Terra Incognita, which will be released on August 24 and is currently available (with audio samples) for pre-order on Amazon.com, is the latest recording by the Imani Winds and includes a result of its Legacy Commissioning Project. This is an ambitious five-year endeavor launching the group into its second decade of music making. In the course of the effort, the ensemble is commissioning, premiering, and touring ten new works for woodwind quintet written by established and emerging composers of diverse musical backgrounds. The work represented on this CD is the four-movement suite Canes by Jason Moran, best known as a jazz pianist. The Legacy Project was launched in 2008; and Moran's composition was one of the first to be presented, receiving its premiere on October 24, 2008. The other two compositions on the CD were also commissioned by Imani Winds, but they predate the Project. However, they also feature composers better known for their jazz work, Paquito D'Rivera and Wayne Shorter. Clarinetist D'Rivera joined Imani, along with pianist Alex Brown, for the two-movement suite Kites, first presented in 2005; and the title track is Wayne Shorter's first composition written for an ensemble of which he was not member and given its first performance in 2006.
Of these three composers, D'Rivera is definitely the one most comfortable working with the chamber music genre, having composed the woodwind quintet suite Aires, which has also been performed by Imani. (Two of its movements were performed by Summer Music West chamber music students.) Kites is a "memory piece" of his kite-flying as a boy in Havana; but it is far more abstract that Aires. It is also framed by spoken text at the beginning of the first movement and the conclusion of the second. Musically, it suggests a dialog between D'Rivera playing in his comfortable jazzy style and the more conventional woodwind sonorities of Imani, both of which are accompanied by Brown's piano. It's greatest shortcoming is a tendency of both movements to overstay their welcome, leaving one to anticipate closure noticeably before it actually arrives.
Indeed, the only composer who seemed to have a sense of duration commensurate with the demands of his materials was Jason Moran, whose Cane was also a memory piece. In this case the music provided a family narrative in four episodes: transit on a slave ship from Togo to Natchitoches, Louisiana, a profile of "Coin Coin" (presumably an ancestor), emancipation, and Moran's own transit from Natchitoches to New York. Each movement captures its episode with only a few mood-setting gestures and lasts only long enough to fully establish those moods. This is not a particularly "heavy" composition; but Moran clearly has a keen ear for working with the sonorities of a woodwind quintet.
Shorter's composition, on the other hand, claims to have "a unique perspective on structure." It is unclear what this means; but an extra track will be released exclusively through iTunes, consisting of a second performance of "Terra Incognita," whose surface structure differs significantly from the CD version. The work certainly does not sound improvised in most jazz senses of the word, but Shorter may have conceived of it as a collection of modules that can be assembled by the performers in different ways. It may also follow the same approach taken by both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley, according to which the composition concludes when all composite elements have been performed, regardless of the ordering or duration of their performance. This could explain why the CD version is longer than the "bonus" version, although both versions are likely to strain the patience of many attentive listeners.
However, even if there are problems with excessive duration, this music definitely offers innovative approaches to the woodwind quintet repertoire. There is no doubting Imani's skill with their respective instruments, and they bring fresh sounds to a repertoire whose variety has tended to be rather limited. At the very least Shorter should be recognized for taking such a bold move outside of his usual element; and I am certainly curious to hear what emerges the next time he tries (meaning I am both assuming and hoping that there will be a next time)!
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