The Color of Sunshine
The Color of Sunshine
Lawrence Blatt
Blatt's MySpace
Lawrence Blatt’s CD “The Color of Sunshine” was produced by Will Ackerman, one of the pioneers of New Age recording, who gained fame with Windham Hill a couple decades ago… his cassette "Conferring With the Moon" was always one of my favorites but spent many years in storage, alas we were reunited not long ago and the tape snapped after about five minutes. So, no more conferring for me.
Anyhoo, you can hear a lot of Ackerman’s influence in this guitar-centric CD—performance, production, and writing style… one thing he’s good at is getting a pristine sound out of acoustic instruments. Blatt gives a clean rendition of some really nice new-age music, most of it’s consonant, peaceful, some wistful, and always easy on the ear. He’s agile on the guitar, and deft in turning a note or a phrase to make you say “Hmmm I wanna hear that again!”
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 02:27 PM
Endless Blue Sky
Endless Blue Sky
Kevin Kern
Real Music
Kevin Kern’s new CD is Endless Blue Sky, he’s a piano player, so these songs are basically new age solos with other accompanying instruments, violin for example. This is a nice CD… while I was playing it in the car, two people, with no solicitation from me, said “This music is very pretty.”
And it is very pretty, but to my ears much of it doesn’t distinguish itself from what else is out there. The first track, “Joy of the Journey” has a couple chord progressions that make me say “did you have to do THAT?” The second half of the CD has the better and more original music, “The Skipping Song” and “Caring Friend” are a couple really nice tracks, so in the end it all seems to even out.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 02:25 PM
Sanctuary
Sanctuary
Gandalf
Real Music
A new CD by Gandalf called Sanctuary continues in his usual musical tradition… i.e. I like this a lot, but he’s not doing anything particularly new… on the other hand, why mess with success?
What sets him apart from many New Age composers and performers is his lush orchestrations and that he’ll change up his leads… i.e. one song focuses on guitar, another on piano, another is more sitar-oriented, etc. It’s a very comforting sound, meditative, like you’re in a forest where the struggle for survival has been overcome by all the plants and animals that are usually locked into the mortal combat known as the eco-system.
This runs together as all one piece, no breaks between the tracks, and the various songs borrow from each other. My fave track on this CD is “Citadel, Part 1” which has many moods and in the end makes a grand exit with a very simple melody, there’s some “to die for” string harmonies in here that take the listener higher and higher, as a major key melody keeps breaking out of a minor key intro.
I think what makes him good is as much as what the material is, is what he does with it, how he surrounds it with some really cool orchestration, or drumbeats that sometimes only put in the barest essentials of rhythm.
In any event, Gandalf, an Austrian artist how uses this Lord of the Ring pseudonym, should be proud of making life just that much better for so many listeners.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 02:21 PM
Watching For Rain
Watching For Rain
Anne Trenning
Shadertree Productions
I didn’t get around to listening Anne Trenning’s CD, “All One World” for about a year after I got it, but I was so taken with it that I in fact started to write a review anyway, even though life got in the way and I never got going on it.
While “One World” is more or less “original Celtic piano solo,” her latest, “Watching For Rain,” is Celtic-plus… it offers much of the style of the first CD but veers into gospel, pop, etc, still reeling us in with the same attention to peace and tranquility as her Celtic base. This CD is also more orchestrated, with several instrumentalists accompanying.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 09:37 AM
Generations of Yuletide
Generations of Yuletide
Ken Elkinson
August Son Productions
I guess if Christmas music isn’t traditional, nothing is, and you can’t really do an instrumental Christmas CD of Christmas music no one has heard of and expect to sell any, so the best thing to do is your own take on stuff people already know.
Ken Elkinson hit on a formula that works, he plays a song on piano in a recognizable fashion, then he’ll give you his own improvisational take on it, then he’ll return to the original to round out the piece. It’s very classical sounding in approach, in that… well… that’s what folks did years ago to show off their musical prowess.
He plays a style that’s gentle and clean, very unobtrusive, so that people who like to hear Christmas music can enjoy it, yet it won’t aggravate people who don’t. He keeps away from the Sappy and does the songs pretty much "straight up." Some of his improvisations are pretty imaginative, for instance the Little Drummer Boy keeps the “drum” pattern and goes off on a tangent of its own, then restates the melody to round it out.
Also he respects the time of the song... i.e. he's not going to jazz up something from 1350 as much as he will something from 1950.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 11:08 AM
The Lost Dream
Jamie Craig
The Lost Dream
by Craig Sound Productions
This is a new age CD that’s a definitely better than the norm…
I’m going to throw in a bio from his MySpace, since it probably says it better than I can.
“Jamie was inspired to write The Lost Dream intended to capture a person's loneliness and sadness which is experienced when hopes that were once strong and real are never going to materialize. Jamie composed, arranged, played all instruments, recorded, mixed and produced the complete Lost Dream CD. Jamie is a self-taught musician who began his career playing bass guitar. His fondness for the sounds of a bass guitar is evident throughout the CD, which he uses 8 different bass guitars.
He enjoys creating music with complex instrumental layers. Jamie is also an accomplished pianist and enjoys playing a wide variety of guitars. He has been playing and composing music for more than 30 years.”
Ok, back to me. He’s right… this music does have complex instrumental layers, that’s one of the cool things about it. Every now and then, a harmony or melody makes you stop “not paying attention to it” and go WTF was that? So he’s more than just making pretty sounds, he knows what he’s doing compositionally.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 11:07 AM
Light on the Water
Light and Water
composed and performed by Timothy Cooper
by New Piano Age Music
This is an obscure beginnings, but one of my fave albums is Richard Souther’s Illuminations, in which he weaves original music around some 10th Century tunes of Hildegarde van Bingen. There’s a couple solo piano tracks on there, which… well… this entire album sound like those.
This isn’t a bad thing at all, it’s just what it reminds me of. It’s new age piano for sure, but it goes beyond “pretty piano music” and feels deeper, more emotional, more evocative…
Then I’m thinking, if something is evocative, what does it evoke? Again, I think it’s emotion, maybe even, as the CD is called, “Light on the Water,” that twilight where the sunlight is dancing over the lake, or the ocean, that end-of-an-era feeling where you’re thinking of what could have been… this music reflects, more than looks forward. It thinks about what’s gone before, maybe what could have been done differently, but… the more you know about your past, the more you can fix the future.
Anyway I like it.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 10:45 AM
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