Songs With Words

Description

SONGS WITH WORDS is the new album by acclaimed German-American composer Malakoff Kowalski, in collaboration with pianists Igor Levit, Johanna Summer and Chilly Gonzales. This album combines arrangements by classical composers with sung poems by Allen Ginsberg, an iconic figure of the Beat Generation. Inspired by Felix Mendelssohn’s Romances sans paroles (Songs Without Words), this exceptional quartet offers a new musical form that seems to herald an entirely new genre, at the crossroads of classical music, jazz and pop. In the liner notes, Malakoff Kowalski sums up the project as follows: “It took about five years to bring these twelve songs to life. They were assembled from arrangements, famous or lesser-known, by Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Aram Khachaturian, Maurice Ravel, Edvard Grieg, Amy Beach, Germaine Tailleferre, Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré. I discovered, again and again, timeless, intimate and vulnerable poems in Ginsberg’s work, and, for some unknown reason, these texts naturally came to me as song lyrics, with almost no changes at all. The gentle voices follow the piano motifs and themes rigorously, while the piano parts remain faithful to the original versions, with only a few adjustments.” The result is a song cycle evoking the world of Tom Waits, Jim Morrison and David Bowie, tinged with the musicality of Bill Evans, Kurt Weill and Michel Legrand. Malakoff Kowalski considers it an extraordinary stroke of luck to have been able to bring together three of his closest pianist friends to bring this project to life: “Three personalities with contrasting pianistic styles, as diverse as the works we explored here: Igor Levit, whom I admire above all for his three great Bs: Busoni, Bach, Brahms. Johanna Summer, whose improvisation between jazz and classical music is so free and so profound that it leaves me dizzy with happiness. And Chilly Gonzales, who, with Solo Piano and its successors, has done more than anyone for contemporary arrangements.” With SONGS WITH WORDS, this extraordinary ensemble creates a fascinating dialogue between the pure tradition of the European piano and the vibrant poetry of the American Beat Generation.