Peter Margasak, Reader staff writer
Timo Andres, Home Stretch The second album from young pianist and composer Timo Andres bursts with creativity, vaulting over the divide between conservative and radical, past and future. His piece Home Stretch accelerates through three uninterrupted parts, with his pulsing piano surging and relaxing amid meticulous chamber arrangements. In a dramatic segue, he follows it with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 26 (aka Coronation), adding dazzling left-hand figures (which Mozart never completed). The album closes with Andres’s Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno, a luminous, spectral collage of Eno’s ambient music.
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Orlandivo, Orlandivo Orlann Divo, who started out drumming with bossa nova keyboardist and bandleader Ed Lincoln in the early 60s, cut three solid second-tier bossa and samba records that decade. He resurfaced as Orlandivo on this self-titled 1977 disc, which makes plain his debt to Jorge Ben’s samba-soul: “Um Abraço no Bengil” both namechecks Ben and quotes from “Mas Que Nada.” The music isn’t original, but it’s fantastic.
Janet Bean of the Horse’s Ha, Eleventh Dream Day, and Freakwater
Lonnie Holley, Just Before Music Lonnie Holley‘s music makes me feel like the little girl in the rowboat from the opening scenes of the magnificent film The Night of the Hunter. She and her brother drift slowly downstream, utterly alone in the world, mesmerized by fear and wonder at what they may find on the high banks of the river that enclose them.
Mike Auldridge, Dobro I had no idea when I bought this album how much I’d love it. The initial spark that led me to it was a desire to learn about the Dobro players who other Dobro players were listening to, and Mike Auldridge from the Seldom Scene came highly rated. When he put out this solo record in 1972, he seems to have been an anachronism—his versions of “Killing Me Softly” and “Greensleeves” were way outside the bluegrass canon—but his playing is beautifully lyrical and filled with humor.
