William Parker Double Quartet - Alphaville Suite (2007) torrent

RogueArt: ROG-0010
http://web.roguart.com/shop/album/id/17

* William Parker: double bass
* Rob Brown: alto saxophone
* Lewis Barnes: trumpet
* Hamid Drake: drum set
* Mazz Swift: violon
* Jessica Pavone: viola
* Julia Kent: cello
* Shiau-Shu Yu: cello
* Leena Conquest (special guest): vocals

http://www.williamparker.net/

Recorded on January 4th & 5th 2007 par Anthony Ruotolo
at Leon Lee Dorsey Studio (New York, Ny, USA).

Music Inspired By The Jean-Luc Godard Film "Alphaville"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_%28film%29

Review
~~~~~~

by Stef

[...]

Adding the string quartet helps to evocate the music of the film itself, with
the eery tension and typical movie suspense full of romantic drama and
sentimental outbursts. But the strings here are luckily more modern, more
avant-garde, offering a great contrast with the free jazz musicians, sometimes
limiting themselves to pizzicato chattering in the background, sometimes driving
heavy unisono lines accentuating the jazz solos, with an especially gloomy and
menacing counterpoint in the long "Dr. Badguy". The overall effect is utterly
bizarre, creating a kind of busyness which is too much to grasp at once, because
there is too much going on, but still in a coherent way, following its own
logic. The jazz dominates, and it's great as you can expect from these artists
and there are times, especially in the longer pieces that the strings let them
do their thing, leaving some breathing space, but never for long : there they
are again, to chase the jazz quartet forward, jabb it in the sides, kick it
back, emphasize it, play along in moments of frenzy, move it to weird territory,
or offer shades and an overall darkness that is highly unusual, to say the
least. Without specifically saying that the string quartet would represent the
cold futuristic logic of the evil scientist and the jazz band the proponents of
love and free expression (or female vs male :-), at least the tension between
good and bad and the overall mood of the film is well-captured by the concept of
the double band. And the music is excellent to. Like Parker's "Requiem", this is
one you should listen to often before you can appreciate it to the full.