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Lifelines 

Musicians: Deanna Relyea – voice, Piotr Michalowski – sopranino saxophone/bass clarinet with
 EDGE: Taylor Ho Bynum – cornet/flugelhorn, Andrew Drury – drum set, Ken Filiano – string bass, Jason Kao Hwang – violin 
Music by Jason Kao Hwang   
Poetry: Lester Afflick, Patricia Spears Jones and Davida Singer 

Words of Our Own 
Musicians: Thomas Buckner – voice, Joe McPhee – tenor saxophone/pocket trumpet,
 William Parker – string bass, Sang Won Park - kayagum/ajeng/voice, Jason Kao Hwang – viola 
Music by Jason Kao Hwang  
Poetry: Lester Afflick, Fay Chiang, Steve Dalachinsky, Patricia Spears Jones, Yuko Otomo 
 
BIOS
Jason Kao Hwang (composer/violin/viola) has created works ranging from jazz, “new” and world music. Recently he released the CD VOICE and  Burning Bridge, his octet of Chinese and Western instruments commissioned by Chamber Music America, performed at the Magic Triangle (Mass.) and the International Festival Musique Actuelle (Canada). Also, his symphony The Challenge: Tiananmen Square, commissioned by the Multicultural Music Group premiered at Lehman College In 2014 Zizal, his duo CD with Ayman Fanous, was voted into the second round of the Grammy Awards. In 2012, National Public Radio selected Burning Bridge as one of the year’s Top CDS and the Downbeat Critics’ Poll voted him “Rising Star for Violin.” In 2011 and 2012 the critics’ poll of El Intruso voted him #1 for Violin/Viola. He also released Symphony of Souls (Mulatta), performed by his string orchestra Spontaneous River, and Crossroads Unseen, the third CD of his quartet EDGE. In 2010, the NYC Jazz Record selected Commitment, The Complete Recordings, 1981-1983, from a collective quartet that was Mr. Hwang’s first band, as one of the “Reissued Recordings of the Year.” As violinist, Mr. Hwang has worked with Will Connell, Jr., Butch Morris, Pauline Oliveros, William Parker, Anthony Braxton, Yoshiko Chuma, and many others.

For more than 40 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of new music composers including Robert Ashley,  Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff and many others. He has made appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Herbst Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ostrava Days Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Buckner is featured on over 40 recordings, including 6 of his own solo albums. His most recent solo recording  “New Music for Baritone & Chamber Ensemble” includes works by Annea Lockwood,  Tania Leon, and Petr Kotik. He also appears in the newly released CD/DVD “Kirili et le Nymphéas (Hommage à Monet)”. This recording documents the latest in his ongoing series of collaborations between the sculptor Alain Kirili and improvising musicians and dancers. For the past twenty years, Buckner has co-produced the Interpretations series in New York City. He also created the Mutable Music record label to produce new recordings and reissue some important historic recordings, previously unavailable in CD format. 
  
Mezzo soprano Deanna Relyea has an impressive and varied career as a performer.  From a family of singers (among them her brother Canadian bass baritone Gary Relyea and his son John Relyea --Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala), Ms. Relyea has appeared on concert series and festivals throughout Canada and the USA where she has performed the major oratorio and symphonic works including Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 and the Verdi Requiem, and has appeared in a variety of concert settings including a collaboration with celebrated pianist Martin Katz (Hugo Wolf Liederabend), and a performance of the songs by today’s acclaimed opera composers Ricki Ian Gordon and William Bolcom with the composers at the piano. Her interest in new music has generated several compositions written especially for her, from a cabaret style to mixed Sprechstimme and improvisational work.  Ms. Relyea is Founder/Artistic Director of the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  Now in its 31st season, she has presided over this award-winning arts organization as it has become widely recognized for its innovative presentations of classical, jazz and cabaret as well as world, avant garde (annual avant jazz festival Edgefest) and new music. 


