Product Description
Virginia-born pianist, composer and singer-songwriter Bruce Hornsby has long been fascinated with old-time American roots forms – hymns, blues, country, bluegrass, old folk, shaped-note religious songs and the like. His Vanguard Records two-disc set, Bruce Hornsby – Solo Concerts, - his first for the label will be available August 26th and allows him to explore that fusion of styles, along with classical music, jazz and pop. The album’s 21 tracks are culled from solo concerts performed by Hornsby in the U.S. over 2012 and 2013, bringing together disparate “information” from musical languages often thought to be opposed: Americana roots music, folk-pop, film scores and modern classical, what Hornsby calls an “unholy alliance.”

Solo Concerts offers an opportunity for Hornsby to show off his chops on piano in a variety of settings. There are solo renditions of his radio hits, songs like “Mandolin Rain” and “The Valley Road” as well as forays into the kind of old-timey music he performed at the start of his career – playing accordion in a band that featured fiddles, banjos and dulcimers. Hornsby also explores modern classical music with the dissonance and expressive chromatics of 20th century 12-tone experimental composers like Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, as well as American modernists like Elliot Carter, the Hungarian György Ligeti or the French mystic Olivier Messiaen.

Hornsby champions on this set what he calls “two-handed independence,” a phrase to describe a piano performance where one hand doesn’t just accompany a melody played by the other, but rather, as in boogie-woogie, simultaneously achieves a parallel compositional and musical life and vitality of its own.

The album starts with “Song E (Hymn in E-Flat),” from a Spike Lee score Hornsby composed several years ago, then segues into “Preacher in the Ring,” a boogie tune, “an old pattern I was shown by a longtime cohort, so I wrote the song based on that pattern, which illustrates that two-handed independence.”

“I think I’ve found a middle ground,” Hornsby says, “where you’re reaching and broadening your language but still connecting with someone perhaps used to hearing — for an entire lifetime — only those seven white notes and those simple chords.”

Bruce Hornsby Solo Concerts represents an emotional musical merger of American history and European daring, in which the various elements of his songwriting and instrumental styles align in highly personal ways.

CD1
1. Entrance
2. Song E (Hymn In Eb)
3. Preacher In The Ring Part 1 / Variation Ii (Webern) / Caténaires (Carter)
4. Life In The Psychotropics
5. Piano Concerto (Schoenberg) Excerpt
6. Might As Well Be Me
7. Continents Drift
8. The Valley Road
9. Caténaires (Carter)
10. Where No One's Mad
11. Where's The Bat

CD2
1. Sticks And Stones
2. Invisible
3. Gavotte (Schoenberg) & Variations
4. Paperboy
5. 20/20 Vision / Night On The Town
6. Arc De Terre
7. La Grive Musicienne (Messiaen) Excerpt / Camp Meeting
8. Mandolin Rain
9. Etude 5 (Ligeti)
10. Here We Are Again

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LQEUDEC/?tag=imwan-20

Ordered. Thanks for the heads-up.

I don't begrudge Hornsby his muse, but beyond the first couple of albums, I typically find little more than a track or two that I enjoy on each album. He used to be an automatic buy, but he isn't anymore, at least not for me.

Another track:

got it today.

2 CD's in a jewel case.