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Ways & Means

Label Songlines Recordings

Artists James Carney Group

€29,99 EUR

Tax included.

Blending analogue keyboard textures with the horns of trumpetist Ralph Alessi and saxophonists Peter Epstein and Tony Malaby, pianist James Carney weaves elements of jazz, rock, funk, classical and world music into a tightly-orchestrated soundscape. - Mark Werlin

Green-Wood, the James Carney Group’s first album, received many accolades for Carney’s distinctive aesthetic – one which, in Troy Collins words, “blends classic modernism with knowing futurism.” Like Green-Wood, Ways & Means explores the border regions of styles and genres, from jazz, rock, and funk to classical and world music: Carney: “The differences between approaches, styles, and eras of music are almost meaningless to me, and in fact I see more of a continuum between everything than I ever did before." In Ways & Means, Carney further pursues his vision of jazz as virtual cinema. From the outset, Ways & Means (a Chamber Music America commission) was designed as a movie in sound: “I really did think about a 70-minute dramatic narrative film, and how the individual compositions would intertwine, because there is a different sort of approach with film scoring, in that the music should always complement and enhance the onscreen action and emotion. I wanted to create music that could function as the complete score for an edited sequence of images – music that would have themes, sound effects, atmosphere, shock value, drones, periods of time with no established tempo, and dynamic range surprises that are usually a component of scores. And I continually visualized the end result during the process. I didn’t think of a specific story, but I did ponder and focus on abstracted collages of scenes from many films I admired in the past. But in traditional film scoring it’s rare to have the music be jazz-based, or improvisational in nature, and usually when it is, it’s a single or specific type of jazz like bebop or ragtime, big band or cool. And, almost always, the music becomes sliced and diced. When I scored projects in the past, they never featured group improvisation, and they never used all the sonic tools I now have at my disposal. It’s not just blending electronic instruments [an Alesis Andromeda analog synth and a Fender Rhodes] and acoustic instruments in a jazz context – it’s the ability of my band members to coax very unique and sometimes completely unpredictable sounds from their instruments because of their musicianship and their open aesthetic. And most importantly, it’s the blend of all of those sounds, intervals, chords, and their related partials that I wanted to exploit, coming from both the composed passages and the open sections. You can’t plan it, and you really can’t orchestrate it, either."

James Carney Group James Carney, acoustic and electric pianos, analog synthesizer, glockenspiel Peter Epstein, soprano & alto sax Ralph Alessi, trumpet Tony Malaby, tenor sax Josh Roseman, trombone Chris Lightcap, contrabass Mark Ferber, drums

Tracklist

Total time: 01:08:10

1. Nefarious Notions