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REVIEWS: JORDAN RUDESS 4NYC back to artists page Discography • Audio • Tour Dates • Links Released Sept 10, 2002 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Elegant and classy tribute to the triumph of human diversity in the wake of terror. Jordan's improvisation captured his feelings and the feelings of others after September 11, 2001. Fear and Displacement. Love and Hope. This is a wonderful album. "One Voice" is beautiful. "Lamb Chops", requested by Jordan's Daughter before the show brought a tear and a smile. – Ytsejam –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Jordan Rudess is perhaps one of the most talented keyboardists (both rock and classical music) of this time. Best known for his work this past few years with prog metal band Dream Theater, Jordan became famous for his amazing techniques and musicality. Just last year he released his instrumental solo album from Magna Carta Records playing some of his favorite style of music, progressive rock. But he is not only an amazing rock keyboardist but he is also an accomplished pianist and has mind-blowing improvisational skills. Over the past few years he also released (independently from his website) two mellow piano based albums (which still has some amazing playing). On this new release titled 4NYC is an addition to those. This album features live recordings from benefit concert, which was held right after the September 11 tragedy. He has raised $12,000.00 for the American Red Cross at this concert. He performed his material both on grand piano and on his favorite Kurzweil 2600 keyboard. About half of the tunes on this record are from that benefit concert and the rest are studio recordings that he improvised on one keyboard and recorded. Songs he performed are very emotional, mellow and astonishingly beautiful tunes on piano and keys. He used and played over simple sequence on the choppy yet beautiful "Speed As Light" and "A Step Beyond." "Lamb Chops" is an amazing live variation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" which he did on the spot with such technicality and musicality it's simply stunning. Tunes like "My Thoughts," "If I Could," "Within," "For You," "One Voice" and "Darkness to Day" are incredibly beautiful and full of emotions. Without a doubt Jordan Rudess is an amazing musician and this album proves it. If you are a Jordan Rudess fan this album is of course not to be missed and even if you never heard of him or Dream Theater or Liquid Tension Experiment albums this shows his unbelievable talent as a keyboardist too. This is not a rock record, but it's a great record. – Scott Somersett for TakeOutMusic.com 5 Donuts* *Deep fried in extra fat with sprinkles, ... mmm donuts. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– We needn't relive the events that brought us to hearing this CD, nor refer to them as "unspeakable" or "tragic," for doing so would surely reaffirm what we already know: that the world can hurl the cruel and unexpected at us with curve ball speed and an unflinching lack of remorse. Perhaps it's better, then, to use our words to surprise, find something that if not completely fresh, is at least refreshing: that with 4NYC Jordan Rudess has given us a reason to feel and perhaps, in a way, even through tears, celebrate. I've never been to New York City and on September 11, 2001, I wasn't even on the continent; two weeks into a ten-month stay in Europe, I couldn't help feeling paralyzed, couldn't help wondering, for a few moments anyway, if all that happened that day would expedite or delay my return home; and, lastly, I couldn't help but wonder if home, my home, a place half a country away from NYC would be the same when I returned. Still, despite that and despite my momentary inward-turning, I felt like reaching out. But how could I do that from, as they say, half a world away? What could I say that would somehow matter? Nothing, it seemed. About the only thing I could do was grieve: on the public buses that rushed me from one end of the city where I lived to the other Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" swept quietly over the huddled masses of tired early morning or late afternoon workers, many of whom didn't speak English. The song (along with Steve Vai's "Alive In An Ultra World")moved me to tears in those first few days (and I hadn't cried in a long, long while). I can't help but feeling, though, that the tears at hearing Gabriel were the same tears I had cried years earlier when I first listened to the song every evening for a week, thinking it would soothe some of love's first stinging lacerations or how I drove around listening to it on my car stereo again and again in the first weeks after my father died. This time, more than ever before, the life-affirming qualities of the song and the heavenly ache of Kate Bush's seemingly effortless warblings moved me to tears but this time I have to believe that the tears were not wholly about grief: I cried because, for all else that was going wrong in my life at that moment, I was lucky to be in a remote part of the world that had (and will probably continue to be) safe from terror. There were nights, too, when, before sleep, I found myself sliding a recording of