Product Description
Contains:"Blood... Thicker Than Water"
- taken from the Isadar solo piano complete collection, "Red" (also available on SMP)
Sounds like: Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi, Liz Story, George Winston, early Windham Hill solo piano artists
Transcribed by: David Shenton (
https://www.shentonmusic.com/ ) verbatim to the sound recording
Album & Songbook Review by: Kathy Parsons
Red is
pianist/composer Isadars genre-defying tenth solo piano album and
seventeenth independent release from the past twenty years. It is also
the third installment in a trilogy of solo piano albums released in the
past year - Reconstructed, a Will Ackerman-produced anthology of some of Isadars best piano pieces; O Christmas, Isadars second piano Christmas album; and now Red,
a bittersweet love-themed album that took seven years to produce and
that consists of the first new original solo piano material Isadar has
released in more than ten years.
I have been reviewing and thoroughly
enjoying Isadars releases since his second piano album, 1999s Active Imagination,
which still stands as one of my favorite recordings. Even though I have
been a big fan for many years, I was still blown away by Isadars live
performance in my house concert series in July 2010. The man has magic
fingers and an extraordinary piano touch that are perfectly suited to
express his imaginative, distinctive, and emotionally powerful music.
Isadar is also a singer/songwriter and an electronic musician who
creates the music videos for much of his music, dramatizing the stories
that inspired the songs. I will always be partial to Isadars piano
albums because his voice and vision are unique, incorporating jazz, new
age, pop, and classical stylings into a musical language all his own.
Red opens with "Broken Valentine," a
free-flowing expression of heartbreak and the broad range of emotions
that go with it, alternating between grief and confusion then shifting
to perhaps anger and resignation - a great beginning. The title track
conveys the freedom of an improvisation while weaving together a variety
of upbeat themes. "The Man Who Broke My Heart" is energetic and in
constant swirling motion - also very free and from deep within. "The
Stairwell" is darker and much more mysterious, overflowing with Isadars
intriguing accented rhythms and picturesque compositional style. My
favorite track is the almost nine-minute "Letting Go," a piece that
intertwines a series of musical vignettes into a powerful, colorful
musical collage. I love the way Isadar seamlessly goes from flowing and
smooth to a bouncy jazz style to high drama without missing a beat.
Great stuff! "En Face Du Miroir (Facing the Mirror)" is much lighter,
with fingers dancing nimbly around the piano keyboard. The album closes
with "Blood ... Thicker Than Water," again a combination of changing
themes that could well be a musical family portrait - different
personalities working separately and as a unit, bound together by the
unseen ties that keep families together through thick and thin.
Isadar has created another piano masterpiece that should be more widely heard than his previous releases due to the success of Reconstructed. I hope so, anyway! Red is available from isadar.com, Amazon, iTunes, and CD Baby. Very highly recommended!
Isadars
Red: Solo Piano Sheet Music Collection
is a note-for-note transcription of all seven pieces from I
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