Hal Russell & Joel Futterman - The Chicago River

2022 release

Part of the liner notes written by prof. Marc Medwin:

Follow a river from the source’s gentle percolations, through the rushing rapids and, ultimately, to the point at which it joins the ocean’s vastness for the elemental and biographical life-cycle voyage. It transports, it connects, it replaces and it decomposes in order to redistribute itself and the unmoored objects it carries. Its powers of nourishment are as real as its cataclysmic strength. It is infused by its travels, tracing geography and culture along its disparately circuitous path, and, like the music made in these two concerts by Joel Futterman and the late Hal Russell, its journey constitutes a harmonic blend of the infinitesimally small with architectural forms and structures predicated on vast plains of historical backstory. Like the various gradations of water amidst multivalent environs, each musical moment exists but extends itself in context, connected to the last and prefiguring the next, flowing with the prescient spontaneity fostered by the trail-blazing felicities of a meeting of minds and spirits. It creates its own history while Gargantuan and inclusive reconfigurations occur, shaping the terrains over which these vast explorations in sound, each beginning with something as simple as a gesture of greeting in musical friendship, are facilitated as metaphorical boundaries are reconfigured and removed. The sounds we are now privileged to hear comprise stations, points of charged respite along a path like so many others in its stunning and transcendent uniqueness.........