by: John Book
With a somewhat ho-hum album cover, I wasn’t sure what I would get when I played this. Opening the jewel case, one sees Patt Battstone (piano) and Richard Poole(vibraphone( playing at what seems like an intimate live performance, but even that wasn’t enough to provide any hints. Never judge a book by its cover, even if the book provides little to nothing. I had to go in.Mystic Nights (self-released) could have been nothing more than a simple piano and vibraphone album, perhaps sounding cool and reserved, at least that’s what I expected when I saw their photo. But this studio album is anything but reserved. The opening track, “Scottish Heather”, has them coming into the scope, slowly playing and welcoming you to their instruments and their world, almost like the unveiling of a gallery. It’s not free form, but there’s no solid rhythm that defines this. “Summer Sunset” suggests relaxation, but some of the tones they create together are more about the heat and the blur of the bright sun than anything that brings calm. “Newsreel” may bring to mind the old ways of taking in the news, and maybe it’s a not-so-subtle way to describe the musicians themselves, looking at our modern, non-stop blitzkreig way of taking in the news of the day. “When Creatures Reigned” kind of sounds like what one might dream up in our youth as a way to describe the fears we used to read in books, but now it sounds playful, and if there was a way to go back to those days, we all would.
Some of the songs are straightforward, while others are a bit more adventurous, especially when Battstone goes into the piano and plucks the strings with his hands. Poole will then play on top of that but sometimes play them solely as a percussion instrument, with no sense of keys or melodies. If the music on Mystic Nights are meant to represent something, I’d like to know what it is, but music is there for the imagination to play with. Personally, I want to play within them again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment