Liner Notes
In bringing together this fantastic roster of composers, all of them speaking in many beautiful tongues, Gloria Cheng proves herself a multilingual master. There are so many blended layers and narratives here. One of the big-picture ideas is that of encountering the wonderful creole of jazz and classical modernism that has been such an important throughline among composers since…well, since Maurice Ravel and Jelly Roll Morton. Even then, individual artists refused to accept a broadly assumed classical/jazz dichotomy; in the hundred years since, such reductive distinctions have, thankfully, blurred to meaninglessness.
In this music, we find an enthusiastic readiness of each composer here to enrich their personal idiom via the teachings, cadences, and accents, of admired others. The range of these adoptions, both in terms of the individuals cited and the reinterpretation of their voices and narratives, tells its own tale. Anthony Davis’s homages to Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Cecil Taylor emerge from his own music with declarative intensity At the other end of the spectrum is the abstract subtlety of Gernot Wolfgang’s nods to Claude Debussy and Miles Davis in his Two Movements. Cultural resonances are deeply present in Jon Jang’s simultaneous evocation in piano-language of the Chinese guzheng and the energy of feminist Chinese American social activism. The Mexican composer Arturo O’Farrill depicts aspects of the West African Yoruba religion through a mosaic of styles that seems to parallel the widespread and diverse influence of Yoruba practice in the New World. Linda May Han Oh channels the spirit of pianist Geri Allen in a piece also reflecting on the sea’s multifaceted power and symbolism. James Newton’s Eight Calla Lilies, a tribute to his wife, reflects the layered, stream-of-consciousness intricacies of a lifetime lived in parallel intimacy with another.
No stark categorization, then, but rather nuanced contexts, unique convergences of influence. Each of these pieces is a sophisticated network of cross-communications at once musical, biographical, and societal. What’s achieved by these composers and this pianist is a resonance outside of any language, transcendently meaningful, urgent, and rich.
Robert Kirzinger