? Similarly, while it might be interesting to imagine what a remixer would do with A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue, could a new version hope to be anything but a pale shadow of the original? For such re-imaginings to succeed, perhaps what the remixer needs to do more than anything else is put as much distance between the original and the re-work as possible, as doing so means the new treatment will not too greatly suffer in a comparison and be judged on its own terms.

Such considerations could be said to apply to Glass Piano (Versions), a forty-minute collection that stretches Bruce Brubaker's solo piano performances on his recent Glass Piano recording into dramatically different forms. In this particular case, it's the productions that re-shape the album's material into something new and unfamiliar that impress most of all. The best of the bunch, an Akufen treatment of “Metamorphosis 1,” finds Marc Leclair re-shaping the original into an inspired fusion of loping Nujazz and smokey jazz noir. With arresting vocal, bass clarinet, and clavinet elements woven into the arrangement, the track's about as unGlass-like as a treatment could be, even if the haunting melodic progression from the original still appears within the Montreal-based producer's overhaul.

A close second is Francesco Tristano's “Knee For Thought,” a ten-minute club dynamo that could easily be mistaken for a treatment by his sometime collaborator Carl Craig (tellingly the remix was produced at his Planet E studio in Detroit). Tristano turns out to be a natural choice for the remix set, given that he was a student of Brubaker's at the Julliard School in New York, and the two still sometimes play together. In this case, the version segues from an opening piano-based introduction into a synth-powered swinger that swells incrementally in detail until a muscular kick drum arrives seven-and-a-half minutes in to give the gyroscopic material extra drive.

October 2015