Chris Bleth oboe, english horn, clarinet, flute & alto flute 1, 2, 3, 6, 7
Dimitris Houndis soprano saxophone 8, 13
Renato Ripo solo cello 1, 6, 8
Sergiu Nastasa solo violin 1, 7
Yiorgos Kaloudis cretan lyra 7
Tracklist:
01. An Other Life (Dedicated To Ennio Morricone)(8:25)
02. Midnight Walk (5:48)
03. Restless (3:55)
04. Alone (5:12)
05. Intro To The River Of Time (0:49)
06. The River Of Time (4:11)
07. Unknown Land (3:37)
08. Dance With The Wind (4:41)
09. In This Boat (3:24)
10. Topkapi (4:03)
11. Growing Apart (5:04)
12. Intro To Beyond By Peter Erskine (1:24)
13. Beyond (7:28)
14. Walking (Dedicated To Peter Erskine)(4:27)
Label: Argomusic, 2011
Stavros Lantsias was born in Nicosia-Cyprus in 1966. He studied classical piano and music theory continuing his studies at Berklee College Of Music where he graduated in 1990. He there received the “Count Basie Jazz Masters Award for pianists 1989” and the “Quincy Jones Jazz Masters Award for arrangers 1990”. After Berklee, he continued his jazz piano studies with jazz “guru” Charlie Banacos.
Stavros Lantsias is in high demand as a pianist and arranger, always active performing with some of Greece’s most respected and acclaimed artists.
One of his most important projects is “Human Touch”, a group he has formed with long time collaborators David Lynch and Yiotis Kiourtsoglou. In their two studio recordings,“Human Touch”(LYRA 1998) and «Movin’» (LIBRA 2004), apart from composing and playing the piano Stavros expanded his playing with Drums, Percussion, and Acoustic Guitar. Together they have played in several international jazz and ethnic festivals in Europe, Turkey, and the Balkans.
Throughout the years Stavros has developed a unique multi-instrumental approach playing piano and drums simultaneously!
In 1999 Stavros Lantsias signed a recording contract with Warner Music Greece and since has released two personal albums “Return”(WEA 1999) and “The Journey of a Note”(WEA 2002). In these albums, he demonstrates his composition and orchestration skills performing with both jazz and classical ensembles.
His latest recording release “Diary Of Dreams”(ARGOMUSIC 2011) features the Athens Kamerata String Orchestra and world-renowned musicians Peter Erskine on drums and Lars Danielsson on Bass. This compositional work was originally a commission by “Patra Cultural Capital of Europe 2006”
(edit 22nd August 2018 – readers may also be interested in the careers of Ana Olgica and Enno Aare)
The works of the Vietnam-born French composer and pianist Amity Cadet have all but vanished from public consciousness. Of her innovative and eclectic body of work from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, only one song – “Romances” has made it into the era of YouTube:
Cadet was born in Saigon on the 7th of May 1954 – symbolically the day of the fall of Dien Bien Phu which would mark the end of the French presence in Indochina. Cadet’s father was a railway engineer working on the maintenance of the North-South Railway Line, her mother a teacher in the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat:
Cadet’s teens spanned the years 1967 to 1974, but contemporaries did not recall her seeming terribly affected by the supposedly epoch-making events of the time. “She was a calm, placid girl. She liked slightly cheesy music – Neil Diamond, John Denver, that kind of thing.” She had begun learning the piano in Algeria and kept up her lessons with Madame Press, a legendary Quebec City music teacher of fearsome repute. Yet, uniquely among Press’ students, Cadet had a calming effect on the irascible, ancient woman who had been brought to Canada by her parents fleeing an Odessa pogrom in the year 1881. “Things that, from anyone else, would bring forth a hail of Yiddish curses and blows from tiny fists, would be greeted with a benevolent smile if Amity did them,” recalled a contemporary from the Quebec City Conservatory.
It was in 1975, aged 21, that Amity Cadet began to release albums on the legendary Montreal label Les Enfants d’Esprit. The pioneering drone-rock act Nul and the “extreme singer-songwriter” Benoit de Boniface (whose ninety-five minute strums on open chords had so divided opinion during the first Festival De La Sagesse held in 1972) were the best-known acts on this label. The Les Enfants d’Esprit archives, including the cover art for all records released on the label, were destroyed in a fire in 1983.
All known copies of Amity Cadet’s debut, Piano de l’Enfer were destroyed in the flames. Perhaps, somewhere in a mouldering jumble sale or in an attic, there remains a copy of this album described by Canadian music critic Doug Bundle as “at the same time terrifying and arousing, like the lovechild of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon” (to which Amity Cadet reportedly replied “What does that even mean?)
Whatever the merits of Bundle’s clotted prose, Amity Cadet’s debut was a milestone in the development of minimalist music. One contemporary said that the best way to imagine it is “Ligeti’s Musica Ricercerta II – played in hell by a pianist being slowly disembowelled by the lovechild of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon.”
The years went on – Charles Manson and Richard Nixon became somewhat lesser cultural touchstones – and as the 1970s became dominated by punk (according to ageing music critics) and the Bay City Rollers (in reality), Amity Cadet found herself swimming against a musical tide of triviality, swimming against a cultural tide of cynical materialism, and swimming against a personal tide of repeated bad relationships. In 1979 a nightmare date with Donald Sutherland, followed by a nightmare date the following Saturday with Leonard Cohen, was immortalised in her minimalist piece “Threnody On Nightmare Dates with Donald Sutherland and Leonard Cohen on Two Successive Saturdays” She persuaded Les Enfants D’Esprit to release this fifteen-hour work in a twenty-LP set, no small vote of confidence in a work that consisted of Cadet repeatedly pressing all 88 piano keys at the same time using a length of wood.
The album “Romances” appeared in 1981. It is from this that the one surviving Amity Cadet track that appears on Spotify and Youtube comes from. Along with Tubular Bells, it is regarded as the high watermark of New Age music. “Romances”, the song, is the paradigmatic piano relaxation song, one whose structure, however, contains hidden repetitions of note sequences that encode the opening verses of the Books of Revelations.
Later in the 1980s, Amity Cadet renounced music. The death of her mother in a train crash, for which her father, who had been unaware his wife was on the train, was later held criminally negligent for, deeply affected her. She used what royalties she had gained to buy up her records and destroy them, and to pulp entire runs of magazines that mentioned her career. She, like her mother before her, was to devote her life to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and music played by the lovechild of Charles Manson and Richard Nixon in the hell did not quite fit this aspiration. Some tender impulse, however, led her to spare “Romances” from the memory hole, and to this day we can enjoy this epitome of piano relaxation.
