Innova Rec.
Maya Beiser : Provenance (US,2010)**°
Bang of A Can co-founder cello player Maya Reiser with this release of new classical half improvised : half composed new classical cello music with a few world music references investigates something of her own roots which she remembers and imagines through certain patterns. The front cover does not make a statement with innovative cello playing but focuses on the person as if making publicity for a perfume, in this case the musical idea. This starts from the romanticised idea of the Golden Age of Spain which through circumstances had been a melting pot of different cultures until Roman-Christian ideas destroyed the common practical sense of all those people working together in a mixture of one culture rather than with different entities. Maya Beiser, herself of an Argentinian father and French mother, raised in Israel and having studied at Yale, the mixed ground was something of her personality. The common source was explored in different compositions which holds the middle between an emotionality in improvisation and composed material. This can already be sensed in the near-Middle Eastern minimal of “Mar De Leche” by Israeli composer Tamar Muskal, in sephardic Middle Eastern style interpretation of a ladino traditional, including some oud and Persian percussion. Most other compositions are more dominated with new classical elements. Never too complex. The piece by Douglas J Cuomo is most melancholic, in a Jewish way. Although the reference is fine with the inclusion of the rock track “Kashmir” which brought Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Zeppelin to a successful idea of fusing Middle Eastern elements with a rock element, the instrumental version by Maya Beiser with an arrangement by Evan Ziporyn (also from Bang On A Can all Stars) sounds a bit too limited and lessens the original inspiration to something more lame. In general the ideas remain a bit too much on the surface to convince enough.
