| Behind the bland cover art, the music on Claude-Marc Bourget’s newest CD Second Time/ Improvisations Cycle is dynamic and temperamental. Comprised of an opening movement, three inner parts (with five pieces to each part), and a final adagio movement, this cycle uses interesting modalities and jazz idioms to unite each section. Bourget explores melodic material and sound acoustics providing moments of extremely tranquil reverberations and thick tonal clusters.
Each song in this cycle paints a different picture with similar shades and strokes. "Northern Restlessness" is unstable: using dissonance, repetition and rising melodic content to evoke the experience of a piano being tuned. "Dance of the Large Bird" uses flying staccato passages next to smoother legato parts, syncopated rhythms and frequent leaps across the piano which show off Bourget’s agility and sensitivity to the instrument. "Second Time" is emotionally and intellectually insistent, with great variety heard through radical shifts in dynamics, rhythms, tone clusters, repetition and contrast of melodic material. Other pieces worthy of mention are: "Dripping of Whiteness" with its curious intervallic leaps that explore a mysterious and vast territory; "Tides of Hopewell Rocks", which sounds more like an orchestra than a single instrument; "Ungrund" with its smooth and reflective melodies; "Awakening Cycle", which uses clusters and whirls of tones to create a great gust of wind blowing the melodies against a wall of sound; and "Rising Death", the pinnacle of dizzying and unsettling tension that fails to release until the final break that is left to echo in the last few moments of the CD.
Sometimes certain pieces sound familiar with one another, as when Bourget experiments with melodies in the upper register and heavy chords in the bass, but his pieces are most often insightful, and his style of improvisation can be both reflective and virtuosic.
by Jessica Lombardi — September 2008
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The tracks
1. OPENING
Part I
2. NORTHERN RESTLESSNESS
3. INTERLUDE
4. PLAYS OF WINDS
5. DANCE OF THE LARGE BIRD
6. SECRET ICE
Part II
7. SECOND TIME
8. LULL IN ASHES (BRAHMS)
9. SONG OF DESTINY (BEETHOVEN)
10. SONG OF PAST
11. TIDES OF HOPEWELL ROCKS
Part III
12. DRIPPING OF WHITENESS
13. UNGRUND
14. RIVER IN THE AIR
15. AWAKENING CYCLE
16. CODA
17. RISING DEATH (ADAGIO)
www.claudemarcbourget.com
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