Annette Peacock may still be best known for the pieces she composed for Paul Bley in the 1960s and early '70s. They were spare, elusive ballads that lent themselves perfectly to multiple harmonizations and free improvisati... more »on. Since then, she's had an episodic career, at one point recording with Bill Bruford. But she's frequently been out of the spotlight. She sings and plays piano on 15 of her songs here, accompanied by the Cikada String Quartet of Norway. Acrobat's Heart may be an ideal description of what Peacock does, from writing phrases like "the din of an opening heart" to playing with harmonic gravity on "Weightless." Her songs are always close to the core of an emotion--whether loss, rapture, betrayal, or hope--that's recaptured and concentrated in reverie until it clarifies or blooms into something else. Within these subdued songs, she is able to construct sometimes startling combinations and leaps--emotional, melodic, or verbal, or all three at once. Her voice is almost without vibrato, a pared-down instrument that etches her striking melodies with telling accuracy. Her string writing here, too, is an effective complement to the songs, the instruments seeming to breathe as one with her voice and piano. --Stuart Broomer« less
Annette Peacock may still be best known for the pieces she composed for Paul Bley in the 1960s and early '70s. They were spare, elusive ballads that lent themselves perfectly to multiple harmonizations and free improvisation. Since then, she's had an episodic career, at one point recording with Bill Bruford. But she's frequently been out of the spotlight. She sings and plays piano on 15 of her songs here, accompanied by the Cikada String Quartet of Norway. Acrobat's Heart may be an ideal description of what Peacock does, from writing phrases like "the din of an opening heart" to playing with harmonic gravity on "Weightless." Her songs are always close to the core of an emotion--whether loss, rapture, betrayal, or hope--that's recaptured and concentrated in reverie until it clarifies or blooms into something else. Within these subdued songs, she is able to construct sometimes startling combinations and leaps--emotional, melodic, or verbal, or all three at once. Her voice is almost without vibrato, a pared-down instrument that etches her striking melodies with telling accuracy. Her string writing here, too, is an effective complement to the songs, the instruments seeming to breathe as one with her voice and piano. --Stuart Broomer
CD Reviews
Angular, edgy, beautiful, and conversational
Tribal Knowledge | Seattle, WA USA | 09/27/2000
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This album is similar in tone and content to her album "Skyskating" from the early eighties. She has forsaken the electronics of her work up to this point, and replaced them with a string quartet, which serves, along with her piano and beautiful and edgy volcals, the angular, stark, and conversational melodies admirably. Her lyrics deal with the ambiguities of emotional life with a strange (and great) tension between romantic ambiguity, romantic abandon, and analytical distance. This song cycle is hard to place in a specific genre, and all the stronger for it"
New Ears
Jeffrey T. Bitzer | York, PA USA | 12/31/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I am a musician. I play alot and when not playing music I listen to the music of others. This CD forced me to re-think my concept of music. It forced me to grow. We tend to think of music as circular..going out and back to home...like a boomerang. Peacock's music goes out and out further and then off in another direction. It flies on its own. It is linear and tangential. It may never come home. Don't think about pitch; it's too confining. Think of Picasso. It is quite an accomplishment when an artist can cause us to re-think art with beauty, grace and the depth of emotion Peacock shares here. This is a landmark CD that unfortunately will be heard by too few."
She knows how to cast a spell or two
MurrayTheCat | upstate New York | 02/05/2003
(5 out of 5 stars)
"One reason I find much of the ECM catalog so alluring, is the atmosphere, that brooding headiness projected by so many of that label's artists. This one could win an award for its mood-inducing qualities. Singer-songwriter Annette Peacock's discography has been quite varied. Here, she gives us a ruminative, laidback and somewhat pensive mood, which doesn't let up for the entire 61 minutes. Her accompanying piano and the spare contribution by the string quartet yield a chamber-music feel, but her jazz-inflected vocals almost croon by comparison. It's a fairly arresting mix, actually. The songs are introspective, often pondering the hurt love can sometimes bring. But, while listening to this, I pay more attention to how she shapes the words, how they sound, rather than what she is singing about. Her lyrics are not terribly deep, but who cares, when the sound of the words is so soothing, her phrasing so gently contemplative. Her singing haunts me; her voice drips with melancholy. I also love that uncanny ability of hers to sing and talk concurrently.Annette hides her age very well: you would never guess by her cover photo that this gal is in her early 60s. Nor does she sound like it. She is a brilliant composer, as interesting an artist as you will find. Oh, that ECM would record her more! I treasure AN ACROBAT'S HEART. If you're an ECM fan, or if you enjoy the type of brooding magic I've described, you too will treasure this recording.Cheers,
Murray"
A beautiful suite of songs
Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 12/15/2004
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Much of Annette Peacock's back catalogue has scandalously never been given the CD treatment, including her ahead-of-it's-time masterpiece I'm The One from 1970, with its sublime version of Love Me Tender and synthesized vocals and electronics that ought to have been impossible at the time, so if you peer into the Annette Peacock section of your closest large emporium, this 2002 set on ECM is what you are most likely to unearth.
Annette Peacock, born in New York on 8 January 1942, was in her twenties when discovered by Timothy Leary, experimenting with psychedelia and avant garde jazz. She later eloped with Gary Peacock, bassist for Albert Ayler and later Paul Bley, and thus composed for the Paul Bley Trio, writing their entire 1967 album Ballads, before touring as the Annette and Paul Bley Synthesizer Show at the start of the 1970s.
She has also expanded on her rockier inclinations, making ground-breaking work for the Aura label which inspired the likes of patti Smith, and worked and recorded with Bill Bruford (and appeared with him on the Old Grey Whistle Test in the UK in 1978). She has also collaborated with the modern classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Her mother was a classical musician, and in her sixtieth year Annette chose to record this acoustic and electronics-free album of reflective bitter-sweet songs on which her distinctive singing and piano playing is sympathetically accompanied by the Cikada String Quartet, calling up memories of the chamber music she was brought up listening to. The result is a haunting, evocative, mature and beautiful suite of songs where lines of thought and music stop and are replaced with new themes and musical ideas that pick up the threads and form a complete whole. A wholly satisfying listen
"
Fresh and haunting music
Laurence Upton | 11/30/2000
(4 out of 5 stars)
"This caught my ear today in a music store and I listened to most all of it. And my ears can hear pitch fine, thank you. These are very hauntingly beautiful settings for voice with fragile accompaniment that strikes the right balance.Yes, it may drive people who like perfect pitch crazy, but all of the writing is first rate and it supports the lyrics and manner of the vocals. As one who usually has little tolerance for out of tune singers, on this one she gets away with it. How is this so? This is a case where the power of expression trumps archaic technical details such as intonation. Call it mind of matter, but sometimes it is the case that a musician can do everything wrong but it works because she had something to say. Strange, but true."
Track Listings (15) - Disc #1