Thomson, Ken - Thaw
SKU
34-Naxos CA 21085
Ken Thomson is the excellent and very animated saxist for Gutbucket. This is his 'serious music'string quartet, performed by the acclaimed Jack Quartet, with room for his bass clarinet as well.
"Want to hear some musicians really digging in? Hang on -- THAW is really moving." – Steve Reich
"Brainy, gritty and visceral, the music leaps off the disc" - Time Out NY
"Utterly diverse and vividly imagined… on the level of the some of the best contemporary compositions written for a quartet in the past decade." - Altoriot
"When Brooklyn-based clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Ken Thomson prepared to sit down and write the music for THAW, he literally needed to “thaw out” by leaving town. “One of the hardest things to do in New York City is compose,” he writes in the CD’s liner notes. “In the winter of 2011, I decided at the last minute to find a cabin in New York state, hole myself up there, and start writing. I spent days writing music, watching the snow and ice fall around me. I didn’t complete the quartet there, but the impetus behind all the movements started then.”
What he ended up with was a four-part suite that melts, liquifies, re-freezes and realigns the composer’s demands on the traditional string quartet, making THAW (which pairs the title composition with “Perpetual,” for string quartet and bass clarinet) a project that only the famed JACK Quartet could tackle. Known for their ability to lend a palpable sense of electricity to the most complex pieces by such composers as Iannis Xenakis and Georg Friedrich Haas, the four members of JACK have built up a mind-meld of instinctive communication over the years, drawing the attention of everyone from Derek Bermel to Vijay Iyer to John Zorn and more.
Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld - violins John Pickford Richards - viola Kevin McFarland - cello with Ken Thomson - bass clarinet (on “Perpetual”)
- LabelCantaloupe
- UPC713746309527