Wayne Alpern – Gotham (ENG review)

Henry Elkan Music – Available
Jazz
Wayne Alpern – Gotham

How about a little Kryptonite? What do you mean, no? Let yourself be carried away by the new album from Wayne Alpern, a composer and pianist who describes his music as follows: ‘One morning in the shower, I realized I couldn’t sing or dance to my own music. I read Matisse’s observation that if you want to know who you are as an artist, look at your early works. I found my first pieces with the Princess. They were tonal, joyful, and catchy. I looked at myself in the musical mirror: I studied classical music, but I grew up with Motown and played in rock bands. It’s an ingenious (and typically American) aesthetic dialectic. I gradually came to view popular styles, conventions, and songs as treasures of auditory archaeology, found objects, musical fabrics, vehicles for creative transformation to be reused and revitalized as original art through the redemptive act of arranging, rearranging, or recomposing at a higher level of synthesis. Throughout this ongoing process, my greatest musical masters are Bach and Mozart technically, Haydn, Stravinsky, Gershwin, and Ellington stylistically, and Heinrich Schenker theoretically.’

You’ll find that this artist doesn’t lack humor, and that’s exactly what this album offers: a fantastic time, thanks to his fabulous arrangements that twist well-known songs in every direction for our greatest pleasure. He even dares to deconstruct ‘Desafinado,’ and with such talent, you can imagine the result is nothing short of a success.

It quickly becomes clear why he chose to make this album. Indeed, Wayne Alpern thinks like a filmmaker; the setting and content must be perfect before projection onto the screen. Originally from Detroit, steeped in Motown sounds, he studied at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, Yale University, and the City University of New York, with additional work at Harvard, Juilliard, Wesleyan, and the University of Pennsylvania. Certainly, we can feel his classical music training, which serves only to elevate his works through his innovative arrangements, compositions, recompositions, and rearrangements. Alpern’s works have been performed and recorded by distinguished artists from diverse musical traditions. In his music, there is a true vision of his art, always ensuring that melodically, the audience can connect with it. As for the rest, I took great pleasure in deeply listening to all the arrangements. There is no doubt: Alpern is certainly one of the greatest musical arrangers I’ve ever heard. It’s far from easy to make something new from titles written by others, and for that, you need a real personality and a vision that goes beyond the original proposal, often pushing yourself to surpass your own limits.

Music can also be great fun, and we can only celebrate that by placing this album among our ‘Favorites,’ though we must admit the only thing holding us back from listing it as ‘Essential’ is that the album doesn’t feature original compositions…

Thierry De Clemensat
USA correspondent – Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News

PARIS-MOVE, October 9th 2024

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