Album Review: THE MUSIC BETWEEN US

Album Review:
The Music Between Us
Composers Concordance Records
COMCON0067       
Release: 12/15/2021
(Distributed by NAXOS)

The new release (on December 15, 2021) on Composer Concordance Records, distributed by Naxos, of “The Music Between Us” (COMCON0067) is both brilliant and thought provoking.  This disc is a song cycle on poetry by Robert C. Ford, better known as the “Wall Street Poet.”  Three composers - Charles Coleman, Mark Kostabi and Gene Pritsker - have collaborated to put Ford’s enticing poetry into the limelight.  The ten selections on this album are all poems of Ford, and they all challenge us to form our own conclusions about recent events that we have all experienced, such as the pandemic, and the political malaise that is gripping our beloved America.  Woven into this excellent fabric are also many common threads of human experience, such as when a young person, attending a junior prom, is too nervous to use his phone to communicate with that special someone.   

“That’s not what our founding fathers had in mind” is one of the many pithy lines of poetry that are so succinctly set to music by three composers with most excellent careers, and who pull off this feat of perfect collaboration.  These three are:  Charles Coleman - a brilliant baritone as well as a fine composer, whose range of eclecticism expands from opera and musical comedy to jazz, rock and beyond; Mark Kostabi, a multi-talented maestro, who paints. sculpts, composes and performs in the tradition of the great visual artists, as well in the tradition of the great musical artists; and Gene Pritsker, a perfect composer extraordinaire, who is (at the time of this review) author of over 850 works.

The disc leads off powerfully with “The Strength of Diversity (Don’t Marry Your Cousin)”.  The marriages of Johann Sebastian Bach (first wife), Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt notwithstanding, the music of Gene Pritsker combines the diverse forces of Gene’s own brilliant electric guitar playing, Todd Rewoldt’s stupendous sax, and the most excellent David Taylor, on bass trombone.  This trio forms a rock solid foundation for Robert C. Ford, speaking his own perfect poetry.

The second track gives us “The Music Between Us” (the title track), composed by Charles Coleman, and forms the perfect contrast to the first track, giving us the very simple and straightforward combination of piano and voice.  The harmonies in the piano start off sounding very lush and juicy.  And credit for bringing these sounds to light and making them sound very simple and easy is given to Geoffrey Burleson, the perfectly skillful and soulful pianist accompanying Coleman, and being more like an equal partner than an accompanist.  And there is something very sweet and sensitive about Coleman’s baritone.  There is also a lightness to the voice quality, very different from your average baritone, who often punches up the lower frequencies in his chest tones to sound deeper than the tones actually sung.  

The third track gives us “Mama I Can’t Breathe (Chorale #1)”.  In this song, Pritsker reflects on the last words of George Floyd with a chorale setting that is at once very solemn and profound and also very unique.  There are voicings and pitch combinations that are most unusual, but this music hangs together quite expertly.

The same combination as in the second track is heard on the fourth track.  And on the ninth track, “Statue Down”, Charles has written an a capella (unaccompanied) setting of Ford’s irreverent verses commenting on the taking down of such statues as Robert E. Lee, in a Southern state, and Thomas Jefferson (at City Hall in New York City), and Theodore Roosevelt (at the Museum of Natural History in New York City).

The fifth track gives us “Bitcoin Without a Blockchain”.  And it also gives us a most unusual trio combination:  clarinet, violin and baritone voice.  Gene Pritsker, ever the awesome text setter, starts this song off with what sounds like monophony (a single unaccompanied melody - like what was done in the middle ages with Gregorian chant), but it is really more like heterophony (where there is a single unaccompanied line, but it is not an exact doubling, with either clarinet or violin not doubling every note of the melody at times).  The astute artistry of Michiyo Suzuki, on clarinet, and the vibrant violin of Lynn Bechtold, are very much in evidence, bringing their talents to the fore, and in equal partnership to the sensitive baritone of Charles Coleman.

I could go on and on about this marvelous disc, but I will skip over some of the remaining tracks to focus on two that need mentioning.

Mark Kostabi’s awesome work as composer is heard on the seventh track “Do Not Pass Go”, and for this piece, Kostabi paints the perfect backdrop to Ford’s most meaningful words.

The final cut is “The Biggest Lie” and it is solidly performed by the group known as Sound Liberation, which also involves the work of Pritsker and Coleman and features the expert vocals of Berzan Onen and Ibadi, and the fine drumming of Francesco Coppola Bove, with the solidly supportive and soulful bass guitar work of Clemens Rofner.

Kudos should also go out to the technical team.  For the mixing, Pritsker was joined by the very expert Konstantin Ladilov.  Ehab Omar did the fine mastering.

The cover art was by Mr. Kostabi, with one of his most provocative paintings.  And the expertise of the design by Octavio Maya Rocha was very much in evidence.

I highly recommend this disc and hope it will wind up in everyone’s collection.

- Andrew Humphries