"And one that, maybe because of its brevity, encourages an amazing creative maelstrom. For Christopher Rountree, Wild Up's founder and artistic director, that made Femenine a kind of creative sandbox for the musicians to play in. Among those is the Los Angeles-based ensemble Wild Up, which has just released a singularly jubilant performance of Eastman's 1974 work Femenine (pronounced feh-meh-NEEN), a mesmerizing 67-minute groove that unfolds one beautiful moment after another.Įastman's score for the hour-plus piece is only five pages of manuscript, and the entire work is based around one melodic building block, a two-note theme in the vibraphone that emerges from a forest of bells. It's only in recent years that friends and scholars have begun slowly shedding light on Eastman's music and the blurry details of his final, erratic years - and that a newer generation of musicians has given his work a fresh look. When he died in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital in 1990, he was just 49 years old and alone. But in the 1980s, after he moved back to New York City, he began spiraling into unpredictable behavior and rumored addiction. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, collaborated with key musical figures like Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta, and taught at the University of Buffalo. Born in Manhattan in 1940, Eastman was a precocious pianist, blessed with a commanding bass voice.
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