Peter Calandra - Ashokan Memories

Peter Calandra - Ashokan Memories
2013, PCM

Peter Calandra is a film and television composer whose work has been featured in over 40 films.  His 1800 compositions for television, featured on ABC, NBC, Fox, A&E, ESPN, Discovery, National Geographic and Sesame Workshop make for the sort of career that many composers dream of.  Calandra has also been active on Broadway, serving as the principal keyboard player for Miss Saigon.  Other credits include The Phantom Of The Opera, Les Miserables, and Little Shop of Horrors.  Calandra takes center stage on the solo piano album Ashokan Memories, a veritable treat for the ears.

Calandra sets sail with the spritely energy of "Awosting Morning". There's an air of Vince Guaraldi here as Calandra turns wonderfully melodic phrases with an almost whimsical grace. "Ramblin' Nighttime" explores an ever moving musical architecture that is lyric but full of wonderful energy.  "Frost Valley" is more pensive, full of a quiet beauty born of its darker inflection and Calandra's intimate phrasing.  "Overlook" gets a bit bogged down in its own repetitive nature, but Calandra saves it with his sense of timing. 

"Bonticou Crag" is powered by a sometimes frenetic piano part that eventually resolves into lyric passages. The song is over almost before it’s begun however. "Peekamoose" cycles through pedestrian passages without a lot of life, while "Ashokan Memories" recycles the frenetic rolls of "Bonticou Crag".   "Mettacohonts Flowing" meanders just as the title suggests, while "Tubin' the Esopus" has a quirky, jazz like quality that's unforgettable.  Calandra turns a bit more mundane for numbers such as "Gertrude's Nose" and "Woodland Valley", using his keyboard skills to eke more out of the songs than they are willing to give.  "Minnewaska" once again shows Guaraldi-like tendencies, with complex and beautiful melody lines that soar in quiet, soft spaces. 

Calandra once again hits a lull on "Ver Noy Falls" and "Ice Caves", making up for the oversimplified nature of the latter with some beautifully gentle theatrics.   “Shaft 2a” shows a shift into a sort of contemplative jazz that’s wistful and sweet, whereas “Stoneridge” has a dark quality that’s beautiful and disturbing at the same time.    Calandra uses a rhythmic, chord-driven style here at times to create a mental picture, but evolves into rivulets and streams of notes that distract, retract and come together again.  “Karma Road” wends its way through the now-familiar Guaraldi style piano themes, often suggesting pending resolutions and then backing slyly away.  This is one of the most captivating pieces on the album, as Calandra teases listeners again and again.  Ashokan Memories winds down with the wistful and melancholy strains of “Buttermilk Falls”.  This mood occasionally resolves into something brighter, but the internal conflict never entirely fades even in the sunnier patches.

Solo piano albums can be anathema to intrigue at times, particularly with the explosion of healing CDs in the marketplace.  If you’re feeling jaded about modern piano instrumentals, then you’ll want to hear Peter Calandra’s Ashokan Memories.  The occasional Vince Guaraldi influence is here, but Calandra himself is an original.  Calandra follows his muse, never boxing himself into tired themes or rote musical loops.  Ashokan Memories is one of the finest collections of original piano music of 2013.

Rating: 4.5 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more at www.petecalandramusic.com. 

Review: Kowtow Popof - Exalted Headband

Kowtow Popof - Exalted Headband
2009, Wampus Multimedia

Kowtow Popof is a Washington, DC area singer-songwriter who'd developed a distinctive taste for instrumentals that mix organic and electronic instrumentation. This form of Organica has developed a bit over time, finding fruition in Kowtow Popof's latest CD, Exalted Headband. Inspired by cinematic composers such as Bernard Herrmann and John Barry as well as electronic pioneers Ryuichi Sakamoto and Bill Nelson, Kowtow Popof wrote Exalted Headband with a cinematic scope in mind, using recurring thematic elements to construct an integrated series of compositions that work as a stand alone modern Organica symphony.

Exalted Headband is extremely intricate and nuanced in both composition and performance, opening with the Acoustic/Electric hybrid of Swimming Downhill, which sounds a bid like Windham Hill updated for the digital age. Enigma Of The Spokes continues in this vein, but has a more European sound, mixing acoustic guitar with electronically-generated strings for lovely soaring passages you'll want to play again and again before branching into piano/synth duets that are as pretty but perhaps not quite as imaginative. Kairos '77 is an intriguing composition, struggling with its own identity crisis between a theme of hope or despair. This is a piece I'd love to hear broken down for live instruments, and I think there is a lot of beauty in the depths that electronic instrumentation can seek but not quite find. Kung Fu Sunset sounds like what might have happened if Vince Guaraldi had fallen in love with space-age Electronica rather than Jazz.

Run To Daylight features one of three primary themes from Exalted Headband quite prominently. The Daylight Theme is nearly a stand-alone melody here, sounding like something out of 1970's Jazz-Pop set to a dance beat. Exalted Headband (Funkspiel Fringe) sounds like a theme to a 1970's detective show, right down to the Chicago-style horns. Theme From Lucky Guy sounds like the theme to a show you might find on ESPN in part A with a creepy transition or bridge. My favorite track on the CD is Balloon Bazooka; a surreal waltz that devolves into a computer-generated electronic composition that will invade your brain and stay there with a thematic element that intrigues. Rebreather is a fun listen, using a synth voice-generated melody as a foil to its thematic expression. Other highlights include Chronis, Children Of The Teeth and Floaters.

