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Walter Norris Duo: from another star
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[ front cover | forward | interview | critics | discography | credits | song list | back cover ]
FROM ANOTHER STAR
Integrity, musical genius, truth - one of the numerous signs of today's mass culture is the inflationary use of such terms and thus, their devaluation. This places the author of these lines in a dilemma as it is exactly those terms that best characterize the American virtuoso pianist and "Steinway Artist" Walter Norris whose latest CD you have in your hand. Norris is without doubt one of the last great authorities on piano music at the end of the 20th century. His personal and musical integrity has made him immune to the daemon of the "Zeitgeist", to the compelling forces of the musical market, to the mechanisms of the culture industry which has degraded almost all musicians, regardless whether classical, modern music or jazz, to mere producers whose productive efforts are painfully lacking an essence which once inspired and justified the rise of jazz. However, in Walter Norris' music this essence is alive and felt on a level which only few masters of this art, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane have attained.
Norris, who sometimes paraphrases his style as romantic, elevates is attitude towards a musical truth above marketing principles and commits himself without compromising his own idiom, to a productive combination of emotion and rationality as well as sensuality and precision. In his compositions and improvisations he combines the best of the worlds of Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and Bartok with those of Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, brought together by his highly independent power of musical judgement, his encyclopedic knowledge of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structures and his all-embracing conception of time-shaping which one cannot help characterizing as genial.
His playing at the very highest level is only a means to an end. His way of working with music is a reflection of his integrity; he examines musical material thoroughly, freeing it from all irrelevancies, all cliches and with his formative power lends it inner tension and necessity. His compositional sovereignty enables him to create enables him to create unity in those places where it is a question of uniting antagonisms between tonal and abstract musical elements. Norris makes use of technical compositional means not only for the mere organization or basic structuration of material but to also create a transparent intellectual framework. Thus he, according to the philosophy of Adorno, develops the "Identical" into the "Non-identical" and it is precisely this which justifies its claim to aesthetic truth. This truth, emitting from his piano sound, is the connecting thread in Walter Norris' musical identity; (Norris, "The sound created from an instrument is a summation of your experiences in life. Emotions and intellectual efforts are passing through the nervous system and fingers straight into the instrument and are then transcended into music.") via his compositions and improvisations.
Coherence and stringency, as valid aesthetic categories, will have for those listening to this recording and those who were lucky enough to hear Walter Norris in live performance, a very perceptible result; true joy while listening!
Jörg Engels musician/author
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[ front cover | forward | interview | critics | discography | credits | song list | back cover ]
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This page last modified: Thursday, 24-Apr-2008 15:33:33 PDT