Perhaps you’ve visited the Vivian Maier website, watched the engrossing film Finding Vivian Maier, or perused one of the many books that showcase her photography or tell her life story. If so, you know she was an ultra-talented artist as well as an enigmatic presence. While working as a nanny, she took thousands of unforgettable, mostly black-and-white pictures on the streets of New York and Chicago and elsewhere. But she never showed them to anyone or tried to sell them; she didn’t even develop many of her negatives. Her photos weren’t discovered until shortly before her 2009 death, and it is only in recent years that they have been widely disseminated and acclaimed.
Jazz musician Harald Walkate first saw Maier’s pictures in 2014 and says they had a “powerful impact” on him. “At some point,” he writes, “I realized the photographs were also giving me musical inspiration—ideas for soundscapes and harmonies started coming to me—and I decided to compose pieces to go along with the images and selected 10 photos that I felt were most evocative.”
The result, called Room for Other People, is the fifth album credited to Walkate’s New York Second ensemble. The title comes from a Maier quote: “Nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel: you get on, you go to the end, and then someone else has the same opportunity.”
Walkate—who says his influences include Steve Reich, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Pat Metheny—produced the 10-track album, wrote and arranged all its material, and plays piano throughout. His seven accompanists add trumpet, flugelhorn, flutes, tenor sax, trombone, vibraphone, drums, and double bass. A booklet that comes with the CD features notes about each number as well as the Maier images that inspired nine of the selections. (Unable to obtain permission to reproduce the photo of Paris’s Ile Saint-Louis that prompted the 10th number, Walkate instead offers a picture he took at the same location.)
The all-instrumentals set begins with “983 Third Avenue,” the composer’s musical response to a photo Maier made in New York in 1953. Writes Walkate:
The elevated train and the hustle and bustle of traffic and people going about their business gave me the inspiration for the Steve Reich–like patterns of chords for the piano and vibraphone, with the horns playing stretched-out lines that tell a simple story about life on this street, but build up towards a faster swing piece with flute and sax improvisations on harmonies that veer from dissonant to traditional and reflect the power and energy of the big city. The track ends with horn statements that are suggestive of car traffic, alternated with drum improvisations that hint at the elevated train rumbling by.
Among the other selections are “Florida, 1957,” which was inspired by a photo of a hopeful-looking young African American; the title track, whose music serves as a companion to a Maier self-portrait; and “The White Dress,” which Walkate wrote after viewing an image of a fashionably dressed woman walking away from the camera.
You may or may not see a connection between each of his numbers and the photo that sparked its creation, at least not without reading the explanations in the booklet. But the connection matters less than the fact that the images prompted Walkate to compose this atmospheric, richly textured music. If it helps to further popularize Maier’s fascinating work, so much the better.
Also Noteworthy
Dan Fogelberg & Tim Weisberg, No Resemblance Whatsoever. The late soft-rock singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Dan Fogelberg had four platinum and double platinum LPs to his credit by the time he collaborated with flutist Tim Weisberg on 1978’s Twin Sons of Different Mothers, which also achieved double-platinum status. No Resemblance Whatsoever, their 1995 follow-up which has just been remastered and reissued, didn’t sell nearly as well but should have.
On the album, which Fogelberg and Weisberg co-produced, the former handles all vocals, keyboards, and guitars while the latter plays assorted flutes and piccolos. Backed by more than a dozen other musicians and singers, they perform eight Fogelberg compositions, six of which are instrumentals. Also featured are two fine Jesse Colin Young numbers that fit perfectly with the rest of the program: “Sunlight,” in a version that apes the original from the Youngbloods’ Elephant Mountain; and “Songbird,” the title track from Young’s sixth solo studio LP.
There are times when No Resemblance Whatsoever veers dangerously close to elevator music, but there are also moments of beauty that will make you wish a third collaboration had happened. Alas, though the pair seem in sync throughout this recording, they didn’t stay on the same wavelength for long: Two years after this album’s original release, Weisberg sued his erstwhile partner, charging fraud and breach of contract.
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