'Root Progressions': Gloria Cheng performs solo-piano scores solicited from improv specialists

Does the Muse descend upon creative musicians, enabling them to set down music they

Gloria Cheng; Grammy and Emmy winner

otherwise would lack access to?  Or does it sometimes lead them halfway up Mount Parnassus and meet them there, suggesting things otherwise unavailable to them, and do  those things emerge as spur-of-the-moment creations?

That's the age-old polarity dividing premeditated and set-down music from the spontaneous kind, which is summed up for most people as largely the province of jazz. Gloria Cheng is a pianist long active in new music who has reached out to improvisationally focused ccomposers for the works on "Root Progressions." 

Related to jazz but often winging free of its styles are the composiers represented on this new recording (Biophilia Records). The visionary modernist Anthony Davis exhibits his keyboard fancy in "Piano Heaven," linking vernacular styles of piano-playing. "Spheroid" is a detached, pointillistic prelude to a mock Great American Songbook tune, setting up the atmosphere of "Turquoise," a slow blues with ornamentation and a restless bass line. "Shards for C.T." concludes the suite  with tangled harmonies and the abruptly contrasted dynamics and tempos familiar from the unique style of Cecil Taylor.

The resonance permitted by the sustaining pedal allows Arturo O'Farrill to impart the blurred outlines of dreamland to "Mis Guerreros (The Mystic Secret)."  The bassist Linda May Han Oh proclaims the reach of an inspired pun title for "Littoral Tales," a two-part tone poem obviously divided into "High Tide" and "Low Tide." The former has a chordal texture; the latter is predictably splashy and calm. Yet the sound of the music itself isn't predictable, but rather refreshing.

"Eight Calla Lillies" is James Newton's evocation of an  enduring romance, with the title signaling a floral tribute to his beloved.  It is the most expansive piece of the collection, and has an imaginative connection to his flute-playing, such as the florid unaccompanied version of "Sophisticated Lady" he set down on his 1985 LP "The African Flower: The Music of Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn." 

The disc is filled out usefully with Jon Jang's "Ancestors & Sisters," a work steeped in the composer's Chinese heritage and with a meditative cast in its last few minutes, a calming successor to Debussyan washes of sound earlier in the piece. Also worthy of mention is Gernot Wolfgang's "Two Movements," with a choice of notes avoiding the tick-tock monotony suggested by the title "Pendulum" and the second movement, "Shift," presenting a rambunctious clutch of patterns in the mid-range and the bass.

All the pieces seem to have Cheng's detailed attention to the varieties of piano sonority and rhythms that make thesse composer's adventures outside their normal music-making worth interpreting in expert hands. 

T'he recording's Biophilia format is environmentally conscious, with no physical CDs available. In the words of producer Steven Swartz, "Each Biopholio contains a unique download code enabling the listener to digitally download the music in their preferred format."