Klarinet Archive - Posting 000718.txt from 2003/10

From: "Ken Wolman" <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] "A little traveling music, Ray...."
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:28:05 -0500

Jeremy A Schiffer wrote:

>Just don't forget Krakauer's previous solo album, "A New Hot One" which
>does some of the most amazing jazz influenced klezmer you'll ever hear,
>and Krakauer's bass clarinet playing alone is worth the price.
>
>
>
One of the first things I bought a few months ago was "Rhythm & Jews."
The first track...it sounds like the girls' night off in a Turkish
cathouse, snake-dancy stuff with this incredible bass clarinet work.
"Who IS this?" Only a little while ago did I bother to read the liner
notes and discover it is Krakauer. There were so many Krakauer CDs in
the box at Tower (for a change) that I had to play eeny-meeny and grab
just one, so it turned out to the be most recent, Twelve Tribes. My
first reaction?--"Why the ---- did I drop nineteen bucks on this
NOISE?" Is there anything traditional left in Krakauer? Yeah, I
guess...later in the CD he plays stuff I've heard elsewhere, but doing
things with it rhythmically, melodically, and at tempi I didn't think
any human being could handle unless he was willing to watch his fingers
fly off as he was breaking his clarinet. Can you go beyond the
altissimo register? I mean, is there a fourth octave? Because if there
isn't, Krakauer makes it sound like he found it.

Track 6 is called "The New Year After." To paraphrase the liner notes,
Krakauer got distressed at the shofar-blowing in synagogue on Rosh
Hashanah--in 2001 it fell on September 18, one week after the attacks.
On the track, he makes the clarinet imitate a combination of a man's
voice and the shofar itself: "the cry," as the notes read, "of a man
facing the cosmos." Hard going. I find too he is a noted teacher in
New York, at the Manhattan School of Music since 1990.

I guess A New Hot One comes next. Oy.

Ken

--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538

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