Records from a Vanishing City
Jessie Montgomery (b.1981)

THE STORY

     Composer Jessie Montgomery shares: 

     Records from a Vanishing City is a tone poem based on my recollections of the music that surrounded me as I grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s. Artists, truth seekers, and cultures of all kinds defined our vibrant community. The embracing diversity burst out with an effortless everydayness in block parties, festivals, and shindigs of every sort. Partly because my parents were artists—but also because I just couldn’t help it—I soaked up all that surrounded me: Latin jazz, alternative rock, Western classical, avant-garde poetry, and Caribbean dance music, to name a few. 
     A year before completing this work, a very dear family friend passed away and it was decided that I would be the one to inherit a large portion of his eclectic record collection. James Rose was one of the many suns in the Lower East Side cosmos who often hosted parties and generous gatherings for our extended artist family. His record collection was a treasure trove of the great jazz recordings of the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond—he was mad for John Coltrane, but also Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, as well as traditional folk artists from Africa, Asia, and South America. 
     In the process of imagining this piece, a particular track on a record of music from Angola caught my ear: a traditional lullaby which is sung in call-and-response by a women’s chorus. This lullaby rang with an uncanny familiarity in me. An adaptation of this lullaby and the rhythmic chant that follows it appears in each of the three main sections of Records. 
     This piece is dedicated to James Rose. 

LISTEN FOR

• Overlapping musical styles, from avant-garde jazz to Angolan lullabies

• Colorful, unexpected, and artfully layered textures and harmonies

• The Gershwin-like wailing clarinet

• The steady pulsing of the strings

• A sweep of chromatically ascending parallel chords, creating a wistful farewell at the conclusion of the work 

INSTRUMENTATION

Flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings