Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)
The fifth album in clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s 8 Albums on August 8 releases is a duo performance with percussionist William Winant. The title of the album is Dreaming Upon Waking, and four of the eleven tracks are identified with three-digit numbers between 699 and 747. That last of those pieces did not invoke any thoughts about jet aircraft; but the rapid clarinet passages struck me as inspired by “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the orchestral interlude that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Nevertheless, I doubt that any bumblebee could keep up with a Boeing jet airplane flying at top speed!
Winant’s percussion instruments include a vibraphone. This allowed him to reflect (sometimes in unison) on the thematic phrases Goldberg was playing. That said, he alternated deftly between the melodic lines on the vibraphone and the diversity of rhythmic phrases from the other percussion instruments. Because this is a duo performance, I found that much of it could be approached by an attentive listener as a call-and-response rhetoric.
To be fair, I am not quite sure of the interplay of dreaming and waking emerging over the course of the album; but I suspect that the most rapid passages performed by both of the players clearly involve waking!
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