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 Songs Without Words, this exceptional quartet offers a new musical form that seems to inaugurate an unprecedented genre, at the crossroads of classical music, jazz, and pop.In the liner notes, Malakoff Kowalski summarizes 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, time and again, timeless, intimate, and vulnerable poems in Ginsberg's work, and, for an unknown reason, these texts naturally imposed themselves as song lyrics, with almost no modification. The gentle voices rigorously follow the piano's motifs and themes, 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 incredible stroke of luck to have brought together three of his closest pianist friends to bring this project to life:"Three personalities with contrasting piano 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 profound that it makes me dizzy with joy. 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 European piano and the vibrant poetry of the American Beat Generation.