JB Floyd


(Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )

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JB Floyd, raised in provincial Texas and classically trained, absorbed boogie-woogie and jazz during his formative years.

Transporting Transmittance (Mutable, 2003) contains The 3-D Picture of Death, A Transporting Transmittance for Transverse Flute and Disklavier, a duo with flautist Lisa Hansen, two improvisations on Robert Ashley's opera El Aficionado for piano and voice (baritone Thomas Buckner), and the boogie-woogie Solos and Sequences II for "disklavier" piano.

A 1975 performance with David Rosenboom appears on Suitable for Framing (Mutable, 2004).

In Crossing the Busy Street (Mutable, 2009) contains the namesake eight-song cycle for baritone (Thomas Buckner) and piano, and a six-part improvised "jam" on its leitmotiv (with drummer George Marsh).

Another Time and Place (Mutable, 2011) collects compositions spanning three decades. Prince of Pentacles (1979) is a slow, bluesy, dissonant meditation in which the piano is simulated the bubbling sounds of the Buchla synthesizer. Variations 1979 has the feeling of a Schubert-inspired romantic fantasia adapted to a cocktail lounge. Waves The Ebb and Flow (1981), instead, masterly evokes the pattern (if not the sound) of the waves rolling onto the beach. The change that came during the more recent music is represented by the ferociously spinning crescendoes of the piano sonatas: Tribute for my Father (1991) and Solos and Sequences I (1999), despite their pensive and somewhat fatigued beginnings. Floyd delved into equatorial atmospheres for Another Time and Place (1993) for "disklavier", virtual instruments, percussion and solo pianist, that hints at ethnic music and jungle sounds, an odd hybrid of ambient new-age dance music that seems out of context here.

(Copyright © 2006 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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