Meridian Arts Ensemble is a long-established, New York-based brass group that specializes in contemporary music, but that does not mean it is grounded in the conservatory and its post-serial trappings. The group feels just as comfortable in "downtown" music as "uptown," but seeks out pieces that stretch its capabilities and also provides a sense of fun. Brink is its eighth album for Channel Classics, and is issued in an SACD format that sounds terrific. Whether or not one knows these composers,
Meridian Arts Ensemble doesn't go to the expense of recording dubious pieces to realize the terms of commissions, and all of the pieces on Brink represent contemporary music at its best. Brass players especially will find Brink enthralling and cutting edge.
David Sanford's Corpus sounds a little like a Third Stream-era brass piece with an updated sense of drumming. This is not meant to be taken as a negative encapsulation of Corpus, just a description that fits -- it is a good piece, has a solid sense of scoring and delivers a good, swinging sound at times. Sanford leads a big band called Pittsburgh Collective, so it is unreasonable, even undesirable, to expect that there would be no jazz in his work. The hip hop styled beat in the movement entitled "Shot" is infectious in the way that it interacts with the horns, and "Sermon," an imitation of an African-American preacher, is reminiscent of
Charles Mingus' similar kinds of evocations of revival meetings.
Elliott Sharp's Beyond the Curve seems the most exploratory and formally unpredictable of the three works on Brink. It also incorporates the subtle use of some electronic modification. Beyond the Curve is strongly rhythmic and of the three pieces also shows the most interest in unconventional musical effects that brass players are capable of -- gliding microtones and leaping figures, very quiet staccato patterns, and other ideas. Beyond the Curve may not be able to formally pin it down, but it seems to partly be developed in psychological form and partly to simulate a sense of jamming, and it's great.
Sharp knows the capabilities of the instruments and pushes the envelope accordingly, but keeps enough of a frame around the music that the listener is never left behind.
Nick Didkovsky's Slim in Beaten Dreamers features 15, often very short, movements with goofy titles that seem derived from some anagrammatic procedure. It is like a distracted conversation with an incisive thinker who likes to populate his thread with a number of jokes; some movements are clearly intended as humorous, whereas others evoke the kind of "TV Action Jazz" ostinato patterns familiar from the television scores of the 1970s. While it has many good moments, as is often with long suites built up with short pieces like these, one wonders if some of them might not have enough good ideas to keep them going longer.
Didkovsky obviously doesn't want any of the various parts that make up Slim in Beaten Dreamers to wear out their welcome, so perhaps his impulse in this instance is the right one: keep it short and simple.