The AIX All Star Band – Moonlight Acoustica
Imagine an improvised take on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata played by 7 of the best studio players in Los Angeles…55 minutes of pure imaginative music making.
There we were in late January with an available recording slot to fill. I decided to go ahead with an idea that I have been fostering for a couple of years and that David Chesky encouraged me to go ahead and do (After all, I did get my Ph.D. in composition from UCLA). Here’s the concept…take a very well-known classical work and re-cast it as a piece in the style of electronica. But that’s not all. Have some of my favorite musicians realize the concept acoustically and in real-time…basically jam on the “changes” of the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven for an hour and capture it on high-definition audio and high-definition video. It turned out great! It’s a hybrid piece with great solos, pulsing rhythms and incredible instrumental color.
The AIX All Star Band is comprised of my favorite LA studio musicians. They bring their amazing talents to the hall have some brief discussions and then launch into an uninterrupted 55-minute jam. It’s mind-blowing how good they are. Carl is the guitarist for Supertramp and fronts his own trio, ex-Wings guitarist Laurence Juber is always at the top of acoustic guitarists polls and music director and keyboard maestro Jim Cox has a discography that spans many, many pages.
It turned out so well that we’ve done two additional classical masterpieces in the same style: Pachelbel’s Canon and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. If you like what you hear on this recording, you’ll like those as well. The ensemble is essentially the same and the same improvisational mastery is focal point of the track.
In the middle of the production it occurred to me to turn the video of the musicians into a moving, evolving piece of motion graphics by processing or filtering [heavily] the HD video that we shot. Lots of computer graphics get created to accompany a piece of music but how many times is the video a direct derivative of the performance itself. I call this the “wallpaper” version of the piece. I’d love to hear from customers about this presentation…I spent another 6 weeks realizing it.
AIX Records’ premium DVD-Audio/Video discs have two sides. The first side in an interactive DVD-Video disc and the other side is a DVD-Audio disc [which requires a DVD-Audio capable machine to play it back].
The sound of this recording brings these incredible musicians into your listening space. The HD-Audio surround mixes immerse you in the musical interplay with full range frequency response and dynamics.
Audio Samples:
- Moonlight Acoustica [ending] –
