Energetically progressive Kitty Brazelton's chamber music - given a keen ear by PATRIC STANDFORD '... some attractive surface work ...'

Those who may have been well tuned in to New York's energetically progressive music scene may be no strangers to the exuberant Kitty Brazelton through her several incarnations as the leader of rock bands, her singing and songwriting, her excursions into teaching, and her enthusiasm for composing chamber music over the past thirty years. She has been BMI Composer in Residence at LaGuardia High School of Music & Arts in New York City and a visiting artist at the Lincoln Centre, New York University and Columbia, and on her way through has persuaded students to 'find their own voices' -- no bad thing as long as the students have means to acquire the technical resources to put their own voices to good use.

Now, a long way from her first rock band Musica Orbis, that won East Coast acclaim in the late 1970s, she is inaugurating her new 'digital-chamber-punk band' What Is It Like To Be A Bat? bringing computer-generated material into her live shows -- the on-stage performer in her being perhaps her strongest asset.

And after all that comes this CD of her most recent chamber music compositions, a strange miscellany of part improvised pieces self consciously trying to avoid owing anything much to any dominant 'ism' of our multi-faceted times. 'We can't say what needs to be said in languages that no longer reflect the way we live', she is quoted as saying. But how much of what is on this CD 'needs to be said'?

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