READ ALL REVIEWS

This album is a landmark in vibrant, truly synthetic conjunctions of words and musical expressions, of the state-of-the-art in the avant today, with the world, history and time conjoined in two unified suites of great power and merit. It is a blockbuster and a tribute to the imaginative thrust of Jason Kao Hwang and his collaborative associates.  - Grego Applegate Edwards, gapplegatemusicreview, Jan. 27, 2016  Read Full Review

The performing challenges are immense, not only in the extreme virtuosity of the music, but also in having to move from the jagged to the lyrical in the blink of an eye. Jason Kao Hwang yields nothing to previous performers of repertoire such as this in penetrating the depth and breadth of emotion that the poetry conveys, and it helps that this is a fabulous recording, allowing the wide range of tone, colour and dynamics to be heard to full effect.  Raul da Gama, World Music Report  Read Full Review

VOICE, Hwang's recent release on Innova (and reviewed here), offers a striking example of his audacious artistic sensibility, and it was this striking fusion of poetry and improvised instrumental accompaniment that prompted me to contact Hwang for the following exchange. - Ron Schepper, Textura.com, Feb. 2016  Read Full Interview

Textura.com, ALBUM OF THE MONTH, February, 2016   Read online​

As a project, VOICE constitutes a refreshingly bold move on Hwang's part. It would have been easy for him to have recorded a handful of instrumentals with the musicians involved, and such a project might have been an easier sell, too. But in taking on a voice-based project, he's accomplished something impressive, not to mention something more memorable for being so rarely attempted. - Ron Schepper, Textura.com, Feb., 2016  Read Full Review

It is a music full of emotions, which transcend those that are the traditional techniques... There is so much energy and passion to spread the album with solos of all participants... It requires careful listening to these sounds unusual, the energy that emerges from the strings of the leader and his sidemen is something unusual but fascinating.​  - Vittorio Lo Conte, musiczoom.it (google translation)   Read Full Review

Relyea shows her wide range of expression in particular on “Days of Awe” (by Patricia Jones) with a steady mix of spoken and sung lines in various emotional tones. Michalowski’s sopranino sax is also very apt on this piece. The two poems by Lester Afflick have their textual rhythms accentuated by Filiano’s sturdy bass lines and Drury’s sharp drum licks. “I Raise Myself” has a beautiful intro on bass and “Someone” has some great growl cornet from Bynum and soulful violin from Hwang. But as I have already indicated, my strongest impression from this record date is how well it works as a whole.  Lars Bjorn, SEMJA, March, 2016 Read Full Review

...interpreted by strong vocalizing full of street speech, slam-techniques, synthetic link with the world, history and circulating fluidized time contemplated in excellently designed avant-garde art-jazz. Very inspired work for demanding listeners with skilful curves shows how each process of blending pure poetry can be configured in a truly imaginative analog implementation. terapijanet.net (Croatian translation)  Read Full Review
 

Best of 2015:  Two sequences of poems by a variety of poets, with music composed by violinist Hwang with some room for improvisation, each set with a different ensemble.  “Lifelines” has mezzo Deanna Reyea, new to me, a fascinating voice and delivery, sort of improvised, sort of sprechtstimme.  The band includes Ken Filiano on bass, Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet and flugelhorn, and Andrew Drury on drums.  “Words of Our Own” features baritone Thomas Buckner, with Joe McPhee on tenor sax and pocket trumpet, William Parker on bass, Sang Won Park on kayagum and ajeng, and Hwang on viola.  Innova 938.    - Steve Koenig, Acoustic Leviation,  Read Online Review 

Best of 2015, Craig Nixon, Acoustic Levitation   Read Online Review

***** Five Stars:  This is a multifaceted experience – one that extends the range of music and feeling and poetry and life.  
- Grady Harp, January 16 Read Full Review

The brilliant violinist, virtuoso violinist and composer Jason Kao Hwang occupies a privileged place at the forefront of jazz and creative music of our time... Voice launch will take place in January 2016 and its edition will be in charge of Innova Recordings label.
 - Sergio Piccirilli, El Instruso (Google translation) Read Full Preview
 

