|
Click
to buy
ANSEL
ADAMS
PBS WEBSITE
|
"Ansel Adams"
Track
List:
1.Benediction
Piano (Keane)
2.Benediction Orchestral (Keane)
3.Cowboy Song (Keane)
4.Marias River Breakdown (Aaberg)
5.American Open (Keane)
6.To The Summit (Keane)
7.Starting Out (Keane)
8.Sky (Stramp)
9.Searching (Keane)
10.American Open Piano (Keane)
11.Ansel's Theme (Keane)
12.Benediction Piano Reprise (Keane)
13.High Sierra (Burns/Keane)
14.Bach Prelude (Bach)
15.American Open Reprise (Keane)
16.Benediction Orchestral Reprise (Keane)
17.Bach Prelude (performed by Ansel Adams)
Release
Date: April 23, 2002
Label: Green Linnet
Reviews:
Billboard Magazine: "...Keane has made
one of the most distinctive instrumental albums of the decade."
"Chance,
favor, and the prepared mind. That's how Ansel Adams described
the evolution of his nature photography to a plane of poetic excellence.
In his search for the right proportion of humility, vision, and
drive with which all artists attempt to achieve an original portrayal
of the truth, Adams' essential checklist was succinct. Since he
was also a trained classical pianist, his outlook resonates in
the realm of sound as well as sight.
"Music is wonderful, but the musical world is bunk; so much petty
doings, so much pose and insincerity and distorted values," Adams
also observed, by way of explaining his decision in young adulthood
to pursue photography rather than music as a career. On April
23, two days after the national PBS TV premiere of Ansel Adams:
A Documentary Film by noted documentarian Ric Burns, Green Linnet
Records releases the soundtrack to the project. Produced, arranged,
and conducted by Brian Keane, an equally gifted musical scorer
of documentaries, the music has a crisp lucidity and spaciousness
to rival both Adams' awed environmental portraiture and Burns'
careful historical insights. And, like the sum of Keane's own
exceptional career, it meets the film's subject's aforementioned
recipe for inspired results.
"I started out as a musician who was very intellectually based,
being in jazz and classical music," Keane says with a laugh. "But
like Ansel, I have also realized over time that the infinity in
any art form is its emotional and spiritual substance, and music
is the most direct at expressing that substance."
An only child born to a once-wealthy San Francisco timber baron
who went bust, Adams grew up an eccentric soul encouraged by a
tender father and tolerated at a distance by a depressed mother.
Respect for civility kept the highly stressed family on course,
and controlled benevolence became the Adams boy's quiet creed.
On a family trip to the spectacular Yosemite Valley in 1916, the
shy 14-year-old saw with one sweeping gaze that there would always
be something far greater than the fortunes or follies of mortal
guile. Adams took his first serious photo in 1927 (two years after
he began giving piano concerts), and for the rest of his career,
although he occasionally collaborated with such human-interest-minded
photo-journalists as Dorothea Lange, Adams took to what he called
"the high places" of the western American wilderness. Poised before
nature's immensity in every psychic and artistic sense, he used
his camera to depict humanity's small but critical place in the
landscape. Through chance, favor, and a prepared mind, he became
a pioneer artist/conservationist who chronicled one person's luminous
intersections with eternity.
"In his time, the most popular photography was depicting human
suffering from the Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, and so
on," Keane says. "He was criticized for taking pictures of nature
while all of this was going on. But he saw a more lasting truth
in man's relatively insignificant relationship with the whole
of nature, and, in a strange way, with a more correct sense of
balance than many of his contemporaries."
For Keane (born Jan. 18, 1953, in Philadelphia, the first of three
offspring by businessman/amateur Irish tenor George Keane and
his avant-garde composer/wife, Winifred), the "chance" aspect
of his own musical growth occurred when the Juilliard School-educated
guitarist, who'd built an early jazz reputation recording with
Larry Coryell and touring with Coryell, Polish violinist Michael
Urbaniak, flamenco legend Paco De Lucia, and the group Spyro Gyra,
was invited in 1981 to score his first documentary. It was Against
Wind and Tide: A Cuban Odyssey, a study by filmmakers Jim Burroughs
and Suzanne Bauman of the Mariel boat lift. The film earned an
Academy Award nomination, and Keane's verve as a musical storyteller
was established. Between jazz dates during the next six years,
he toiled on other film projects with Bauman or Burroughs, including
her 1987 documentary Suleyman the Magnificent. Suleyman led to
collaborations, among them the classic Beyond the Sky (Celestial
Harmonies, 1992) with Turkish multi-instrumentalist Omar Faruk
Tekbilek. Keane also began an acclaimed solo career that yielded
such admired albums as Snowfalls (Flying Fish, 1986) and Common
Planet (Blue Note, 1992).
But in an Adams-like gesture of resolve, Keane left Blue Note
and solo jazz work because the commercial demands of the genre
felt too confining. Despite scoring nearly 200 documentaries (including
such renowned PBS series as Eyes on the Prize, The Great Depression,
and Long Journey Home: The Irish in America), creating his own
lucrative Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice album collections,
and becoming an in-demand music producer, Keane has opted not
to cut another album as a featured solo artist. "It's hard to
reconcile art and commerce much of the time," he says. "What most
corporations' stockholders are looking for is safety and a high
return fast. You couldn't ask for worse conditions to manufacture
art, because they will mean copying somebody else with whatever's
popular to try to cash in quick. I prefer documentaries, because
the subject matter is worth documenting; that's why they're made."
In 1989, Keane was working on the score for Chimps: So Like Us,
the Emmy Award-winning HBO film about Jane Goodall's field studies
of chimpanzees, when he met Ric Burns, who was collaborating one
floor up in the same building with his brother Ken Burns on The
Civil War. Ric asked Keane to score Coney Island, his own PBS
film for the American Experience series. Keane has since scored
all Ric's films, including The Donner Party, The Way West, New
York, and now Ansel Adams. "Ric is an artist himself," Keane says,
"and he wanted to focus the film on Ansel's life but also the
process and the value of being an artist. The responsibility of
the film composer is to the emotional truth the director's trying
to convey. It's also the ideal of artists, in terms of what they're
trying to convey in their art. Adams was someone who experienced
the world in emotional and spiritual terms."
Keane captures that experience in all its lonely, purposeful rigor
and trepidation, bringing a vast tenderness to the piano and guitar
themes, as well as the full orchestrations. There is a vulnerability
to Ansel Adams: Original Soundtrack Recording From the Film by
Ric Burns that is by turns poignant and transporting, the music
often redolent of a solitary climb to a succession of impermanent
plateaus. (A thoughtful coda Keane included on the album is a
portion of a primitive 1944 recording of a Bach prelude played
by Adams himself.)
In the process, Keane has made one of the most distinctive instrumental
albums of the decade. "Getting back to emotional truth," Keane
says in summary, "sadness, of course, is a part of longing, the
knowledge that you may not achieve your dreams. But you have the
courage and conviction to go after them anyway. Those emotions
are in Adams and all of us, or they wouldn't resonate so strongly."
-- Timothy White in "Music To My Ears"
|
