Darrell Katz Death Of Simone Weil CD

Simone Weil was a Jew obsessed with Christian and Buddhist worldviews, a mystic who claimed to have visions of a realm beyond reality, and a reclusive philosopher who starved herself to death in 1941.With music by Darrell Katz and text by Paula Tatarunis,The Death of Simone Weil deals with wild imagination, German occupation, desire, fishing, and the Pope. Weil's story unfolds like a surreal jazz improvisation that seamlessly mixes modern composition and the entire jazz legacy into a mature and personal style.The alto voice of Rebecca Shrimpton effortlessly captures the subtle shadings of the starkly beautiful text. Boston's powerfully virtuosic Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra accompanies with fistfuls of fire.The Death of Simone Weil stands out in the jazz vocal tradition in terms of both scale and ambition, and whose depth and economy of expression are worthy of the subject. All in all, it's an exciting soire with the far-out, the insane, and the beautifully strange.When The Jazz Composers Alliance was founded in 1985, its agenda included the establishment of an active public forum for the presentation of new jazz works, the creation of the JCA Orchestra, and a concert series that included a visiting composers program. Since then, the JCA initiated the Julius Hemphill Composition Awards, an annual competition promoting the most interesting and progressive work by jazz composers around the world, created two other ensembles, the JCA Sax Quartet and JCA Winds, and released 6 CD's. With some of New England's finest improvising musicians in its ranks, the JCA Orchestra has premiered over 120 new pieces by its resident composers along with commissioned works by Muhal Richard Abrams, Marty Ehrlich and Wayne Horvitz; JCA performances have featured collaborations with major jazz recording artists such as Tim Berne, Steve Lacy, Henry Threadgill, Sam Rivers, Anthony Davis, Bob Moses, Dave Holland, Julius Hemphill, Ricky Ford, Michael Gibbs, Fred Ho, Maria Schneider, and Dave Fiuczysnki; Hemphill and Rivers can be heard on earlier JCA Orchestra albums.Band members over the years have included John Medeski, Jim Black, Chris Speed, Billy Kilson and many others.

/Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra/Rebecca Shrimpton.
THE DEATH OF SIMONE WEIL is a jazz cantata composed by Darrell Katz with text by Paula Tatarunis.
Personnel includes: Rebecca Shrimpton (vocals); Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra.
Principally recorded at Berklee Performance Center, Berklee, Massachusetts
on October 6, 2001.
In music, having the best of intentions doesn't always pay off creatively. There are many ambitious, well-meaning projects that simply don't work out; the pieces fail to come together, and the end result can be awkward or embarrassing. But that isn't a problem for Darrell Katz on this risk-taking, mildly avant-garde CD, which finds the Boston-based composer/arranger joining forces with singer Rebecca Shrimpton and the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra. The idea was to set poet Paula Tatarunis' The Death of Simone Weil (a reflection on the life and death of French philosopher Simone Weil) to music -- specifically, to Katz's own melodies. Shrimpton could have simply recited the text of Tatarunis, who is married to Katz -- that would have been an easier way to do things, but instead, she sings Tatarunis' words. And that's a positive thing, because her performances are quite compelling; stylistically, Shrimpton's contributions to this disc (which was recorded in 2001 and 2002) bring to mind Judi Silvano, Ann Dyer, and Kitty Brazelton (three of the more imaginative vocalists of the '90s and 2000s). Favoring an inside/outside approach, this CD underscores the fact that not all avant-garde jazz is atonal screaming; actually, the disc is quite musical -- abstract, cerebral, and left-of-center, certainly, but definitely musical. Of course, a project as esoteric and arcane as this one could have become overly self-indulgent if the participants weren