The Zeitgeist Improvisations

Music CD Review by William Routhier

There are jazz improvisers, there are rock improvisers, there are even folk and bluegrass improvisers, but there aren’t many classical improvisational musicians. Andrew Asboe is a classically trained composer and pianist who has recorded a live CD of what he calls “mood improvisations” and “soundscapes,” which might also be called variations on a sketched theme. Asboe works within a certain established framework of key and time, much like a jazz performer would work within the structure of a selected song, but the forms which the constantly shifting compositions take are, as in jazz, never the same.

Asboe uses a Korg synthesizer keyboard with 88 keys, and various sounds - the improvisations often take on an orchestral tone. About the first piece, "Fantasy on a Moment by Vaughn Williams," Asboe writes in his liner notes, “Based on a motif from ‘The Lark Ascending,’ the keyboard sound is that of a string orchestra. Parallel thirds start low and weave their way up to the high register before descending and ending back in the low end. The improvisation is intended to conjure visions of an English countryside.”

The pieces are by turn poetic and clanging, meditative and dissonant, joyous and aching, and always challenging, unlike what is generally called “mood music.” This is mood music that doesn’t disappear in the background like wallpaper. This music grabs your emotions and pulls you through the varying terrain and myriad paths found in every still-beating human heart. It evokes mood, certainly, but the mood is always complex, multi-layered, always unfolding anew. There is the same quality of surprise that makes improvised jazz so exciting – these are compositions in flux, riffs of the highest order, and Asboe plays them with the soul of a poet.

The music was performed live in 2005 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge Mass. Ben Schwendener, critically acclaimed pianist/composer, student of composer/musical theorist George Russell and certified teacher of the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, also founder and director of Gravity Arts, Inc., accompanies Asboe on piano and conga.

The CD can be purchased at CD Freedom.

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