WORMS MARCEL - CD BLUES BEYOND BORDERS

Popis - BLUES BEYOND BORDERS:
Around 1990, my love for both contemporary classical music and jazz resulted in a “love child”: the crossover of the two genres, modern composed music with jazz influences. Especially during the 1920s, composers were bitten by the jazz bug, whereas by 1990 it seemed that further development of this genre was clearly in decline. It was my opinion that commissioning composers for new works could provide a new impulse. My passion for the blues and the blues form in particular were the motivation for these commissions, which resulted in the first new Dutch blues compositions for the project in 1996, followed soon after by international contributions. The blues is one of the elementary foundations of jazz and its form provides the composer with a clear blueprint which I thought might increase the chance of my re-quest being fulfilled. Moreover, choosing the blues as premise would provide a certain coherence between the composed pieces. The composers were free to apply the blues in their own manner. The blue notes, the three fundamental chords, the blues keys, and the scheme of 12, 16 or 32 measures could all be used, but were not prerequisite. There was also room for improvisation. The only essential requirement was that each composer, in his own individual way, should try to make the soul of the blues audible, as well as its associated state of mind. The tenth anniversary, in 2006, of my project New Blues for Piano in which, up to that time, some 150 composers from 50 countries had participated, was a good reason to publish some of the 60 new Dutch compositions. The Dutch publishing house Donemus released two volumes with 31 blues scores by Dutch composers, including a recording of the repertoire on CD. After that, it became obvious to me that an anthology of the international repertoire of the project should also be published, including a CD recording, as in the Dutch version. I am very grateful to Peermusic Classical Hamburg for their immediate and positive response to this idea. Some of the works represented in the score editions of Peermusic Classical have already been recorded and released by me in the past. With this CD, I’d now like to present the other pieces to a wider audience as first recordings. I tried, as much as possible, to achieve cultural diversity in the choice of repertoire, which, as of now, includes almost 200 compositions. If there is one community that can be called multicultural, then it surely is music.