John Schott - Shuffle Play : Elegies For The Recording Angel (2000)

“Composer-guitarist John Schott has a fascination with the past, as well as with the convergence of idioms. The basis of the work is a series of ancient recordings, scratchy near-inaudible cylinders from the end of the 19th century that include "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star," whistling, speeches, and a bugle call. These are used as backdrops or central voices in several of the 28 pieces that make up Shuffle Play, pieces that range from pointillist modern classical composition to free jazz to mixtures of the two. Tracks vary in length from atmospheric bits as brief as 10 seconds to more than seven minutes, while Schott's Ensemble Diglossia expands from individual soloists through small improvising groups to reach an 11-member chamber ensemble of reeds, strings, and percussion for four tracks.”

Shuffle Play is designed to be played in the “random” or “shuffle” mode of a CD player, reconfiguring the story it tells with each listening. However, because not all players have this feature, consideration was also given to the normal sequencing of tracks. It comprises 28 meditations on the history of recordings, including several tracks that use cylinder recordings from the earliest decade of recorded sound (1888-1900)-many of them previously unpublished-direct from the Edison archives in New Jersey.

The idea was to develop the material from as many angles as possible: free improvisation, musique concrète, post-war composition, AACM-derived strategies, and pop music, to name a few. Sometimes these idioms are juxtaposed, more often they are integrated, in a sort of polylingual counterpoint. I wanted the tracks to be widely varied as to length, instrumentation, subject, and/or recorded ambience, so as to place in the foreground the listener’s role in making it cohere: What do these pieces have to say to each other? It’s an attempt to listen and talk back to history. The old records are telling a story, but the story is garbled, it cuts in and out, you can’t quite make out what is being said. Each time you return, the message is different; you amass clues, but the piece that would make sense of the whole is always just out of reach. — John Schott

Personnel :

Steve Adams - flutes, alto saxophone
Beth Custer - clarinet
Ben Goldberg - clarinets
Dan Plonsey - saxophones
Tom Yoder - trombone
Carla Kihlstedt, Jenny Scheinman - violins
Tara Flandreau - viola
Matthew Brubeck - cello
Trevor Dunn - acoustic bass
Scott Amendola - drums
Gino Robair - xylophone, percussion, drums
Karen Stackpole - gongs, percussion
Rob Burger - accordion
Myles Boisen - electric bass
John Schott - guitar, organ, percussion

Track List :

1. Overture
2. Eleven
3. Poor Mourner: Intro
4. Passage
5. Elegy: America
6. Long Grain
7. Ten
8. Graph With Citation
9. Trio
10. Poor Mourner Repainted
11. Eighteen
12. Elegy: Thomas Edison and Emile Beliner
13. Temple Blocks
14. Elegy: Nearer, My God to Thee
15. Passage
16. Violin
17. Second Graph
18. Drums
19. 28 Seconds
20. Poor Mourner: Snorkel
21. Elegy: Noel Josephs and Jesse Walter Fewkes
22. Ground Zero: June 29, 1888
23. Nineteen
24. Trio
25. Elegy: Yankee Doodle Dandy
26. Passage
27. Thirty-Two
28. Nearer