The artwork for this release leads the listener to expect a tango album of some sort, which this set of contemporary compositions for alto saxophone and piano or electronic accompaniment mostly is not. The only actual tango on hand is
Astor Piazzolla's gloriously elegiac Adiós Nonino, in an arrangement by saxophonist
Todd Oxford, and indeed it does work beautifully on the saxophone, which has the same combination of passion and grit as
Piazzolla's bandoneón. Instead,
Oxford offers something rarer than a tango album: a program that circles loosely around the ideas of the tango, dance, Latin America, nightlife, and the meeting of classical and vernacular traditions. The opening Tango Magnetism of Daniel Gutwein hints of the tango as "a metaphor for other male-female relationships in which passions are contained not only by the conventions and formal restraints of society, but by their own fears of chaos," put it that way and the music's rather abstract patterns make sense.
John Williams' Catch Me If You Can comes from the film of the same name. The prolific
David Amram combines a jazz-tinged ballad with a piece influenced by the Taxim genre of Arabic music, while Aaron I. Bramwell's Canciones del Zócalo (Songs of the Plaza) nicely evokes a Latin American town with very few gestures. David Heuser's electronic Deep Blue Spiral is consistent in mood with the rest of the music, but nonetheless seems to break the thread of consistently related music. Nonetheless, this is a model contemporary instrumental recital, one that directly appeals to an audience and finds a secure place for concert music within its everyday surroundings without recourse to sentimentality or familiarity.