more from
CNM
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Prehistoric Jazz Volume 3 (Three Places in New England)

by Eric Hofbauer Quintet

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $9 USD  or more

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Letterpress printed and hand crafted packaging by Dan Wood Printing. Liner notes by historian and jazz writer David Adler. Design by Benjamin Shaykin.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Prehistoric Jazz Volume 3 (Three Places in New England) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 1 day
    edition of 50 

      $12 USD or more 

     

  • Full Digital Discography

    Get all 4 Eric Hofbauer Quintet releases available on Bandcamp and save 35%.

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Prehistoric Jazz Volume 4 (Reminiscing in Tempo), Prehistoric Jazz Volume 3 (Three Places in New England), Prehistoric Jazz Volume 2 (Quatuor pour la fin du temps), and Prehistoric Jazz Volume 1 (The Rite of Spring). , and , .

    Purchasable with gift card

      $22.10 USD or more (35% OFF)

     

1.
2.
3.

about

FROM THE LINER NOTES - It’s gratifying to see young jazz bandleaders of our day reinvent the music of Shostakovich, Webern, Ligeti, Machaut and others. For Boston-based guitarist Eric Hofbauer, who in 2014 confronted monumental works by Stravinsky and Messiaen on Prehistoric Jazz, Vols. 1 & 2, the goal was not a melding of genres or a salute to “serious” music in general, but rather a puzzling over matters of timbre and instrumentation, improvisational pathways and harmonic implications specific to these composers and not others. The orchestrations were rigorous yet everywhere was the spark of the unexpected. Hofbauer’s take on the encounter of European modernism with the America of blues and jazz follows in the best tradition of Joplin, James P. Johnson and all that came after.

That holds true once again for Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 3, devoted to Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England, a masterpiece of bracing modernism that the Connecticut sage completed in 1914 and revised in 1929. Ives’ sound world — deeply mysterious, irreverent, dissonant in the extreme — is kindred in spirit to the “prehistoric jazz” that Leonard Bernstein once spoke about in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, and that Hofbauer extrapolated on Prehistoric Jazz, Vol. 2 to include Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Moreover, Ives’ appropriation of plantation songs, military marches and other vernacular sources is itself jazz-like. And Three Places, inspired as it is by Revolutionary and Civil War monuments as well as natural scenes in and around Ives’ native Connecticut, amounts to a meditation on America’s past and future — something about which jazz has quite a lot to say.

Naturally, Three Places is a three-movement work; the first movement is just under nine minutes, the second six minutes and the last roughly four. In this chamber-jazz quintet treatment by Hofbauer, the first two movements grow to an improvisation-heavy 17 minutes, the third to just under six. “I created in each piece a series of guidelines and goals,” Hofbauer explains, “instructions to help keep the improvisations on track and connected to the stories and emotional places of each movement.” As models, Hofbauer cites the streamlined compositional approach of Kind of Blue but also various concepts from the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Henry Threadgill.

Perhaps to an even greater extent than the Stravinsky and Messiaen albums, Hofbauer’s Three Places benefits from a robust, pure acoustic studio sound and crystal-clear separation of voices. “This piece is about folk music and melodies,” says Hofbauer, “and there needs to be an intimacy at the center of each movement. The acoustic guitar captures that closeness, addressing the American-ness and nostalgia, while also providing a more pointed and percussive attack when needed to highlight the nuanced timbral language of specifically African-American music vocabularies.”

credits

released October 18, 2016

Musicians

Eric Hofbauer, guitar
Jerry Sabatini, trumpet
Todd Brunel, Bb clarinet & bass clarinet
Junko Fujiwara, cello
Curt Newton, drums & percussion

All compositions by Charles Ives.
All arrangements by Eric Hofbauer (Spice-E Music, BMI).
Recorded, mixed, & mastered January 2016
at Rotary Records (rotaryrecords.com).
Design by Benjamin Shaykin
Liner Notes by David R Adler

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Eric Hofbauer Quintet Boston, Massachusetts

"Situating the last century’s classical music and classic jazz in the same modernist continuum.”
- Kevin Whitehead, NPR's Fresh Air

contact / help

Contact Eric Hofbauer Quintet

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Eric Hofbauer Quintet, you may also like: