This is a fantastic surprise. Every year, it seems a
piano recital of unusual material curated by the performer drifts
into my shortlist for Recording of the Year, and Jocelyn Swigger’s
Rhythms & Blues is no doubt the 2011 contender. Her
lineup is a great deal of fun, and essential for lovers of contemporary
piano music too: we range from short explorations of American
folk rhythm by the great Samuel Barber to a series of living
composers - Amy Rubin, Martin Scherzinger, John Adams, William
Bolcom and four improvisations by Swigger herself.
The program’s theme, if it has one, is America as musical
melting pot; we have here much that is jazzy and much that is
altogether new. Amy Rubin’s American Progressions
brings together blues tunes, agbadza drumming patterns
from Ghana (in the stunning “Grace” movement), and
a page in the last movement notated only with chord progressions
and demanding the pianist improvise. South African Martin Scherzinger,
now resident in New York, contributes a four-movement sonata,
When One Has the Feet of Wind, in a single ten-minute
arc, impressively built, with moments (like around 3:15) which
do seem to take flight. Just as the sonata reaches perilously
“easy-listening” territory near the end, it begins
to speak a fascinating new language. The first three movements
use only white keys; the finale introduces black keys and thrillingly
colorful dissonances.
Book-ending these works are two by more established composers:
Samuel Barber’s wartime Excursions, and John Adams’
China Gates. Barber explains his work as excursions “into
regional American idioms,” and we do indeed get boogie
and blues filtered through the sophisticated harmonies of Barber’s
classical language. Although the score is carefully notated
to mimic improvisation, you would never know it; Swigger excels
here in making the carefully planned phrasing really work,
really sound not like fake improv but the real thing. In China
Gates, Adams’ repeated cells of material take on a
wonderfully mystical quality; it’s surely one of the most
instantly attractive of minimalist works, and Swigger projects
it beautifully.
There are some good old-fashioned jazz numbers, too. William
Bolcom contributes four rags, a suite called The Garden of
Eden. “Old Adam” is a particularly glorious
example of the ragtime art. “The Serpent’s Kiss”
is indeed a devilish number, and among its array of ideas (one
senses the serpent using every last trick in its book to seduce
the hapless couple) are calls for finger-clacking, tongue-clicking,
and whistling. Jocelyn Swigger is, I have to say, a tongue-clicking
virtuoso. Jelly Roll Morton’s “Finger Buster”
is an even more devilish jazz number - for the pianists getting
their fingers busted, anyway.
The collection ends with its most daring conclusion of all:
four tracks of Swigger herself improvising at the end of the
recording sessions. The first improvisation gets off to an unpromising
start, with a series of repeated notes that smack of trying
to decide what to do next, but it takes off as a sort of upside-down
rag: the left hand is there, in the grand old tradition we’ve
heard earlier, but the right hand won’t go down without
a fight, and plays dissonant, angular lines. A similar story
recurs in the movement which sounds most ‘finished’:
“Ragged,” the title presumably meant halfway between
tired and done playing rags.
There’s really very little competition for this; the Bolcom
rags have occasionally been recorded elsewhere, Adams’
China Gates has popped up on a few recital discs - though
not as much as one might expect for such an appealing work -
and the Barber has been recorded several times though the Naxos
performance is more soft-focus than this. But Jocelyn Swigger’s
lineup here meshes extremely well, and the pieces she has chosen
both go naturally together and make a very satisfying program.
She digs into the rags with relish - though, wisely, not too
much relish; Scott Joplin warned that the only way to play a
rag poorly was to play it fast. She projects the blues rhythms
very well, and feels at home in the more abstract visions of
Scherzinger and Adams, where the repetition never wears. The
Jelly Roll “Finger Buster” does sound rather finger-busting;
Jelly Roll himself dispatches it with jaw-dropping ease, but
then, as Swigger herself admits in the booklet, the composer
“had much larger hands than mine.” There’s
also a YouTube clip of Dick Hyman absolutely demolishing the
piece on a 1986 BBC appearance. But I can’t imagine better
advocates for works like Scherzinger’s, and Amy Rubin’s
own recording of her piano music is now very hard to find.
Jocelyn Swigger’s booklet essay is superb and does a terrific
job explaining her musical choices; the engineering is mostly
very good - nothing spectacular - but I was a little disconcerted
by how closely-miked the tongue-clicking in “The Serpent’s
Kiss” seemed to be. It’s a quirk well worth living
with, because this back-roads tour of the lovely, unexplored
bits of American classical and folk music is a one-of-a-kind
journey. Rhythms & Blues is my most pleasant surprise
of the year so far.
Brian Reinhart
Jocelyn Swigger (piano) 
