http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/arts/music/new-music-from-the-rotem-sivan-trio-and-anna-webber.html 2014-09-28 06:35:45 New Music From the Rotem Sivan Trio and Anna Webber New music from Anna Webber, Tashi Wada and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. === Tashi Wada DUETS “Duets” is a record of problem-solutions for the cellists Charles Curtis and Judith Hamann. The songs were written by Tashi Wada, son of Yoshi Wada, the Fluxus artist who also studied with the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath; it makes sense that the son inherited an interest in drones as well as small but powerful riddles. (The album is released on Saltern, his own label.) Here’s the concept: the record’s four tracks are about slow and coordinated change, with a very simple directive. The cellists bow slowly through a moving unison, progressing downward in pitch at a somewhat regular rate. There’s nothing for them to do but stay together; the composer’s only instruction is “The players descend in unison very slowly.” And so the drama is in how well they can do it. (Achieving unison on a given note is one thing; unison through a gradual slide is another.) Sometimes, as in “September 2006,” the road is clear and the progress steady: about a half tone every 20 seconds, to span two octaves. In “April 2007,” the distance traveled is the length of an entire string, but the pitches seem wild and uncertain, yet still in unison: The players are using natural harmonics, listening to each other to locate the same glassy whistles and ghost tones — pitches that seem to suddenly dive down deep or leap up high. But they’re still in sync, as much as they can be. Anna Webber SIMPLE A young Canadian saxophonist and flutist now living in Brooklyn, Ms. Webber is writing music that goes two ways: toward plotted percussive cycles, precise and gamelan-like, in which repetition becomes its own reward; and toward the kind of playful and thinky, tone-smearing, what-is-a-sound? experiments that the composers of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians started working on nearly 50 years ago. She’s played with a number of groups from Montreal and New York, some of them her own, but Spanish Harlem Orchestra SPANISH HARLEM ORCHESTRA A well-armed group strikes again, backing up a renovated ideal of an old sound: the The pianist There’s a reimagining — kaleidoscopic and airy — of the Cuban nueva-trova singer Pablo Milanés’s “De Qué Callada Manera,” with lyrics by the poet Nicolás Guillén, arranged by the energetic Venezuelan composer Gonzalo Grau. At the end of the record, the jazz musicians Chick Corea and Joe Lovano add solo features to a version of “You and the Night and the Music.” Rotem Sivan Trio FOR EMOTIONAL USE ONLY You will have to adjust your hearing slightly for the 30-year-old Israeli guitarist Rotem Sivan’s second album, “For Emotional Use Only” (Fresh Sound). It’s a Mr. Sivan runs through the music with natural confidence. He’s not spare. He plays a lot of notes. But he is quiet: almost always quieter than someone with this much training and musicality tends to be, and this is what makes him more than a very good young guitar player. Made of all originals but two — Jobim’s “Useless Landscape,” and the song “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from the original “Cinderella” movie — the record is a three-way conversation that never stops, and Mr. Sivan adds passing notes, ornament and afterthought to everything. But he’s not overbearing. He lets you hear the innate sound of his instrument, using classic jazz-guitar tone with dynamics and a searching quality to his improvising that risks awkwardness. Sometimes he appears to be fighting his own fluency: Here and there you hear him start a lick, or half-quote Charlie Parker’s “Au Privave,” before stopping himself cold. He attains a kind of private language of hesitation and inward-turning commentary. It’s the kind of thing that makes you listen harder.