Shape-Shifting Sound: Taborn, Cherry, and Richter Reinvent Tradition
Organic Music Society by Don Cherry
This week’s selections trace the boundaries between structure and fluidity, tradition and reinvention. Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel turns the solo piano into a space of pure exploration, where silence and sound shape each other in real time. Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society dissolves genre altogether, blending jazz with global traditions in an ever-expanding sonic ritual. And Max Richter’s Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons reimagines one of classical music’s most familiar works, stripping it down and rebuilding it into something hypnotic and deeply contemporary. Each of these albums transforms its source material—not by discarding the past, but by pulling it into new and unexpected futures.
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel is an exercise in fragmentation and flow, a solo piano record where improvisation and form dissolve into each other. Rather than following harmonic progression or thematic development, Taborn builds in gestures—isolated motifs, percussive clusters, sudden silences—creating music that resists resolution and instead exists in a state of constant becoming.
What makes Avenging Angel remarkable is its refusal to settle. Taborn treats the piano not as a vessel for melody but as a site of exploration, where resonance, decay, and space carry as much weight as the notes themselves. Phrases emerge and dissipate, creating a negative space where silence is not absence but presence—an essential part of the composition. In its restraint, its rejection of conventional climax, the album becomes an improvisation of absence, a conversation between sound and void.
Don Cherry – Organic Music Society
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society is less an album than a living ecosystem, a sprawling, open-ended meditation where jazz dissolves into ritual. Recorded in 1973 but untethered from any fixed era, it rejects conventional structure in favor of continuous motion—modal chants, flutes and hand percussion, drifting drones, and sudden bursts of free improvisation.
Cherry treats jazz not as a genre but as a global practice, blending Indian, African, and Middle Eastern traditions with the spontaneity of free music. Organic Music Society resists analysis in the traditional sense; it’s not about solos or harmonic complexity but about presence—sound as communal experience. Even in its most chaotic moments, the album feels intentional, not in adherence to form but in its embrace of openness. It’s a work that doesn’t unfold in time so much as expand within it, dissolving the idea of where one piece ends and another begins.
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Max Richter’s Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons is not an arrangement or modernization—it’s a deconstruction, reassembling Vivaldi’s DNA into something both ancient and new. Stripping away the most familiar gestures, Richter isolates fragments of the original score, looping, stretching, and reshaping them into something minimalist, cinematic, and strangely hypnotic.
Unlike traditional reinterpretations, Recomposed doesn’t seek to embellish but to distill. Richter leans into repetition, letting harmonic patterns linger and evolve rather than resolve, shifting the emotional weight of the piece from baroque virtuosity to something more meditative, even introspective. The result is music that feels both reverent and radical—Vivaldi’s past refracted through Richter’s present, a conversation between centuries that refuses to settle into nostalgia.
What binds these three albums is a shared understanding that tradition exists not as a boundary but as a starting point for exploration. Taborn's fragmented silences, Cherry's dissolution of cultural categories, and Richter's dialogue with Vivaldi each demonstrate how contemporary music thrives in the spaces between established forms. These artists don't simply break rules; they reveal the invisible possibilities that have always existed within musical traditions, showing us how the most profound experiences often emerge precisely where recognition transforms into discovery.
Craig Taborn – Avenging Angel
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel is an exercise in fragmentation and flow, a solo piano record where improvisation and form dissolve into each other. Rather than following harmonic progression or thematic development, Taborn builds in gestures—isolated motifs, percussive clusters, sudden silences—creating music that resists resolution and instead exists in a state of constant becoming.
What makes Avenging Angel remarkable is its refusal to settle. Taborn treats the piano not as a vessel for melody but as a site of exploration, where resonance, decay, and space carry as much weight as the notes themselves. Phrases emerge and dissipate, creating a negative space where silence is not absence but presence—an essential part of the composition. In its restraint, its rejection of conventional climax, the album becomes an improvisation of absence, a conversation between sound and void.
Don Cherry – Organic Music Society
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society is less an album than a living ecosystem, a sprawling, open-ended meditation where jazz dissolves into ritual. Recorded in 1973 but untethered from any fixed era, it rejects conventional structure in favor of continuous motion—modal chants, flutes and hand percussion, drifting drones, and sudden bursts of free improvisation.
Cherry treats jazz not as a genre but as a global practice, blending Indian, African, and Middle Eastern traditions with the spontaneity of free music. Organic Music Society resists analysis in the traditional sense; it’s not about solos or harmonic complexity but about presence—sound as communal experience. Even in its most chaotic moments, the album feels intentional, not in adherence to form but in its embrace of openness. It’s a work that doesn’t unfold in time so much as expand within it, dissolving the idea of where one piece ends and another begins.
Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube.
Max Richter’s Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons is not an arrangement or modernization—it’s a deconstruction, reassembling Vivaldi’s DNA into something both ancient and new. Stripping away the most familiar gestures, Richter isolates fragments of the original score, looping, stretching, and reshaping them into something minimalist, cinematic, and strangely hypnotic.
Unlike traditional reinterpretations, Recomposed doesn’t seek to embellish but to distill. Richter leans into repetition, letting harmonic patterns linger and evolve rather than resolve, shifting the emotional weight of the piece from baroque virtuosity to something more meditative, even introspective. The result is music that feels both reverent and radical—Vivaldi’s past refracted through Richter’s present, a conversation between centuries that refuses to settle into nostalgia.
What binds these three albums is a shared understanding that tradition exists not as a boundary but as a starting point for exploration. Taborn's fragmented silences, Cherry's dissolution of cultural categories, and Richter's dialogue with Vivaldi each demonstrate how contemporary music thrives in the spaces between established forms. These artists don't simply break rules; they reveal the invisible possibilities that have always existed within musical traditions, showing us how the most profound experiences often emerge precisely where recognition transforms into discovery.
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