The quiet rumbling of trombones and the soft keening of strings haunt the piano’s slow stream of notes. A mosaic, a tapestry. Rich harmonies and simple triads come and go, like the ever-changing, yet ever-similar, landscapes one passes while driving through a remote area, perhaps a Southern California desert, perhaps a deep woods. Although not in any sense a programmatic music, the events in The City the Wind Swept Away coast in and out of earshot in much this way, or like drifting clouds, slowly changing shapes, shifting angles, picking up different light.

The City the Wind Swept Away, commissioned by the late trombonist Will Sudmeirer’s Le Quatuor Tromboni de Marin (which annually gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area for a concert augmented by strings), was written at the Dorland Mountain Colony in 1982 (and slightly revised at the time of this recording, 2003/04). On this recording, it is performed by a group of noted Los Angeles new-music and studio players.

REVIEWS:

“Beautiful and evocative work…very atmospheric music.” —John Schaefer, WNYC, New Sounds

“Though just under 23 minutes, Jim Fox’s The City and Wind Swept Away (CB0015), performed by a small ensemble of trombones, piano, violins, viola and cello, seems to linger in the air (and the ear) much longer. Delicate and open throughout, it seems to encourage a state of nostalgia in the listener.” —Molly Sheridan, NewMusicBoxan Music Center)

“Devastatingly beautiful.” —Christopher Cerrone (Twitter)

“Music that…feels as if it could go on endlessly…music that comes from the classical tradition, but that feels like it belongs somewhere other than the concert hall….[T]exturally rich, meticulously crafted and delicately beautiful.” —Dusted

“The writing for trombones and strings connotes the misshapen fragments of some organ chorale, immensely slowed down, blown on the wind from afar; meanwhile the piano steadily picks out repeated notes, as if the simulation of some slow pealing of bells. Part of the pleasure of the piece is in noting how these sounds mutate, gradually, unpredictably, and in tracking the subtlest shifts in register, color, weight and momentum. So quiet and eventless is the terrain that any change can startle: as happens when the ‘bells’ momentarily fall silent, then resume in a glorious coda-like transfiguration in which everything, and nothing, has changed. As we know from the music of Feldman, this kind of attentiveness to the integrity of slowly passing sound events can be a strangely moving experience. It is so here.” —Christopher Ballantine, Int’l Record Review (UK)

“Bleak, austere, even sad, but compellingly beautiful. It could go on forever.” —Richard Friedman, Shuffle Boil

“The 23-minute piece is a drifting and immensely beautiful journey at the heart of night. Be it driven by the minimal, yet solemn piano lines, or shivering with the string sounds, the track has both a strong, hypnotizing coherence and a spacious texture, leaving room for your mind to wander and fill it every time with new feelings. I’ve listened to it often while reading McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and it was perfect to evoke those sad and majestic landscapes.” —Eugenio Maggi, Chain D.L.K. (Italy)

“Jim Fox…reaches great heights. Four trombones and a string quartet, alternating and superimposed, ride on the line entrusted to the piano. The impression is of a certain motionlessness, as in the way in which the composer never fully unfolds his excellent basic idea. At any rate, at any particular moment, the result is very interesting, and the track is very pleasing to listen to. I am sure that The City the Wind Swept Away will not disappoint those who liked the excellent Last Things from 2000, whose intimate blue-night tonality is taken up again here.” —Sands-Zine (Italy)

“It is a beautiful suite of a soft, romantic, magic and deliberate style…. The music presents a melancholy hue.” —Amazing Sounds (Spain)

“Beautifully recorded music with suitably artistic packaging…. The City the Wind Swept Away is a beautiful, light instrumental presentation…. [T]his is definitely music worth spending time with.” —Randy Raine-Reusch, MusicWorks magazine (Canada)

“This is an uninterruptedly slow and quiet work, dominated by shifting and repeated patterns of a few notes from the piano—imagine a music box on its last legs…. Long held notes in the strings and brass support the piano part, creating an atmosphere that is both ethereal and oppressive.” —RaymondTuttle, ClassicalNet

“The sound of the trombone and bass trombone add a haunting, dark effect to the music…. The main instrument is the piano, however, and everything swirls around it—desolate music, or rather the music of desolate places—maybe the sound happening when a city is indeed swept away by the wind.” —Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly (Netherlands)

“Jim Fox’s gorgeous meditation for trombones, strings, and piano.” —Andrew Ford, Australian Financial Review

“Keening string harmonies and soft trombone rumbles drift through the piece’s desolate expanses with Bryan Pezzone’s sparse piano playing the delicate thread, his triads forming a pensive pendulum. There’s a static quality to Fox’s piece while, at the same time, an inexorable if glacial impetus nudges it forward. The sparseness of the instrumentation helps create the impression of emptiness, an impression reinforced by the work’s title.” —Ron Schepper, Textura and Stylus

“Is music, at its most ghostly, ours? Enter the snowy quietness of fate: Jim Fox’s gorgeously titled The City the Wind Swept Away prepares for a Fest der Darstellung, a commemoration of places we seem to keep in a corner, where the precious remain, only to be recalled when necessary.… Captivating and truly refreshing.… The music infers a fragile ecosystem that embraces a metaphoric complexity; while observing the landscape, we won’t remain the same.” —Marcelo Aguirre, ei magazine

“Jim Fox’s new EP is a compelling instrumental track…. As with his last CD, the tone is meditative, quiet, and highly reflective…not unlike the groundbreaking work Brian Eno did with Harold Budd…. It’s another favorable notch in Fox’s growing catalog of valid sonic experiments.” —Exposé

“Characterized by quietude…the melodic theme gently lifts off with a piano, to be later backed by deeper and lower reverberating trombone tones. The composition floats on the selective, gentle, and calm moods it evokes. Meditative and restful, it makes a great listening and a potential immersion into innumerable things. More a ‘classical’ than an ambient piece, it deserves full merit for its virtues, leaving you absorbed yet emotionally alert after each listen.” — Erkki Luuk, SONOMU (SoundNoiseMusic)

“Tranquil piano drifts amidst a misty manifestation of smoothly sighing classical strings. As the piece progresses, the piano settles into a dominant position, pensively dripping off notes with a somber laziness while allowing the strings to circle at the composition’s periphery like birds keeping tabs on an abandoned harvest crop. Hiding in the mix, the trombones whisper like spectral sentries. Sparsely structured, this elegant music suitably evokes the notion of urban aspects wafted away from a city, stretching like a stately breeze over outlying agricultural regions.” —Sonic Curiosity

“Jim Fox…one of the most fertile, intriguing composers in ‘radical tonality’ today, turns in a fine work…The City the Wind Swept Away. It is a slow-moving, somewhat mysterious, supremely atmospheric work for two trombones, two bass trombones, piano, two violins, viola and cello. The ensemble creates a kind of blue-green haze to depict a city that has vanished, the emptiness palpable and audible in no uncertain terms. And the performance is all you could wish for. At the center are slowly moving piano patterns—broken, arpeggiated chords swinging like a slow pendulum—sometimes breaking free, only to return to another ostinato pattern. The strings and trombones come upon us as variable translucent blocks, like mists rising over a flat, empty expanse, then dissipating, to be replaced gradually by other chordal blocks of heightened tonal colors. It’s music of beauty and wonder, something that goes well with a sunset or sunup in an otherwise silent room. This is strongly engaging associative music that unfolds in a sonic panorama with great calmness and grace. It will give you pause, make you drift someplace good. Excellent.”—Grego Edwards, Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review