Description
Achieving international recognition through his 40-year career as a bassist and as an award-winning producer, composer, and recording engineer, Dan Dean is a truly multi-faceted artist constantly seeking new challenges and outlets for expressing the music he hears. For his debut vocal recording, Dean came about it in a very roundabout way.
What began as a “what if” experiment turned into a musically ambitious, technically challenging effort. Often angelic, or haunting, or exuberant, “Songs Without Words” is a culmination of his musical experiences over a lifetime, captured by a single microphone.
TRACKS:
1. J.S. Bach / Air on a G String Suite No. 3 in D Major, BVW 1068 (4:48)
2. Rimsky-Korsakoff / Flight of The Bumblebee (3:04)
Vivaldi / Concerto for Lute and Orchestra in D Major
3. Movement 1 Allegro (3:46)
4. Movement 2 Largo (4:09)
5. Movement 3 Allegro (2:16)
6. Mussorgsky / Night on Bald Mountain (11:00)
7. J.S. Bach / The Sheep May Safely Graze, BVW 208 (4:34)
8. Albinoni / Adagio in G Minor (8:08)
PERFORMERS:
Dan Dean – Voice, Bass, Whistle
PRODUCTION:
Produced by Dan Dean
Recorded & mixed by Dan Dean at DDP Studio, Mercer Island, WA
November 12, 2014 – December 23, 2016
Mastered by Friedemann Tischmeyer, Koln, Germany
Photographs by Steve Korn
Cover design & layout by John Bishop
DAN MCCLENAGHAN, ALL ABOUT JAZZ
TOP TEN OF 2017 – And lastly – something not jazz: Bassist Dan Dean has created a set of sounds as innovative, in its way, as the 1968’s Moog synthesizer-driven Switched-on Bach (Columbia Masterworks, 1968), from the forward-thinking Walter (Now Wendy) Carlos. Crafting a polar opposite of sorts of the legendary Carlos set, Dean – with just his bass and his overdubbed voice – shapes a gorgeous, soaring, ephemeral sound, drawing from Bach, Vivaldi and more from the classical world.
MELINDA BARGREEN, AUTHOR AND MUSIC CRITIC
Dan Dean will redefine what you think is possible to achieve with the human voice. In this recording, he makes his voice an orchestra that “plays” spectacular classics like Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” but it’s all honest singing: actual sung notes, not sampled and manipulated electronically, What a range, vocally and stylistically; how subtle and artful the compilation of these tracks; what fine musicianship and ear-opening performances. Prepare to be astonished.
CHRIS SPECTOR, MIDWEST RECORD
Recording on Mercer Island and giving the first special thanks credit to Nancy Rumbel – do you think this is going to be your usual egghead classical date? The protean bass player surrounds himself with his ax and his voice and a mic taking warhorse repertoire to places you’d never imagine. Deciding to do it for himself this time around, the unquestionable bass ace takes it to church and everyplace else in the course of this sterling recital. Played like it was made especially for you, Dean’s limitless possibilities will blow you away. Hot stuff.
RAUL DA GAMA, JAZZDAGAMA
After years of playing and producing music for musicians such as vibraphonist Tom Collier, the virtuoso bassist – and it turns out one with rather operatic intentions – and master of the art of whistling as well Dan Dean steps out and into his own studio to record quite magical versions of chorales, arias and concertos without nothing but his velvet tenor, his trusted bass and the art of whistling – all on the disc entitled Songs without Words.
Expectations are understandably high at the prospect of a formidable musician Dan Dean, graduating into the sphere (particularly) of a J.S. Bach and Vivaldi neophyte, cutting his teeth on the classics, so to speak. Both the Air and the cantata at the end of the disc represent a great instrumental and a choral work each and they bookend (well, almost) a work by Rimsky-Korsakoff that music be performed at a diabolically fast tempo, with ponderous gravity as the Mussorgsky, a memorable work by Albinoni and a breathtakingly complex one by Vivaldi.
These intimate pieces allow Mr. Dean to exhibit his distinguished credentials in music both embracing classical, particularly baroque style and a single-voice chorale – none of which can be accomplished easily by any stretch of the imagination. But he really does live up to his musical gifts on both counts with clear, soft textures redolent of 17th century baroque rhetoric. At his best, such the range of puckish to sober in the contrapuntal bass-line-melody-oriented versions of the “Air on a G String from Suite No. 3 in D Major”, the layered voices and single bass instrument constitutes a remarkably crystalline landscape.
Appropriate emotional restraint also offers some ear-pricking moments: the largo movement of Vivaldi’s Lute concerto highlights Mr. Dean’s exquisite arrangement bringing attention to his orchestral abilities and the highpoint of the air and the chorale affectingly accentuates Bach’s poignant writing. Worth noting throughout is the muscular engagement of the music which is heightened by the stylish transcriptions on Mr. Dean’s part. Best of all is Mr. Dean’s ability to portray the rhythmic elasticity and suspended animation of all of the composers’ – particularly Bach’s – work, which grows this work in a brand-new dimension, together with giants like Bobby McFerrin, this, because the vocal delivery is brilliant when exposed to Bach’s already demanding multi-toned coloratura.
The overall impression is one of music-making of the highest order, which plumbs the depths of all of the emotions from wonderful joys to abject lamentations.