www.myspace.com/donalfoxprojects
Donal Fox
Composer - Pianist
Music Samples and Video Clips:
Music Samples |
Video Clips on Youtube.com |
Look and Listen to Donal Fox
A performance/interview on Public Radio International – Open Source -- hosted by Christopher Lydon, features Donal Fox performing live in the studio, solo piano and with his trio. Mr. Fox talks about and demonstrates his Monk and Bach Project and much, much more, including an impromptu tribute to his mentor Gunther Schuller on the occasion of his 80th birthday year. Donal performs many musical examples demonstrating his improvisational process from J.S. Bach to Robert Schumann and Monk to Fox and back again. The show closes with Fox's swinging work – "Scarlatti Jazz Suite" – inspired by the Italian baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti. Listen here, or here for streaming audio.
"The pianist Donal Fox is a bridge-builder between Johann
Sebastian Bach and Thelonious Monk. He plays a sort of music without frontiers
– open source music, in a sense – with a gift for improvisation
that used to be an essential trick in all forms and styles of music, including
European classical music. It was called "extemporization" and all the great
masters – Beethoven, Mozart, Handel and Bach – wrote open spaces
into their scores for spur-of-the-moment musical statements by other performers.
The boy wonder of the 19th Century piano, Franz Liszt, age 12, would ask anyone
in the audience to provide a theme on which he'd perform an "extemporary
fantasy" as long as he felt like it. It is mainly jazz that has kept
improvisational skills alive. And now it's Donal Fox and a rare few others who
have repositioned that jazz feeling of freedom on the firm old foundations of
classical composition, and made them swing."
-- Christopher Lydon, Open Source, November 30, 2005
"Donal Fox, a remarkable pianist who has positioned himself on the
cutting edge of jazz by incorporating classical techniques and melodies. The
pinnacle of his achievement is found in his blending of Monk and Bach, in his
vivid reimaginings of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and in such dazzling original
works as 'Scarlatti Jazz Suite' and 'Italian Concerto Blues.' Donal is one of a
small handful of musicians who embody the promise of jazz's future."
-- Gary Giddins, jazz journalist and author
Look and Listen to Donal Fox
A
performance/interview on NPR Radio -- The
Connection -- hosted by BBC corespondent Judy Swallow, features Donal Fox
performing live in the studio and much more, including an impromptu response to
a 1957 Bud Powell recording played on the air. Listen
here.
Composer/pianist
DONAL FOX has an extraordinary musical reach -- Latin vamps, New Orleans
second-line marches, free-jazz explosions, Monk taken to the out-there edges of
Schoenberg and Webern, a lyric take on Bach or Chopin or jazz trio. He's got
the all-over power of McCoy Tyner and the superb keyboard marksmanship of
Ellington and Horowitz. (all this when he isn't writing pieces for piano and
orchestra.) Fox -- whose international reputation includes a Guggenheim
Fellowship and composer-residence gigs with the St. Louis Symphony -- issues
another installment to his Monk and Bach Series at the 2001 Regattabar Jazz
Festival, with drummer Yoron Israel
and bassist John
Lockwood.
--Jon Garelick,
Boston Phoenix March 16, 2001