Colour Vinyl
Mary Jane Leach returns to the Modern Love fold with an era-spanning collection of four compositions for multiples of the same instrument - four bass flutes, nine oboes, nine clarinets, and seven bassoons. This is suitably complex, subtly evolving work from the downtown NYC pioneer, tricky to discuss in musicological terms if you're not of that background. Technically it's astonishing of course, but how does it make you feel? Crucially, it's highly engaging work too, playing with tone and timber in inviting and evocative ways, heavy with the same emotional gravitas that's always underpinned the music of her revered peers, Julius Eastman, Arthur Russel and Ellen Fullman. Made for clarinet and bassoon respectively, the two pieces that comprise the second side are especially wondrous, like great windows being flown open, sun raining in. And that should be no surprise of course, since Leach has spent a good portion of this century preserving the legacy of Eastman, a highly commendable endeavour that's worthy of legend status in its own right, revealing of a vastly munificent spirit, one also present within her own music. Woodwind Multiples is a timely reminder of her underplayed artistic prowess (it's odd how little of her music is available), and a further demonstration of that broad church of sound and personality that comprised that period in New York, and its ever-extending reach. Hard to think of another place in time where so many fwd-thinking artists were gathered. The earliest work collected here is from 1985 (her very first, and the latest - a version of that same piece - from 2022. That Leach is still transmitting such vital and virbant work this far down the line is an inspiration.
