A Wave Of New Music

I have had a very interesting few weeks, where I've been exploring new musical genres, namely electronic ambient, and jazz. I actually stumbled onto ambient by accident, while searching Spotify for Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, among the results was the album 'Dehli 9' by electronic group Tosca. The track that had prompted the appearance in my search results was 2504 /1 - session 11 and the unusual name invited me to play it to see what it was. What I found was an etheral piano-based piece, very dreamy and atmospheric in character. With a little investigation I found that this track was one of several experimental piano pieces, on a bonus disc to the album.

I wanted to find the genre of this music, which enabled me to discover electronic 'ambient' music, which in turn led me to sub-genres such as dark ambient. I then spent considerable time sampling lots of music of this type on Spotify and elsewhere, and found some new favourite albums. Artists/groups I have found so far and particularly enjoyed are Brian Eno (an early pioneer), Klaus Schulze, Main, Circular, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Redshift, Steve Roach and many many more.

It is striking to me how music such as this has its roots back in Western art music. As I already learned in the course, early experiments with the electronic medium started with composers such as Edgar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. It turns out the concept of ambient music goes back further; the term 'furniture' music was first coined by composer Erik Satie.

Alongside this, I have also made the decision to face the genre of jazz head-on. In the early part of this course, I noted that I thought of jazz as 'impenetrable'. I still considered it intriguing however, and what triggered my forays into the jazz world was some recent study on playing jazz piano. I then thought that as I enjoy playing ragtime music (an early type of jazz), and some of my favourite contemporary composers were influenced by jazz musicians (Steve Reich influenced by Bill Evans, Miles Davis and John Coltrane) I thought I'd give it a go. As a pianist, I first looked into Bill Evans, a jazz pianist. I was really struck by how much I enjoyed videos found on YouTube of the Bill Evans trio playing at Ilkka Kuusisto's (Finnish opera composer) home in 1969 or 1970:

The harmonies are incredibly lush, and you can definitely hear the Debussy and Ravel influences here. Another thing I particularly enjoyed here was the way the music would fade to allow an instrumental solo, for example the double bass.

I have also spent a little time listening to Art Tatum, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but I wanted to see some live jazz as soon as possible, and found a venue an hour or so away that offered this opportunity. I went to the performance last night and had a great time. The performers were 'Dave O'Higgins and the Kieron Garrett Trio', and I had spent quite a lot of time listening to their recording to be familiar with their style.

A lot of their tracks could be considered Jazz Fusion, also with elements of Latin and Funk. The instruments played were soprano and alto saxophone, digital piano/keyboard, electric bass guitar and drum kit. I thoroughly enjoyed my first live jazz experience, and will definitely be seeing more of it. What I found exciting about the performance was that each individual instrument had a really intricate part to play, so it sounded great as a whole, but you could also switch your focus back and forth between the different instruments and be entertained. There were some times when the sax and bass would play in unison, and this gave a very interesting sound and timbre.