This experimental disc seems to be the brainchild of the Belgian-Québécois recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute, who wrote the notes and composed most of the new music contained herein. The album is noteworthy for not sounding like anything else ever recorded, but it has a bit too many things going on. Maute proposes a "dialogue entre l'Europe et l'Amérique" -- a dialogue between Europe and the Americas, and his program consists of Baroque and Renaissance European works for two recorders along with newly composed material ...
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This experimental disc seems to be the brainchild of the Belgian-Québécois recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute, who wrote the notes and composed most of the new music contained herein. The album is noteworthy for not sounding like anything else ever recorded, but it has a bit too many things going on. Maute proposes a "dialogue entre l'Europe et l'Amérique" -- a dialogue between Europe and the Americas, and his program consists of Baroque and Renaissance European works for two recorders along with newly composed material drawing on North American styles. Maute seems to have started out with the common idea that Baroque music shares a common spirit with jazz -- an idea that becomes less and less appealing as one examines it more closely and realizes the ways in which jazz is fundamentally underpinned by an African aesthetic. His duo-recorder jazz-inflected works like the three-part suite It's Summertime and Bixler Beat seem like uncomfortable mixtures of discordant elements. But Maute broadens his idea...
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