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| Tin Hat: 'The Sad Machinery of Spring' With the release of its first CD for Hannibal/Rykodisc, "The Sad Machinery of Spring", the internationally acclaimed band of genre-leaping musical adventurers known as Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio) begins a new chapter in its remarkable decade-long career. The album is slated for release on January 30, 2007. Tin Hat will also perform nationally in support of the new album beginning on January 26 at Symphony Space in New York City with additional dates to be announced soon. Founded by composers and multi-instrumentalists Mark Orton, Carla Kihlstedt and Rob Burger in 1997, Tin Hat moves effortlessly between genres, creating a new kind of acoustic chamber music that melds elements of jazz, folk, classical, and various American and World roots music. The group's concert performances and recordings have earned widespread critical praise and an ever-growing legion of fans around the world. When Rob Burger left the trio in 2004, Orton and Kihlstedt were faced with a daunting task of reinvention. As Orton explains it: "We knew we had huge shoes to fill, and that we'd miss Rob greatly. He and I grew up together, and we've both known Carla since she was a teenager." Of the musical intimacy and telepathic connection afforded by such long-standing friendships, Kihlstedt adds, "There's nothing that could possibly replace that history." Orton and Kihlstedt wisely chose not to try replacing the irreplaceable. Instead, they took the situation as an opportunity to broaden the palette of musical colors available to them. Dropping the word "trio" from the group name, Tin Hat added not one but three new players to the mix -- all brilliant instrumentalists of tremendous virtuosity and imagination, and distinctively idiosyncratic composers in their own right. Joining Kihlstedt (violin, viola, trumpet violin, voice, piano, celeste, bowed vibes, bass harmonica, ukelin) and Orton (guitar, dobro, banjo, piano, pump organ, auto-harp, bass drum, bass harmonica) on "The Sad Machinery of Spring" are: Ara Anderson (trumpet, baritone horn, piano, pump organ, toy piano, celeste); Ben Goldberg (b-flat clarinet, alto clarinet, contra alto clarinet); and Zeena Parkins (harp). One of the most striking things about "The Sad Machinery of Spring" is that although no fewer than five different composers are represented here, the work speaks with a powerfully unified voice, without obscuring the vivid individual personalities of the players. Carla Kihlstedt reflects on that achievement: "Although we've given it room to shift organically with the new lineup, the history of the group still shows through. I've been a fan of Ben's writing and playing for at least 10 years, and though the tunes he wrote for this record fit seamlessly into the Tin Hat 'sound, ' I can absolutely recognize them as his. This is true of Ara and Zeena as well. Everyone has stretched to find a place in the band, but also, the band has stretched to encompass the new chemistry... it's been a true give-and-take. Collaborations are really about exploring the places where people overlap with one another, so of course those places shift with each new person." The music on "The Sad Machinery of Spring" was inspired by the work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish-Jewish novelist and graphic artist whose life was cut tragically short in 1942 by a Nazi officer's bullet. Schulz's relentlessly imaginative and evocative writing in his two best-known works, "The Street of Crocodiles" and "Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hour Glass", earned him a reputation as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th Century. No less a storyteller than Isaac Bashevis Singer said of Schulz, "He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached." write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Jazz News :: home page |