(+++) GETTING TOGETHER

Robert Carl: From the Ground Up; Surge; Blues Box; Excavating the Perfect Farewell; What’s Underfoot; John McDonald: Snowfall in Two Parts; At Pelham Lookout; Carl/McDonald: A Gift…and an Invitation. John McDonald, piano; Robert Black, double bass; Scott Woolweaver, viola. Bridge Records. $15.99.

Guy Barash: The Space Between Silence and Enough; Confessional; Tattoo; Jesus Knew; Saint Augustine; The King of Fire; Parrot/Killdeer/Poem to Be Whispered by the Bedside of a Sleeping Child; I Will Destroy You; Pied Piper. Guy Barash, electronics; Nick Flynn, spoken word; Frank London, trumpet; Eyal Maoz, guitar; Kathleen Supové, piano. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Virtually all performed music is a collaboration between, at minimum, two people: the composer and the performer. There are exceptions for composers who perform their own music, of course, but when they participate in a performance in which their music requires input from additional people, the net result is collaborative after all. And sometimes there are compositions that, in and of themselves, partake of a collaborative nature. Robert Carl and John McDonald are longtime musical partners, and a new Bridge Records release shows just how strongly intertwined they are. Most of the music is by Carl, written during a two-decade period from 1987 to 2018, but there are two works by McDonald (from 2016 and 2017) – and McDonald plays piano for all the works on the CD, Carl’s as well as his. The music is mostly of a fairly straightforward contemporary type. Carl’s From the Ground Up, described as a “sonic etude,” is a moderately paced dissonant piano excursion, while McDonald’s Snowfall in Two Parts is an etude of a different sort – not quite as dry-sounding and indeed employing contrasts in presentation, as is hinted at in the title. Carl’s Surge includes a double bass, which growls along with the piano’s lower register to suitably dark effect, while Carl’s Blues Box is another piano solo, not particularly bluesy but mostly on the quiet and restrained side. Carl’s Excavating the Perfect Farewell is a two-movement piece for viola and piano: the opening Digging has an evanescent quality to it and lies very high on the viola, while Leave-Taking dips quietly into near-lyricism and treats the two instruments more equally. McDonald’s solo-piano At Pelham Lookout mixes a hesitant quality with a sense of questing, although for what is not particularly clear. What’s Underfoot, heard here as a 15-plus-minute piano declamation, is vaguely Impressionistic, but its pervasive delicacy wears thin rather quickly. The disc concludes with much-shorter material for piano solo: the two movements of A Gift…and an Invitation run between two and three minutes apiece. They call vaguely on long-established forms: the first, by Carl and McDonald together, is titled Free Prelude, while the second, by Carl alone, is simply designated Fugue. There is a touch of the Romantic – certainly not of the Baroque – in the first, and a passing resemblance to fugal construction in the second; together, the two movements make for a pleasant and interesting contrast, and have more musical substance and more character than many of the other pieces on the disc. As a tribute to collaboration, the CD will certainly be of interest to listeners already familiar with Carl and McDonald, but the music itself is not sufficiently distinctive to bring in new audiences for either musician or for them as a pair.

     The collaboration is of a different sort on a New Focus Recordings release featuring music by Guy Barash. Here too there is a creative get-together – in this case involving Barash and Nick Flynn – but the difference is that Flynn provides words and presents them throughout the disc, while Barash, with some additional support from trumpet, guitar and piano players, performs the notes and sounds that circle, underline, and sometimes penetrate Flynn’s words. This is one of those discs that asserts its avant-garde nature at every opportunity: from Flynn come words including “trees jeweled with ice,” “having, at last, someone else breathe for me,” and “no one, as you know, sets out to lose their mind” (all those are in just one of these pieces, Confessional); from Barash come the usual beeps, boops, blips, bonks, boings, bangs and other sounds typically associated with electronic accompaniment. The trumpet, guitar and piano play distinctly subservient roles, to such an extent that they seem nearly electronic themselves rather than offering a traditional acoustic contrast to the electronic material. The CD starts with an instrumental introduction and includes nonverbal outbursts from time to time in its other tracks, but the guiding principle here is verbiage with strong contemporary twists. There are musings on Christ’s death in Jesus Knew, dreamlike contemplations in Saint Augustine, memories of a long-ago house fire in I Will Destroy You, and so forth. Aural distortions abound in the instruments, with Barash’s use of microtones adding to the impression of a world divided and subdivided to a point beyond any possible analysis and understanding. Much of the music for the acoustic instruments plays against their inherent form of sound production: inside-the-piano notes are only one element of the soundscape here. The overall effect of the CD is one of extreme diffusion: certainly Barash and Flynn are twined together through the electronic-music and spoken-word elements of this material, but because the material itself is so wide-ranging and so determined to be up-to-date and frequently self-referential, there is nothing cohesive in the individual tracks or in the disc as a whole. This is clearly not a mistake: Barash deliberately casts a wide net musically and Flynn an equally wide one verbally, the net effect being a sense of life being adrift, uncertain, disembodied and frequently eerie. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but there is nothing very unusual or unexpected in it, either: this kind of “woe is me, the world is too much with us” mixture of language and sound is scarcely something with which modern listeners will be unfamiliar. The Barash/Flynn collaboration works quite well to communicate the ideas and feelings that Barash puts into his music in support of and expansion of Flynn’s words. But neither the words nor the feelings come across as unique or even particularly unusual. This is a short CD, running barely 39 minutes, that makes its basic verbal and musical points early on and then continues to make them for a time that, if not interminable, comes across as longer than it needs to be.