Mozart's Requiem into the CD player, just as I'd done so many times in college when I'd had a particularly brutal week of exams, felt homesick, or even had the flu. There's a certain irony, I suppose,in the fact that hearing lines such as: "Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla" ("Day of wrath, that day/Will dissolve the earth in ashes") had become such a familiar companion whenever I felt the need to transport myself from the midst of jaundice and cynicism. While some might argue that it is hardly the most perfect work by the composer, it is certainly one of my most reliant musical friends, a fate Jordan Rudess's 4NYC is destined for in the years to come. Recorded, in part, on September 24, 2001, at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center in Nyack, New York as part of a benefit for the American Red Cross, 4NYC crosses the spectrum from the sad to the whimsical to the hopeful and finally culminates in a kind of tender victory, serves as a musical act of witness. "My Thoughts," with its soft summer evening melody and breezy chords serves as a delicate promise to find order again while "If I Could," one of several tracks recorded in the studio around the time of the Nyack performance, begins the complex series of emotions both we and the album progress through: tender in a way, soothing, but with moments of slightest dis-ease, where we hear a kind of bruised poignancy that somehow manages to soothe the lingering haze of remembered heartache. Or, at least gives you a companion to cling to (or at least remember once you are separated as you are during "Outcast") as you continue this treacherous but necessary journey. "A Step Beyond," which feels like an aerial view of the city on the darkest night that lasted all day long, when we all wondered (even on the other side of the globe) how long the night would finally be, prepares us for the descent of "Mourning After," where we are reminded of how we felt once the first rays of reality's unapologetic and relentlessly forward-thinking light first began shining in. Even "Lamb Chops," a piece rendered with front parlor flair and a jocular heart, transforms itself from an unusual take on "Mary Had A Little Lamb" to a kind of secular prayer that innocence first be remembered, then reclaimed. But it's only as the final, somber blanket of "Darkness To Day" lifts and gives way to the three tracks that close out the album, "Speed Of Light," "On My World," and "For You" that we truly realize how hopeful an act the composition and performance of these songs was and how enduring they truly are: long after the physical and emotional rubble has become a memory and the wounds (yes, we always talk about the wounds) finally heal, we will have these songs, songs which, as the final notes ring out remind us that we have emerged from our journey and are free once more to look up to the sky and live under stars. And while it's true that for some 4NYC will forever be inexorably bound to "that day," it will also be inexorably bound to hope and will serve as a testament to a generous human heart. – Jedd Beaudoin for Ytesjam –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– A few words immediately come to mind with this instrumental solo release from Mr. Rudess: Heartwarming, poignant, dramatic and serene. That sets the overall vibe for this half-studio/half-live performance CD of piano/keyboard pieces, written from, around and concerning the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The majority of works on this release are piano pieces, although the studio pieces are embellished with synth flourishes that add to the dramatic overtones and add something of a new-age mystique and fanfare to the already peacefull and contemplative compositions. This sounds like something that could've been issued on the Hearts of Space (think Raphael, the electronic composer) and Narada Label (an extensive New Age Label from the Upper Midwest which has such luminaries in the New Age field as David Arkenstone, David Lanz, Peter Buffet, ad infinitum), and though I'd be surprised to see it in the collection of more than your standard New Age enthusiast or Dream Theater fanatic collection, the quality of both the song composition and production is quite good (although, as the music would demand, sparse, and spacious). Very emotional and melancholy at times, and always with a strong sense of purpose through, Rudess shows another facet to his song writing skills that I for one, had never truly seen expressed through Dream Theater's music (ironically, I much prefer Kevin Moore's eccentricities and Derek Sherinians Hyperfield synth playing to Rudess' melodramatics in DT material). The ragtime-ish take on the standard, 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' while cute and slightly bombastic, definitely reveals a humor amidst the drama. I think I will take THIS side of Rudess extensive keyboard talents, to what I've heard so far in Liquid Tension Experiment and Dream Theater... – Scott Mosher for prog4you.com –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– More reviews are added as they come in. Click here to order 4NYC! Jordan Rudess' previous Magna Carta release is Feeding the Wheel! |
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