Difficult Listening from Seth Parker Woods

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Around the middle of this month, Cedille Records released the latest cello solo album of Seth Parker Woods, whose first album, asinglewordisnotenough, was released by Confront Recordings in London in November of 2016. The title of the new album, his Cedille debut, is Difficult Grace, which had previously been the title of a full-evening multimedia concert. In that performance Woods served as narrator as well as cellist.

Much of the album serves to document world premiere performances of compositions by Monty Adkins, Frederick Gifford, Ted Hearne, and Nathalie Jackson. Earlier works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson and Alvin Singleton are woven among the premiere tracks. In a staged multimedia setting there may have been enough imaginative content to draw (if not sustain) the attention of a sympathetic audience. However, the experience of listening to this recording left me (in the immortal words of Fred Astaire) “cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes,” with Hearne’s scatology prompting the only raised eyebrows.

One might say that, taken as a whole, the album serves up far too much “difficult” along with no convincing signs of “grace.”