LINER NOTES

Each of the poems I chose had a personal resonance. They felt like my voice speaking words of my own to express essences that I could not bring to consciousness before. I also heard music in them. All the poems have an inherent and unique flow of rhythms, textures and colors that would challenge and engage music. Aware of this dynamic, I composed sonic spaces that allowed each poem to fully resonate. These spaces created were always infused by improvisations, orchestrated for the unique voice of each musician & vocalist, and developed in direct correspondence with the poems’ evolution. Throughout each poem’s sonic architecture Deanna Relyea and Thomas Buckner were fully empowered to improvise so that the poems would truly become their words, which they chose to sing or speak. In this recording, each word is a sound and each sound is a poem. I am grateful for these indivisible vibrations that offered me lifelines to grow.  Jason Kao Hwang 

There are voices that speak our thoughts, emotions and needs. They vibrate the air to deliver the contents. We speak and talk. We hear and listen. And there are other kinds of voices that are alive but mostly unheard. Some loud and intense, some soft, almost mute, all saying something that needs to be heard. Although heard by no one yet, they are definitely and clearly there. A poet gives them actual voices using their instrument: words. Poems come alive, when written, to be heard by all, including poets themselves. Every poem speaks a different story, creates a different landscape and brings in a different idea since everybody is unique. 
  
And then, there are musicians and vocalists. They do a similar thing to what poets do. They hear unheard music, alive and well, but not yet shared with anyone. They make music to cause the unheard music to come alive using their  voices and instruments, alone and collectively. The music they create gives out vibrations to the air by dispersing the actual particles of sounds in it. This way, they deliver the story, the landscape and the idea once unheard to us as a living  breath. 
  
This VOICE project is a very personal one in the most profound sense. It is a “first person” experience not just for Jason, but for everyone involved. That is why I prefer to call all the participating artists by their first names here. Jason heard his own voice that he could not express in words in the poems created by Davida, Patricia, Fay, Lester, Steve and myself. When something “personal” goes deep enough to a certain degree, it reaches a tipping point where the “personal” changes itself into the “universal”.  He heard the voice and the music in these poems. So, he composed a sonic space inspired by his personal experience and invited his musician friends, vocalists, Deanna and Tom, instrumentalists, Joe, William, Sang, Piotr, Taylor, Andrew and Ken to share his experience. And this was the last recording his EDGE quartet (Jason, Taylor, Andrew & Ken) did before going on hiatus. How amazingly beautiful it is to see our personal voices once unheard being shared as universal voices with others in such an organic and empathetic way despite different backgrounds and personal histories! 
  
VOICE has its own unique history. First created and premiered as “Words of Our Own” for Larry Ochs’s Words and Music series at the Stone NYC in March 2010, it was later performed again at A Gathering of Tribes in April 2010 and for the Interpretations series at Roulette in January 2012. “Lifelines” came into life soon after inspired by the Roulette performance. Commissioned by Edgefest, it premiered there in November 2012 and again was performed at the Stone in December that same year. “Words of Our Own” was recorded in 2012 and “Lifelines” in 2014. VOICE is the resulting creative development of these projects.  
  
VOICE is also a community project. It grew out of the shared garden called New York City. Like a tree or a wild flower, it grew out of our commitments to our creative lives.  As for the poets and musicians involved here, we’ve all known each other one way or the other over the years through joys, struggles and a shared spirit to make the world a better place. Some of us met at various creative spaces such as Basement Workshop and A Gathering of Tribes, crossing the borders of genres and cultural differences. We all are extremely happy to have our beloved friend, Lester Afflick, who passed away much too young, as an integral part of this project. The poems included here are from his book of poetry: “I Dream about You Baby” edited by Marci Goodman and published by Steve Cannon’s Fly By Night Press posthumously with the support of his close friends. 
  
Now, the voices, once unheard and impossible to reach, are here with us, welcoming us all to listen to them with open arms. Let us listen to them from every corner of our streets, memories and dreams. Here VOICE speaks to us in the most humble, personal and genuine timbres and tones, as we walk together or alone in this landscape called LIFE. -  Yuko Otomo