Robin Holcomb and Peggy Lee have been making music together for two decades, including The Point of It All (Songlines, 2010), a collaboration between Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz and Vancouver jazz quartet Talking Pictures. Now Robin and Peggy have made Reno, a duo recording, featuring eight enigmatic Holcomb songs and eight of her instrumental pieces. The intimacy and improvisational interplay of the music-making is remarkable, as is the realism and beauty of the sound.

This music is hard to pin down – it reaches well beyond jazz. The soundworld and poetic vision of Holcomb’s songs seem connected to American folk traditions while her pianism, notable for its unique harmonic language, and Lee’s texturally gorgeous cello playing, combine a rigorous contemporary classical sort of focus with the freedoms of avant-jazz. The result is a modern art music that draws the listener into the conversation.

“I’m not a confessionalist,” says Holcomb. “While I write from my experience it is not necessarily always my lived experience.” The songs here include her very first, “Larks, They Crazy,” from the 1980s, and several that come from song cycles. “Copper Bottom,” “The Sweetest Thing” and “The Point of It All” originated in The Utopia Project, a suite composed in 2004 about utopian communities that thrived in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s/early 1900s. “Divine Stall” and “Coin” come from We Are All Failing Them, her most recent song cycle, reflecting the story of the Donner Party. “Waltz” comes from Angels at the Four Corners (1989), Holcomb’s earliest song cycle. “It was a mashup of extrapolations on both the histories and imagined futures of people I knew while sharecropping in North Carolina and The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow.

The purely instrumental pieces reveal an unusually close collaborative process. For Robin, “playing with Peggy has always been very relaxed, and unpredictable, even with a shared understanding of how the music has sounded in (often many) previous iterations….Peggy is a deep and beautiful player on so many levels. She has an uncanny sense of not only color and rhythm and implication but also of how to blend with a voice. And harmony and melody! She is also a supremely deft improviser and a great foil for me. I can go in and out of vocal music/instrumental music without a second thought. Not everyone can not only follow me, but be right there with me.” Peggy characterizes Robin’s music: “Great depth and beauty, polytonality, life, simplicity within complexity,” and her own approach as “trying to find the simplicity…to contribute in a way that feels true to the moment.” Robin sums it up: “We bring histories of listening to all kinds of music when we play together – sensibilities of clarity and chaos.”

Wayne Horvitz produced: “The recording has a lot of “living room feel” to it, and in fact it was recorded in a living room. This is reflected in the intimacy of the sound and the intimacy of the musical interaction. Our host William Molloy has a sort of boutique studio in his home – plus a beautiful, and beautifully maintained, Steinway B piano. He has a limited quantity of gear, and every item is at the highest level….The mix was very simple. Really the question for each track, depending on the dynamics, was the balance between the close mics and room mics….The absolute secret to great sounds is recording musicians that have great sounds.”

Robin Holcomb, Piano & Vocals
Peggy Lee, Cello