Release Information. From the artists website: When September 11, took place life came to a standstill. The shock and reality of what happened that day drained me of my spirit. I couldn't stop wondering why I landed on this planet. I figured there must have been a ticketing mistake in heaven that day. Obviously I was not supposed to end up here! I wondered, what could I possibly do at a time like this.
Gradually, I began to feel like my musical self again. The idea for a solo concert was born. If I could transport a room full of people with my music, while raising money for the American Red Cross, then perhaps my visit to this planet would make sense! I spoke to my wife Danielle about it. She realized that she could produce this show quickly. Through my Internet community, the American Red Cross and good friends, we managed to spread the word fast. Originally a slow ballad, Rudess adds embellishment and colors the song beautifully.
Another Day starts with of an eclectic and delightful piano improvisation and continues with solid playing with Rudess diverse arrangements. The second original piece on the album, The Grand Escapement, is a difficult track to play with its various counterpoints. Rudess proves his supreme dexterity as a pianist and you can only imagine how such a fascinating song would sound if we ever had the opportunity to hear Dre am Theater play it all together. Rudess performs all of the orchestra parts on his piano in The Spirit Carries On, one of the most exciting songs in this album.
Jordan Rudess proves that the piano is the ultimate musical instrument for expressing feel and emotions, and does it in the best way. To sum up, this album comes at a great time, just moments before the release of the new Dream Theater album.
It combines melodic songs, offers us up the best keyboard player the band ever had and proves that his creative ideas are infinite.
Guthrie Govan provides a guitar solo during the instrumental break. When the rhythm kicks in, it turns into a keyboard extravaganza with plenty of progressive elements. This is like "Liquid Tension Experiment" with keyboards being the main element, a complex and ever changing instrumental. The vocals aren't very convincing for the type of song that it is. There is also a rolling piano solo at the end. It is quite straightforward with an Alan Parsons Project feel.
The jazz piano sound during the first instrumental break is great and more intensity later brings in a synth-guitar duet in a call and response style before the lyrics come back. Most of the progressiveness of this album happens in the 2 part, title track suites. It is done very well except for the part that kind of lags in the middle of the 2nd part. The stronger tracks are excellent while the more standard tracks are a bit boring. It all evens out to a good 3 star album, great music, but not essential.
Many of the pieces on this recording are tremendous. With today's technology, great artists like Jordan Rudess are able to write and record orchestral music without the need to engage an orchestra. Whether this is good or not is a worthwhile debate. However pieces like Explorations may well not exist were it not for our thirst for new technology. The cost of hiring and recording symphony orchestra may have been an insurmountable obstacle for this release.
Written in what I term the neo- romantic style, Explorations runs close to the traditional piano concerto format. It contains many of the elements made famous by composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, and Prokofief.
Rudess plays with an unrivaled technical ease. His orchestrations are rich and invigorating. It displays the drive, passion and inventiveness of the solo piano works of such progressive giants as Keith Emerson and Patrck Moraz, with ever shifting time signatures and blazing virtuosity.
Over the Edge brings the same sensibility to his digital orchestra, shifting suddenly from one idea to another with a carelessness with feels almost improvisational. On the down side I felt Screaming Head merely exposed the limitations of the wonderful tools used to make the record by making a direct comparison to the original rock recording of the same piece, It sounds to me like a poor imitation. Rudess from other artists the way the other works do.
His harmonies are more traditional and not colorful enough for my taste. Lastly, In a few brief sections, a traditional drum set was used or a digital facsimile thereof.
It seemed out of place in this traditional classical format and I found it distracting. All in all, Explorations is a testament to artistic excellence and great gift.
And I am sure I will listen to it as long as my ears hear. Thank you Jordan Rudess! Review by apps79 Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator. It's not an excess to say that the tracks presented here are well adapted to the style of the invited guitarists and Ruddess' duo with each of them makes a stylistical entry of his own.
