Mundoagua - Celebrating Carla Bley [CD] (ONLINE ORDER ONLY)

Arturo O'Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra - Mundoagua - Celebrating Carla Bley - Multiple Grammy winning composer, pianist Arturo O'Farrill presents two ambitious Jazz suites, plus "Blue Palestine" by iconic composer Carla Bley. - Commissioned by The Columbia School of the Arts in 2018 to commemorate the Year of Water, Mundoagua was meant to have it's world premiere in 2019 in the Miller Theater at Columbia University. This was rescheduled because of the global pandemic caused by the Novel Coronavirus. It was a strange coincidence, because so many of the sub-themes in the narrative of the composition have to do with global csuch as global warming with it's resulting climate disasters, including the breaking of temperature records & cataclysmic weather events daily, if not hourly. - Still, the composition is neither optimistic nor doomsaying. It is a journalistic approach to telling the story of how a species is slowly, irrevocably killing it's host, so that corporate entities benefiting a handful of reprobate individuals can engorge themselves while millions die. - Still, this is not the source of my inspiration. What is, is the inalienable free will that determines individual comportment. Ultimately, we have the choice to be cognizant of our individual contributions to global warming. - Beginning with the movement entitled Glacial. It is a study of four meditations on water. It begins with five prayers and a benediction loosely based on the five daily prayers found in the Islamic tradition, Fajr, Zuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Ishra. These are loosely represented by the initial composed (most prayers are formally structured) trumpet statements and then a setting of repose, which begs the four meditations that the trumpet players improvise (meditations are improvisatory). - The four meditations are based on four vast perspectives that we glean from a prayerful examination of the power of water. They are drop, sky, sea, & forest. Each succeeding meditative setting reflects the intensifying nature. A restatement of the setting of repose and we go to the 2nd movement. There are three thematic structures. The first is the initial whirlwind of a sudden awakening to impending crisis.