ILLUMINATIONS

The Ambassador Duo

Since their debut at the 1990 Southwest Contemporary Music Festival and Conference in San Marcos, Texas, The Ambassador Duo has been active as a duo performing and giving clinics at numerous colleges, universities, and concert venues throughout the United States as well as in Canada, Italy, Spain, and China. Their repertoire covers a wide range of musical styles, from Baroque transcriptions to the most recent avant-garde works for saxophone and piano. The Ambassador Duo has inspired and commissioned many new works for saxophone and piano, including three of the works on this recording. Their two previous compact disc recordings as a duo, which were released on the Equilibrium label, are entitled Brillance, (EQ-21) and Excursions (EQ-55).

Pull - light, hot and virtuosic - is a brief but intense struggle between two groups of musical material. Pungent, pounding chords open the work, followed by fleet, cascading arpeggiated figures, which enter about a minute later.

Illuminations was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, the Ambassador Duo. The title refers to a collection of poems by French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91). The work explores sonically the colorful imagery of Rimbaud's poem "Métropolitan." The world premiere of the Illuminations was given by the Ambassador Duo at the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) Biennial Conference in April of 2004.

A Savage Calculus was begun prior to September 11th, several months later, the composer , took up the project again and writes: If the resulting music is "about" anything, it is about the idea of surprise. The work is marked by strong contrasts, in its silences punctuated by loud outbursts, as well as the frequent juxtapositions of different kinds of music, from "irrationally exuberant" boogie-woogie licks in the piano and virtuosic, over-the-top bluesy lines in the saxophone, to mournful, ghostly melodies that slowly descend to nothing. These combinations are sometimes garish, even cartoon-like, and at other times tense and very dark.

Tantrum, has the formal structure of a traditional sonata, but its connection with the historical form stops there. The first movement obsesses continuously on a four note figure (introduced immediately following an extended slow introduction). Lost, the second movement, actually began as a piece for voice and piano; it subsequently lost its text, and the saxophone sings forlornly in its place. The third movement takes a quirky bit of music and modulates it up an interval of a perfect fourth every chance it gets. This high energy piece presents a challenge for both the saxophonist and pianist.

PsychoTherapy In the first movement, Anger: Anger Management, a rhythmically active and cluster-laden piano part relentlessly rumbles beneath a ferociously aggressive saxophone line. The movement drives from beginning to end with few reflective moments. Angle of Repose is both the title of a marvelous novel by Wallace Stegner and a technical term which refers to the maximum angle at which soil and/or rocks can remain without rolling downhill. Thus finding the "angle of repose" is to find the maximum point at which some semblance of balance can be maintained. The third movement, Attitude: Fun With Funk, is based on, well... a down and dirty funk groove. This movement features a flurry of notes, jazz/rock licks and over-the top playing.

The saxophonist is invited to improvise a cadenza. The fourth movement, Action: Vandermarking, refers to the music of avant-garde saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark.

REVIEWS

Critics have hailed the Ambassador Duo as "intuitive, exciting, and enthralling." "Clifford Leaman is an artist of the first order [and] Derek Parsons is truly his musical match." – Paul Wagner, The Saxophone Journal

... they reveal themselves to be artists of technical brilliance and emotional commitment." "The range of colors is impressive..." – Jack Sullivan, American Record Guide