Bruce Hornsby has long been fascinated with old-time American roots forms – hymns, blues, country, bluegrass, old folk, shaped-note religious songs and the like. His Vanguard Records two-disc set, Bruce Hornsby – Solo Concerts, – his first for the label will be available August 25th and allows him to explore that fusion of styles, along with classical music, jazz and pop. The album’s 21 tracks are culled from solo concerts performed by Hornsby in the U.S. over 2012 and 2013, bringing together disparate “information” from musical languages often thought to be opposed: Americana roots music, folk-pop, film scores and modern classical, what Hornsby calls an “unholy alliance.”
Solo Concerts offers an opportunity for Hornsby to show off his chops on piano in a variety of settings. There are solo renditions of his radio hits, songs like “Mandolin Rain” and “The Valley Road” as well as forays into the kind of old-timey music he performed at the start of his career – playing accordion in a band that featured fiddles, banjos and dulcimers. Hornsby also explores modern classical music with the dissonance and expressive chromatics of 20th century 12-tone experimental composers like Austrians Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, as well as American modernists like Elliot Carter, the Hungarian György Ligeti or the French mystic Olivier Messiaen.
Hornsby champions on this set what he calls “two-handed independence,” a phrase to describe a piano performance where one hand doesn’t just accompany a melody played by the other, but rather, as in boogie-woogie, simultaneously achieves a parallel compositional and musical life and vitality of its own.
The album starts with “Song E (Hymn in E-Flat),” from a Spike Lee score Hornsby composed several years ago, then segues into “Preacher in the Ring,” a boogie tune, “an old pattern I was shown by a longtime cohort, so I wrote the song based on that pattern, which illustrates that two-handed independence.”
“I think I’ve found a middle ground,” Hornsby says, “where you’re reaching and broadening your language but still connecting with someone perhaps used to hearing — for an entire lifetime — only those seven white notes and those simple chords.”
Bruce Hornsby will embark on a 16 city tour with Pat Metheny which begins July 16th and runs through August 8th. On July 25th, He will be performing with Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder at the RockyGrass Festival in Lyons, Colorado followed by a solo tour in support of Solo Concerts. Tour dates listed below with more to be added soon. For updates visit: www.brucehornsby.com.
2014 Tour dates:
*with Pat Metheny Unity Group
** Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby with Kentucky Thunder
***solo performances
July 16 Saratoga, CA – Mountain Winery*
July 17 Santa Rosa, CA – Wells Fargo Center for the Arts*
July 18 Los Angeles, CA – Greek Theater*
July 19 Temecula, CA – Thornton Winery*
July 21 Salt Lake City, UT – Red Butte Garden*
July 22 Eagle, ID – Eagle Park Pavilion*
July 24 Jackson, WY – Center for the Arts*
July 25 Lyons, CO – RockyGrass Festival**
July 26 Kansas City, MO – CrossroadsKC*
July 29 Milwaukee, WI – Potawatomi Casino*
July 30 Grand Rapids, MI – Meijer Gardens*
August 1 Chautauqua, NY – Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater*
August 2 Katonah, NY – Caramor Center for Music and the Arts*
August 3 Nantucket, MA – Nantucket Music Festival***
August 6 Vienna, VA – Wolf Trap*
August 7 Kennett Square, PA – Longwood Gardens*
August 8 Newark, NJ – NJPAC – Prudential Hall*
August 13 Steamboat Springs, CO – Strings Music Pavilion***
September 20 Spartanburg, SC – Zimmerli Amphitheatre At Barnet Park***
September 23 Lebanon, NH – Lebanon Opera House***
September 24 Boston, MA – The Wilbur Theatre***
September 26 New York, NY – Rose Theater***
September 27 Princeton, NJ – McCarter Theatre Center***
2 Responses
Bu adam iyi çalıyor hacılar.
I LIKE BRUCE HE MUST COME TO SOUTH AFRICA