Bryan Pezzone - Jim Fox: Black Water (2013) CD-Rip

"Cold Blue Music has an unofficial “stable” of composers and performers—names that come up on multiple releases. And why not? Every record label needs an identity. Composer Jim Fox is the man behind Cold Blue Music, and that position serves as a kind of bully pulpit for his own music. Again, why not?

I like Cold Blue Music a lot, and one of the things I like about it is its advocacy for the specially priced CD single. It’s nice to know that not everything needs to be stretched or padded, and that a 20-minute work can be sufficient unto itself. Cold Blue Music’s...latest release...demonstrate that once...again.

Black Water is a work for three pianos dating from 1984. The pianist, Bryan Pezzone (another Cold Blue Music stalwart), performs it in the studio via multi-tracking. It begins with a trumpeting tremolo, and the mood, throughout most of the work, is assertive and even abstractly heroic, although there are more reflective sections as well. Fox calls it “a churning eddy of ever-changing/ever-returning sound.” The work’s title suggests something liquid, but the title comes from an eponymous collection of stories that Fox was reading at the time and otherwise doesn’t seem to have much to do with the music. To me, Black Water suggests not just trumpets but bells, which, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, are associated with a variety of emotional states and circumstances. Fox’s Black Water is abstract and open-ended enough to allow the listener to interpret its tintinnabulations in just about any way that he or she likes. Pezzone swaggers his way through its wrist-breaking difficulties like a boss, as kids these days might say." -- Raymond Tuttle