It’s always nice when you have the chance to release new music early in a new year.
A new release is one way of throwing your hat into the air to celebrate...and to hope. We can celebrate because we’re here in this moment to do so. And we dare to hope as we move through a liminal space from the now into the unknown.
Gershwin is also a liminal space - in music - living somewhere in an active conversation between classical music, what was once called “popular music”, and jazz. It is a world many people pass through and many people appreciate, each in their own way - offering endless opportunities for interpretation and reinterpretation, even for one performer.
Valentine’s Day is also a liminal space - a single day passed through in so many ways by so many people. Love is remembered - sweetly or sadly. Love is anticipated - lightly or with longing. Love is celebrated - whether it be near to us now or far flung from where we find ourselves.
As these spaces swirled around in our mind, we entered a studio to record and experiment a bit with a particular piano and, in the moment, met this intimate recording of George Gershwin’s Embraceable You as transcribed by John’s musical mentor, Earl Wild.
It was a moment in time - a liminal space spent with Gershwin and Wild - on a kind of jazzy Steinway as an afternoon became an evening in Queens, NYC.
“Had it been another day I might have looked the other way…” Lennon & McCartney said - and so, many recordings may be described.
On this day, this particular take on that particular piano said something to us that was both very different from how John has often performed this piece and compelling to us in its individual voice in that moment.
So we decided to release it on Valentine’s Day, where it might be heard more as a love letter than a sonic sculpture set in stone. The classical music world can have some quite fraught conversations on the nature of a “definitive” recording after all…but Earl Wild once said “The problem with period performances is that we do not have period ears!”, and so interpretive range seems to have been felt as a necessity by some, for some time.
In all our projects, we look to invite the work of a visual artist into conversation with the work of a musician and vice versa.
For Embraceable You, John and I had the great joy of collaborating with illustrator Xiao Hua Yang (The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s Magazine, BuzzFeed, NY Times) to create the cover art for the release.
We met over ideas, considered Xiao’s inclinations in response, and were delighted with this resulting image of a figure on a rooftop under a canopy of stars. It seemed that so many stories could be expressed through this image and that felt right for the range of experiences one might be in on Valentine’s Day.
We think we might do something like this again. Each month we’re meeting so many new people and reacquainting with people who have enjoyed John’s music in the past - and the calendar will fly through fleeting days to bring us back to this liminal holiday again before we know it.
For now, we hope you you enjoy Embraceable You
...on Spotify
... on Apple Music
... on Deezer
... on YouTube Music
Thank you for sharing time with us,
Peter Field
Skylight Arts