www.myspace.com/donalfoxprojects
Donal Fox
Composer - Pianist
DONAL FOX: GONE CITY
New World Records (80515-2)
Review by Lou Kannenstine
This collection of nine performances by Donal Fox, all from the early 1990s, will be pure hell for those listeners who must pigeonhole their recording artists. As a performer, composer, and improviser, this pianist defies any easy attempt at categorization. Having grown up in a Boston household in which classical music and contemporary jazz were ever-present, and strongly and equally valued, Fox, now in mid-career, has clearly transcended the often troublesome dichotomy that has persisted for many since the Third Stream era. Taking an overview of the pieces comprising Gone City, one could in fact wonder if he's even aware of it at all.
For some years Fox was a familiar and noteworthy figure on the Boston chamber music scene. With a background that included piano studies at New England Conservatory, and composition and orchestration studies with T.J. Anderson (the author of this album's booklet notes), Avram David, and Gunther Schuller, Fox became closely associated with the Boston chamber organizations Videmus, Boston Musica Viva, and others in the 1980s. In this decade, he has appeared more and more in jazz contexts, largely through a series of striking duo performances with the likes of Oliver Lake, Billy Pierce, poet Quincy Troupe, John Stubblefield, and David Murray. Recordings with Lake (Boston Duets on Music & Arts) and Murray (Ugly Beauty, Evidence) are available, and now GONE CITY fills in several gaps in the emerging portrait of a major musician.
The structural framework of GONE CITY is provided by three duo performances, strategically placed at beginning, middle, and end, with Quincy Troupe reading -- more than reading, rather living -- his powerful vernacular poems of African-American experience. These are not only enhanced by Fox's keyboard and string embroidery, but in effect turned into songs. The poignant piece, "The Old People Speak of Death," is smack in the center of this album of celebration and lamentation. Here, as through out, Fox is never merely an accompanist, though he instinctively knows when to take a subordinate role. Fox is an astoundingly swift and alert collaborator, and his running pianistic commentaries reinforce Troupe's impassioned delivery of his works.. Playing the strings as well as keys, he sometimes runs ahead of the poet, anticipating particular dramatic instants in sharply shifting patterns.
These performances point the way into Fox's complex tonal and textural explorations with Eric Thomas on clarinet: "Gone City," the concert version of a ballet, and "Ballade For Clarinet and Piano." With Thomas, Fox moves toward the classical end of the spectrum, while the subsequent "Jazz Sets With T.T." finds him engaging in a vibrant improvisational tangle with Oliver Lake on alto. The contrast between these pieces should be jarring, but it is not.
Perhaps the most astonishing moments of GONE CITY however, are the three minutes and forty-one seconds of "T-Cell Countdown" a stark, overpowering evocation of the anguish of AIDS, with John Lockwood's bass and Fox's keyboard behind William Brown's almost unbearably relentless wordless vocal -- and this forcefully echoed by Thomas' clarinet in the "Scherzo Macabre" movement of "Gone City." Only in the last moment of "Countdown" is there a letting up of intensity. Is this a gesture of acceptance, or a giving up the ghost? The ambiguity is haunting.
It is surprising that such a well annotated and informative booklet neglects to give the listener any clue as to the content of the ballet upon which the title composition is based. But despite this small reservation, GONE CITY is highly recommended, both of its dramatic diversity and scope, and for Fox's virtuoso performances.. If you haven't encountered Donal Fox before, you can't do better than to make his acquaintance here.
Lou Kannenstine
The Green Mountain Jazz Messenger
May/June 1999