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Improvisations Allen Shawn / Michael Bisio

by Allen Shawn/Michael Bisio

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1.
[10:54] 10:53
2.
[5:54] 05:54
3.
[7:46] 07:45
4.
[4:31] 04:32
5.
[3:33] 03:33
6.
[5:25] 05:24
7.
[5:07] 05:07
8.
[6:25] 06:25

about

Allen Shawn and Michael Bisio: IMPROVISATIONS.

**** AAJ
“Shawn and Bisio feed off each other's nature, producing personal music by turns complex, evocative, ominous, and calming. Highly recommended.”
Karl Ackermann www.allaboutjazz.com/improvisations-allen-shawn-michael-bisio-self-produced__31469

****1/2 AAJ
“This music is so properly presented, it has all the elements of composed music. To acknowledge these eight tracks as instant composing is sort of mind-blowing.” “From their instant composing we have fully formed works of art.”
Mark Corroto www.allaboutjazz.com/improvisations-allen-shawn-michael-bisio-self-produced

Veteran bass player Michael Bisio (born 1955) can be heard on over 120 CDs and albums, in 24 of them as leader/co-leader. Allen Shawn (born 1948) is best known as a “classical” composer of orchestral, chamber and piano music, as well as the author of four books. The two musicians got to know each other at Bennington College, in Bennington Vermont, where they both teach. After hearing Shawn participate in a rare impromptu improvisation as pianist, Bisio suggested to him that they should go into a recording studio and “see what happens”. Despite his admiration for Bisio’s work, Shawn demurred, saying that he had no experience or facility as an improvisor. But in Spring, 2019, he changed his mind, and the recording took place that Summer.

“I think what made the difference,” says Shawn “is that Mike said how much he liked my composed piano music, and that he just wanted me to make things up, not to pretend to be a jazz pianist, or to improvise in any particular idiom. The irony is that I did in fact grow up hearing so much jazz—starting with my father’s amateur jazz piano-playing at home, and including hearing jazz greats like Monk, Mingus and Ellington live—and a lot of the elements of what I heard in that tradition did influence my own musical language. Yet any listener to what Mike and I ended up playing in the recording studio will recognize immediately that what we made are simply extemporaneous pieces, and do not follow jazz structures or draw on a repertoire of practiced jazz licks on my part. I don’t have such a repertoire in my fingers. Nevertheless, most composers, of course, improvise in the privacy of their workrooms to discover ideas and to kindle their musical thinking, and I have done that since I was ten years old, when I was just starting to make up little pieces at the keyboard.

“Mike’s mastery made it possible for me to relax and try this out in the recording studio, knowing that he would make beautiful sense of whatever I played. We had never made music together at all before we entered the studio, and we planned absolutely nothing, with one small exception. In the parking lot outside the studio in Kingston, New York, I heard a simple melody running through my head that I wrote down and handed to Mike. This became the tune used in track 2, and is reprised at the end of the CD. Otherwise, the music just turned out as it turned out. We had two sessions, totaling 70 minutes, and edited them down to a 50-minute sequence of 8 tracks, which we think of as a continuous train of thought.”

September, 2020



Composer and pianist Allen Shawn (born 1948) grew up in New York City and started composing music at the age of ten.  He studied composition with Leon Kirchner, Earl Kim, Nadia Boulanger, and  Jack Beeson. Since 1985 he has lived in Vermont, where he is on the music faculty of Bennington College.
Shawn loves to improvise in private as a prelude to composing, but he is known for his notated compositions. His musical output comprises more than a dozen orchestral works including a symphony, two piano concertos, a double concerto for clarinet and cello, a violin concerto, an oboe concerto, and two cello concertos; three chamber operas; a large catalogue of chamber music; songs, choral music, piano music, and music for ballet, theater and film.  Recordings include many cds of his chamber music; his piano concerto played by Ursula Oppens with the Albany Symphony; a double CD of his five piano sonatas, and a cd of his piano music performed by German pianist Julia Bartha; and his chamber opera “The Music Teacher” to a libretto by his brother, playwright/actor Wallace Shawn. Shawn was the recipient of a 1995 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an Academy Award in Music from the Academy in 2001. 

In a review of a 2001 concert devoted to his music at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Richard Dyer, writing in the Boston Globe, called the music “a body of work built to last”, adding that the “overall impression of Shawn’s music is of work that is clearheaded, craftsman-like, nostalgic, tuneful, accessible, yet profoundly subversive; it never sets you down where you think it will. Shawn is always turning signposts into weather vanes, pulling the map out from under you—he never loses his bearings, but he wants the listener to.” Shawn himself has described his music as “much more expressive and outgoing than I am.”Asked by writer Dennis Bartel, in a Chamber Music Magazine article of December 1997 if his work constituted a kind of “musical autobiography,” Shawn said “I think for composers, music is where we confide everything".

Bassist / composer Michael Bisio has been called a poet, a wonder and one of the most virtuosic and imaginative performers on the double bass.

Nat Chinen writes in The New York Times :" The physicality of Mr. Bisio's bass playing puts him in touch with numerous predecessors in the avante garde, but his expressive touch is distinctive."

He has over a hundred recordings in his discography, more than two dozen as leader or co-leader as well as a dozen more documenting his extraordinary association with piano icon Matthew Shipp. 

Jazz Times describes Michael as a performer who resonates with intelligence, emotional depth and probing virtuosity." Signal to Noise writes , " Bisio is one of the few musicians who has managed to meld this high concept of physicality with the soulful charge of jazz. His fiddle-high, scraped overtones create a tangled choir that is impossible to resist; his expressiveness with the bow is unmatched."

Michael's current project as a leader is Bisio/Knuffke/Lonberg-Holm, featuring Kirk Knuffke on cornet and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. “This music shows the magic power of great improv to inspire and heal those who need it. A perfect remedy.”
Downtown Music Gallery 
www.downtownmusicgallery.com/newsletter_detail.php?newsID=1421

He has been recognized with nine project grants from various arts organizations, plus the prestigious Artist Trust Fellowship. In 2017 Michael was invited to be Master Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts and is instructor of bass at Bennington College (2009 - present).

Michael has been a member of the Matthew Shipp Trio since 2009 performing throughout the Americas and Europe : Carnegie Hall, Newport Jazz Festival, Buenos Aries Jazz Festival, Am I Jazz ? Festival, Kiev, MoMA, The Vision Festival, NYC and Festival Sons D’hiver, Paris.

michael bisio.com

credits

released October 16, 2020

All compositions by Allen Shawn (Haroann Music ASCAP) and Michael Bisio (AMB Music ASCAP) Copyright ©2019
Recorded at Lone Pine Road, Kingston, NY June 19 & August 19 2019
Special thanks to piano tech wizard Sal Maneri
Cover art : TLTB by Ann Pibal (2017) Copyright © 2017
Design : Michael Bisio
Layout : Detta Andreanna

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Michael Bisio Kingston, New York

Michael Bisio has been called a poet, a wonder and one of the most virtuosic and imaginative performers on the double bass.
Nat Chinen writes in The New York Times :" The physicality of Mr. Bisio's bass playing puts him in touch with numerous predecessors in the avante garde, but his expressive touch is distinctive."
He has over a hundred recordings in his discography.
michael bisio.com
... more

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