Search - Ken Valitsky, David Ott, Benjamin Boone :: Commissions, Vol 1

Depending on your point of view, four saxophones playing in a chamber-music setting may seem as ill-fated as four bulls in a china shop. The instrument's predilection for strong-willed individuality, oddly enough, is what makes the quartet format, especially in the hands of the NCS4, so powerful. Every player seems capable at any moment of venturing into the foreground--this in contrast with the strict social hierarchy of the string quartet. Home Grown collects original commissions that coordinate the various saxophones in a wide range of settings. Composers David Ott and Thomas Massella offer pastorals that benefit from the instrument's earthy associations. Ken Valitsky compacts what he calls sax clichés (guttural blurts, taut riffs, genre phrases) into a fun spree. Saturday Night Live's house band has long perpetrated a kind of black-tie blues, so it's no surprise that Lenny Pickett, an SNL music director, provides some of the album's most soulful work. Like Ott's pastiche, Pickett's design is compositionally rudimentary, at least relative to the others' aspirations. But it's also the one that makes you want to set your CD player on repeat. This is highly recommended music; listeners will delight in the revelatory airspace created when four horns collide. --Marc Weidenbaum