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Rhythms & Blues
Jocelyn Swigger

Gramophone Magazine, May, 2011

by Jed Distler

Just the right amount of swagger from Swigger, with a brave coda to boot

This imaginatively programmed recital begins with Samuel Barber’s Excursions, where pianist Jocelyn Swigger’s tenderly phrased Allegretto and incisive melodic projection in the Allegro molto finale stand out. Although an improvisatory impulse hovers over Amy Rubin’s American Progressions, A palpable sense of form and balance governs the music’s open-hearted eclecticism and rich harmonic resources. While Rubin’s own performances dig deeper (a funkier Blues movement and punchier accentuations in the concluding Pascoalette), Swigger’s easy command of the notes is nothing to sneeze at. It takes some time for Martin Scherzinger’s rhapsodic When One Has the Feet of Wind to find its bearings and I like the piece’s rapid gospel-tinged section the best. While Swigger conveys marvelous characterization and rhythmic verve in William Bolcom’s rag cycle The Garden of Eden, she doesn’t consistently sustain the rapid tempo she sets in jelly Roll Morton’s Finger Buster, where her right hand dominates to a fault (Dick Hyman’s 1974 CBS recording remains the best modern-day version). At the end of the recording sessions, Swigger found herself “hungry for dissonance and simplicity” and improvised four little pieces. True, they’re not memorable, yet give Swigger credit for being brave. After all, has Maurizio Pollini ever improvised freely on disc? Has Murray Perahia? LangLang? Alfred Brendel? Get my drift?


MusicWeb, July 2011

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

Rhythms & Blues

Brian Reinhart 

This is a fantastic surprise. Every year, it seems a piano recital of unusual material curated by the performer drifts into my shortlist for Recording of the Year, and Jocelyn Swigger’s Rhythms & Blues is no doubt the 2011 contender. Her lineup is a great deal of fun, and essential for lovers of contemporary piano music too: we range from short explorations of American folk rhythm by the great Samuel Barber to a series of living composers - Amy Rubin, Martin Scherzinger, John Adams, William Bolcom and four improvisations by Swigger herself.

The program’s theme, if it has one, is America as musical melting pot; we have here much that is jazzy and much that is altogether new. Amy Rubin’s American Progressions brings together blues tunes, agbadza drumming patterns from Ghana (in the stunning “Grace” movement), and a page in the last movement notated only with chord progressions and demanding the pianist improvise. South African Martin Scherzinger, now resident in New York, contributes a four-movement sonata, When One Has the Feet of Wind, in a single ten-minute arc, impressively built, with moments (like around 3:15) which do seem to take flight. Just as the sonata reaches perilously “easy-listening” territory near the end, it begins to speak a fascinating new language. The first three movements use only white keys; the finale introduces black keys and thrillingly colorful dissonances.

Book-ending these works are two by more established composers: Samuel Barber’s wartime Excursions, and John Adams’ China Gates. Barber explains his work as excursions “into regional American idioms,” and we do indeed get boogie and blues filtered through the sophisticated harmonies of Barber’s classical language. Although the score is carefully notated to mimic improvisation, you would never know it; Swigger excels here in making the carefully planned phrasing really work, really sound not like fake improv but the real thing. In China Gates, Adams’ repeated cells of material take on a wonderfully mystical quality; it’s surely one of the most instantly attractive of minimalist works, and Swigger projects it beautifully.

There are some good old-fashioned jazz numbers, too. William Bolcom contributes four rags, a suite called The Garden of Eden. “Old Adam” is a particularly glorious example of the ragtime art. “The Serpent’s Kiss” is indeed a devilish number, and among its array of ideas (one senses the serpent using every last trick in its book to seduce the hapless couple) are calls for finger-clacking, tongue-clicking, and whistling. Jocelyn Swigger is, I have to say, a tongue-clicking virtuoso. Jelly Roll Morton’s “Finger Buster” is an even more devilish jazz number - for the pianists getting their fingers busted, anyway.

The collection ends with its most daring conclusion of all: four tracks of Swigger herself improvising at the end of the recording sessions. The first improvisation gets off to an unpromising start, with a series of repeated notes that smack of trying to decide what to do next, but it takes off as a sort of upside-down rag: the left hand is there, in the grand old tradition we’ve heard earlier, but the right hand won’t go down without a fight, and plays dissonant, angular lines. A similar story recurs in the movement which sounds most ‘finished’: “Ragged,” the title presumably meant halfway between tired and done playing rags.

There’s really very little competition for this; the Bolcom rags have occasionally been recorded elsewhere, Adams’ China Gates has popped up on a few recital discs - though not as much as one might expect for such an appealing work - and the Barber has been recorded several times though the Naxos performance is more soft-focus than this. But Jocelyn Swigger’s lineup here meshes extremely well, and the pieces she has chosen both go naturally together and make a very satisfying program. She digs into the rags with relish - though, wisely, not too much relish; Scott Joplin warned that the only way to play a rag poorly was to play it fast. She projects the blues rhythms very well, and feels at home in the more abstract visions of Scherzinger and Adams, where the repetition never wears. The Jelly Roll “Finger Buster” does sound rather finger-busting; Jelly Roll himself dispatches it with jaw-dropping ease, but then, as Swigger herself admits in the booklet, the composer “had much larger hands than mine.” There’s also a YouTube clip of Dick Hyman absolutely demolishing the piece on a 1986 BBC appearance. But I can’t imagine better advocates for works like Scherzinger’s, and Amy Rubin’s own recording of her piano music is now very hard to find.

Jocelyn Swigger’s booklet essay is superb and does a terrific job explaining her musical choices; the engineering is mostly very good - nothing spectacular - but I was a little disconcerted by how closely-miked the tongue-clicking in “The Serpent’s Kiss” seemed to be. It’s a quirk well worth living with, because this back-roads tour of the lovely, unexplored bits of American classical and folk music is a one-of-a-kind journey. Rhythms & Blues is my most pleasant surprise of the year so far.

What a great surprise: American rags, blues, and minimalism together in a superb program.

Read more: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2011/June11/Rhythms_Blues_CBR21046.htm#ixzz1PYNRun6l