Focus & Field - CD

Visionary composer and percussionist Adam Rudolph draws inspiration from Jo Ha Kyu, the spiritual concept behind Japanese Noh theater, for imaginative new album Focus and Field, featuring a stunning 8-piece offshoot from Rudolph's ground-breaking Go: Organic Orchestra. Rudolph describes his approach, "With every record and every concert, I'm always trying to do something I've never done before." Rudolph accomplishes that daunting goal yet again with his breathtaking new album Focus and Field. The new 8-piece ensemble, an offshoot of his Go: Organic Orchestra, gathered for a mesmerizing performance at New York City's vaunted Roulette last March, mere days before the world seemed to stop with the impact of the global pandemic. The fragile yet utterly captivating mood summoned by Rudolph and his ensemble seems in retrospect to be prescient, a stunning showcase of the healing and communal powers of spontaneous composition. The core elements that Rudolph employs on Focus and Field will be familiar to followers of Go: Organic Orchestra - Cosmograms, the evocative scores that resemble the spiral arms of a sonic galaxy and work like harmonic puzzles able to be assembled and reassembled in various combinations; Ostinatos of Circularity, the layered polyrhythms that give the music it's propulsive motion and complexity; along with illuminating passages written in traditional western notation, which can be cued at key moments but played with remarkable freedom of expression.