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Watch my interview and read my review‍ ‍of pianist Clipper Erickson’s 2 disc set Tableau, Tempest & Tango: Piano Music of David Finko, Richard Brodhead and Modest Mussorgsky

Watch my interview and read my review of pianist Clipper Erickson’s 2 disc set My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett

From Somewhere - Wisdom, Illusion, and the Creative Subconscious

“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.” - The Cheshire Cat

“The secret, Alice, is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile. It’s then, that you’ll find Wonderland.”- The Mad Hatter

Most of us, the lucky ones, have known one or two Cheshire Cat or Mad Hatter types over the years. The former, calm on the surface at least, are dependably inscrutable. One can sense at once, an intensely inquisitive sampling being taken continuously of the known universe behind those deeply enigmatic eyes and Mona Lisa smiles.

“We’re all mad here. You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself,” admits Lewis Carroll’s apocryphal feline with unusual candor, during a particularly focused visual interview with Alice before fading once again, to opaque.

The Mad Hatters among us on the other hand, are the kinetic opposite of Cheshire inscrutability. They enjoy with studied cynicism, the paradox that wisdom and absurdity are soulmates.

American jazz musician, composer, poet and polymath Laurie Altman is a delightful but far from benign concatenation of Wonderland metaphors. While mysterious with a twinkle in his eye about aspects of his compositional process, he is hard as granite about his life-long intention as a composer and intellectual, to raise public consciousness about the world around them through vivid compositional structures in imagery, metaphor, and metaphysics.

“As a composer, I find myself to be a heart creator, not a head one. I believe that music needs to tell a story, and to achieve that end, musical form with substance has no place in my vocabulary. Making the personal universal is my mantra. Incessant noodling born of years as a jazz pianist and improviser has, with the piano before me, pushed forward ideas, harmonic, rhythmic, structural, even the overall musical character and story that I wanted to tell.”

Born in 1944 and raised in New York City where he attended Mannes College of Music majoring in composition, Laurie Altman was for many years resident composer at Westminster Choir College/Rider University in Princeton, NJ and has enjoyed international. touring stints as a jazz pianist over several decades.

The composer’s art music - orchestral, chamber, concerto, his own poetry set for voice - has been performed in major cities and venues throughout the world. The composer and his wife, photographer Jeannine Hummel, live contentedly in Spiez, Switzerland, where Altman continues to create new work, while editing the recordings of his compositional legacy, and occasionally playing impromptu jazz with visiting colleagues.

It takes an empath to understand a fellow traveler. American pianist Clipper Erickson has championed Laurie Altman’s music for many years, not least because the two artists were colleagues at Westminster Choir College some time ago.

Erickson, described as “one of the finest pianists of his generation, a consummate musician,” by Fanfare magazine, has the intellectual fortitude and technical chops to illuminate Altman’s compositional and pianistic challenges with spot-on interpretive insight.

The satisfaction a listener derives from this album is in the rare mash-up of subtle intuition (Erickson) with powerful stylistic structures and sound imagery (Altman). The two artists meld together as one consciousness for this important and illuminating recording of some of Altman’s most descriptive and challenging solo piano compositions; a triumph of collaborative fine-tuning over many years.

Training at The Juilliard School, Yale University, and Indiana University during Clipper Erickson’s student years, prepared him for scholarly research and pianistic revelation. A career breakthrough as a recording artist arrived with his critically acclaimed 2016 Gramophone UK Critic’s Choice best album of the year, the two-disc My Cup Runneth Over - The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett.

“This historically and musically important release not only fills a crucial catalogue gap but sets reference standards no serious aficionado of the history of American piano music can afford to miss,”raved Fanfare magazine, about the Dett performances.

From Somewhere is a selection from Laurie Altman’s solo piano compositions between 1991 and 2020 including two sets of preludes and fugues (2019); two piano sonatas, No. 10 - Aleppo (2017), No. 11 (2018); and the Boogie movement from Sonata No. 8 (2014).

This composer-curated album also includes two musically descriptive tableaux - That Day: In Memory of George Floyd (2020); Soliloquy (1997); and the Prelude No. 17 (1991). Altogether a generous feast of virtuoso piano music that jumps off the page in Clipper Erickson’s texture-driven, intuitively solid performances.

A magnificent piano in an ambient studio, together with the studied and stunning virtuosity of Polish sound engineer Malgorzata Albinska-Frank, make this PARMA/Navona Records From Somewhere package a perfection of meticulously recorded sound, a treat of discovery for professional performers and the general public alike.

The unique magic about the piano music of Laurie Altman is its sweet accessibility to the mind through humility, sensibility, and honesty. Altman knows how to write for the piano as well as the heart.

Disc One

A stand-alone program by itself as organized by the composer, disc one is fashioned in an arc of harmonic flow-friendly (read intelligent) conflations of both temperament and sentiment. Intrigues and mysteries abound - how Cheshire Cat!

The opening work Prelude 17 (1991) is lovely and concise, a hallmark of the composer’s thinking/writing style. Intention and structure are crystal clear without muddying anyone’s brain matter.