Guitarist Greg Howe is featured in a couple of pieces, which still retain the high quality of musicianship, but both are more symphonic with evident Classical interludes and a more pompous sound akin to 70's Prog Rock monsters, albeit with a modern touch.
Great music again, fronted by more melodious themes but also nice isolated performances. With Steve Morse on his side Ruddess has the chance to offer more playful themes, his alternation on keyboard excess along with Morse's more rockin' guitar vibes offer a less heavy or guitar-colored music, Morse of course needs only a couple of minutes to shine on his solos, but Ruddess is the main hero on these cuts with a manifest of keyboard tricks and moves with a jazzy and Classical taste.
The closing piece ''Tear before the rain'' is a different fruit, a soft piano-driven AOR ballad with Winger on vocals and Ruddess on piano, creating a melancholic and emotional farewell. Love it at moments, this comes definitely strongly recommended Review by Neu! The good news here is the material itself. Honestly, who among us wouldn't leap at the chance to hear this all-star roster rummaging through the back catalogues of Genesis, Yes, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and ELP?
That instant familiarity is the ace up the album's sleeve: no effort is required to get into the music, especially when so little apparent effort went into the actual arrangements. And that's the not-so-good news. These new versions stick uncomfortably close to the originals, typically adding little interpretation beyond no surprise here a lot of virtuoso soloing.
Otherwise the structure of each selection is more or less intact, and too bad: a challenging song like "Sound Chaser" is crying out for an unexpected facelift. Jon Anderson's mournful ballad "Soon", performed here as part of an extended solo piano medley, is a model of ostentatious over- embellishment, leading directly into a flamboyant abbreviation of "Supper's Ready", located on a scale of keyboard tackiness somewhere between Rick Wakeman and Liberace, minus only the candelabra.
And the extended solo guitar spot during "Free Hand" only shows how resistant the music of Gentle Giant is to this kind of adaptation. It's all fun stuff to be sure, and totally self-indulgent in a not altogether bad way: these guys have serious chops, and aren't ashamed to show them off.
But it's too bad even a small crumb of subtlety wasn't included in their instrumental menu. With a little more nuance and a lot less grandstanding, Rudess and company might have touched real magic. Still: it would be hard for anyone who grew up with this music not to respond to the dynamic production, and all the performance machismo.
At its worst the album presents little more than a clinical display of cold virtuosity. But at its best it's an affectionate, often forthright stroll down memory lane. Copyright Prog Archives, All rights reserved. Please consider supporting us by giving monthly PayPal donations and help keep PA fast-loading and ad-free forever. It is a bombastic album full of various keyboard sounds, with many odd-time signatures and Jordan provides also his vocals to a couple of songs, being backed by a female vocalist.
This album helped him being recognized as Best New Talent by the readers of the Keyboard magazine. At the same time, Jordan used to play with Annie Haslam from Renaissance and The Dixie Dregs, who reunited after 12 years for one last studio album 'Full circle' in Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater called him to join an instrumental project involving the legendary bassist Tony Levin and his bandmate John Petrucci on the guitar.
He released with them their highly acclaimed album 'Metropolis part II : scenes from a memory', then the controversed 'Six degrees of inner turbulence', the metal-driven 'train of thought' and the more symphonic 'Octavarium'. In the course of his collaboration with Dream Theater, Jordan released some solo albums on the Magna Carta label. This is a record featuring only him on keyboards.
In a nutshell, Jordan Rudess is a progressive keyboardist who entered the hall of fame progressive artists such as patrick Moraz, Rick Wakeman and keith Emerson all playing with him on a Magna Carta tribute to the Classic composers thank In a nutshell, Jordan Rudess is a progressive keyboardist who entered the hall of fame progressive artists such as patrick Moraz, Rick Wakeman and keith Emerson all playing with him on a Magna Carta tribute to the Classic composers thanks to a wide pallet of keyboard sounds and a virtuosity rarely reached in the rock realm.
Richard Barbieri vs.
0コメント