Goshu Ondo Suite

Description

Eri Yamamoto transcends jazz, classical and folk forms to create a stunning new suite for jazz trio & 50-member choir.

Born and raised in Shiga Prefecture, Japan & based in NYC since 1995, the pianist and composer seamlessly melds biography, group improvisation and far-ranging compositional vocabularies in this momentous seven-part suite, featuring her longstanding trio in collaboration with New York-based Choral Chameleon, directed by its award-winning founder, Vince Peterson.

"A seed is a star, a star is a seed." Stevie Wonder's cosmically aphoristic title could also describe Goshu Ondo Suite. In recent years, the busy performer and composer has imagined a broadening of her timbral horizons. The decision to compose for choir was in part sprung from a desire to increase the sense of community in the process of creation – to increase the sheer number of humans involved in making & celebrating beautiful sound together.

Composing the Goshu Ondo Suite brought some of Yamamoto's happiest childhood memories flooding back, conjuring the summer Bon festivals where the source-inspiration folk song was sung to celebrate & welcome the ancestral spirits for a visit. To evoke that joyful sense of community, Yamamoto approached new music ensemble Choral Chameleon, whose founder and director, Vince Peterson, agreed immediately to participate. An intensive and committed rehearsal schedule commenced. This release presents the November 2018 world premiere performance of the work.

The suite commences with the folk-influenced melodic kernel from which the rest blooms. Choral Chameleon's heterophony, polyphony and unison singing beautifully weaves with Yamamoto's trio, often with gorgeous open vowels evocative of natural scenes in works ranging from Claude Debussy through Charles Ives to Duke Ellington. All is bolstered by gentle trio improvisation, Ambrosio and Takeuchi propelling the band forward and ultimately building to a life-affirming choral unison. The second and longest part, with its tempo, dynamic and metric shifts evolving as naturally as breathing, is the tree trunk, fostering development and setting the stage for the various branch movements to follow. All the while, that melodic seed, so deeply enmeshed in the compositional fabric, bears fruit of stunning variety and flavor.

As the final movement's ecstatic and celebratory rhythms surge, crest and dissipate and the various musical threads converge, a transcultural journey is palpable, of many and disparate experiences existing in luminous multi-communal nexus. The coda composition performed by the trio, "Echo of Echo", provides a final moment of reflection, mirroring the suite's ultimate descent toward silence, demonstrating, again, that the part is in the whole, which far exceeds the sum of its components.