Kowtow Popof is an unusually placid voice in electronic music, searching for thematic order where chaos reigns supreme. His use of musical elements from across various cultures and schools of musical thought suggests significant classical/theory training, and opens doors for Popof that many musicians might not even know are there. Exalted Headband works on so many levels because of Kowtow Popof's willingness to try anything. Exalted Headband is hopefully a herald of things to come.

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Kowtow Popof at http://www.wampus.com/ or www.myspace.com/kowtowpopof. You can purchase a copy of Exalted Headband as either a CD or download at www.cdbaby.com/cd/kowtow6.

Review: Dan Freedman - Art Attack

Dan Freedman - Art Attack
2008, Four Hearts Music

Prodigal Sons always return home. So it is with Dan Freedman, who returns to his roots as a jazz pianist after 20 years as a software entrepreneur. Showing how close a musician always stays to their music, it took nothing more than an early 2008 concert performance by Hiromi Uehara to throw Freedman a musical headwind that would turn his life once more to music. Born in London, England, Freedman has a weekly slot on BBC Brighton as "Dan The Piano Man" at eleven years of age. After moving to Canada with his family, Freedman majored in jazz piano performance on his way to completed both bachelors and masters degrees in computer science (hence the 20 year detour). Based now in Honolulu, HI, Freedman was so moved by the performance of Uehara that he began playing again the next day. By the end of 2008, he'd already recorded his debut album, Art Attack. Freedman has plans for two more albums in 2009, and I think it's safe to say that he's not looking back.

Freedman's press materials say his greatest influences are Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. It's very evident on first listen to Art Attack that the jazz spirits of Peterson and Evans inform Freedman's musical consciousness. Freedman takes the impressionist style and runs with it on Art Attack. As with impressionist pianists this can be both a good and not so good thing at times. Freedman finds moment of musical glory embedded in the eight covers and two originals on Art Attack, but also finds moments where the impressions pile up too high upon one another and drown each other out. On balance, the passages and songs that work far outweigh what does not.

Art Attack opens with On Green Dolphin St., a classic played in trio form (piano, drums, bass). It's an egalitarian recording where no one instrument really is subservient to others, like a musical talk show where the instruments converse. There's an Bill Evans vibe that's evident in a relaxed reading of time signatures and the willingness to bend and shape melody lines into pretzels before returning them as they were, unharmed. Freedman pays tribute to Evans on Very Early, re-imagining the Chick Corea/Hiromi Uehara version in a style almost reminiscent of Vince Guaraldi.

Sweet Georgia Brown left me a little bit lost. The Maceo Pinkard classic is performed here as a piano duet, and ultimately that is just too much. The impressionist approach combined with a second piano in duet creates a bit of musical mayhem that was just too much for this listener. Chopsticks is a jaunty series of riffs on classic piano exercise that transforms into, among other things, Rhapsody In Blue along the way. This sounds like it was a lot of fun to play; the sort of divine inspiration that comes when a musician lets themselves have fun with the music.

The absolute highlight of the disc is Freedman's interpretation of Oscar Peterson's Wheatland for bass and piano. Freedman takes us through the gentle ebb and flow of Peterson's creation with a contrapuntal left hand and a minimalist bass line. Wheatland gets to breathe its own metaphysical melody in an inspired performance. Freedman gives an interesting turn next on The Beatles' Michelle, taking the Lennon/McCarthy classic off the pins of rock music and re-inventing it as classical/jazz hybrid. Freedman focuses on dynamic development throughout the song in moving from an almost Chopin presentation to Van Clyburn before falling back to the melodic heart of the song trailing the acoustic waters from whence it originally arose.

Laughing Child is a Dan Freedman original, and in some ways just doesn't belong on this album. Laughing Child is a pop song at heart with a vocal line that cries out of the piano for a singer and words. Laughing Child could migrate to either Adult Contemporary Pop or Broadway without much difficulty, and serves as a hint regarding the diversity and breadth of writing/performing talent that Freedman possesses. Art Attack closes with the surreal and rhythmic Marimba piece Lives At Stake. Lives At Stake sounds like something that might have shown up in session tapes for an early Pink Floyd album.

Dan Freedman comes home to music after twenty years in the corporate professional realm with an inspired debut album in Art Attack. While there are moments that don't work as well as other, the effort on the whole is very much worth your time. Mixing the influences of Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Brad Mehldau and others with unique and daring choices about structure, timing and harmony, Freedman takes chances that mostly work while giving us a hint of how broad a swath he might cut musically. With two more albums planned for 2009, this could just be the warm-up. A definite must for impressionist jazz fans, jazz piano fans, jazz-inflected pop fans, or people who enjoy an artist who can take you anywhere at any moment for any reason.

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Dan Freedman or purchase a copy of Art Attack at http://www.dan88.com/. You can also pick up a copy at www.cdbaby.com/cd/danfreedman.