Anna Webber - Clockwise [CD]

Saxophonist/flutist Anna Webber has been an active performer and bandleader on the New York scene for the last decade, playing with the likes of John Hollenbeck, Dave Douglas, Matt Mitchell, and Jen Shyu. Her own projects, which are clear expressions of her knotty compositional sense, have been hailed by The New York Times as "bracing, argumentative and engineered to show the range of the group members: fulminous, intense collective improvisation; rapid, chromatic steeplechases; research into long tones and textures." Her new release, Clockwise, is an homage to some of her favorite 20th Century composers as seen through the lens of their works for percussion. For the project, Webber researched and analyzed various percussion compositions by Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varése, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage, isolating particular moments that could be extracted and developed into new works. The music explores notions of density and indeterminacy, using timbre as an organizing principal, continuing Webber's ongoing exploration of the interstice between creative improvisation and tightly-prescribed compositions.