Bryan Johanson
Les Productions D’Oz: 28 pages
Believe it or not, there are seven entirely different oranges in existence, a picture of them being on the front cover of this latest work by Bryan Johanson, and a strange bunch of shapes and colours some of them are, ones that look like lemons, and ones that are yellow, or green, and one, called a Buddha’s Hand, which grows in an unusual multi – digital shape looking like a set of fingers attached to a stubbly wrist! Each one is given a serenade here by Johanson, a composer whose music is always very varied, very playable, and completely unique as it literally never sounds like anybody else’s work.
So, the first piece called Blood (named of course after the Blood Orange) is a Presto Fluido with quavers full of hammer -ons and pull- offs race around the fingerboard in multiple time signatures and full of accidentals .This makes this piece rather unnerving, as its musical style is unusual, but not atonal, just merely in a world of its own, musically speaking, and with absolutely no relaxing throughout its 146 bars and four pages of notation.
Navel is next .This is written in a time signature I have never seen before , namely 4/1 time, with long semi – breves, and even breves in a two, then three voiced affair, the most difficult thing of which is actually getting used to playing when all the notes are so long
Valencia, you might guess takes us, via a kind of Fandango, to Spain, where quick runs, chord strums and various Spanish styled music sits amidst Johanson’s own very individual musical mannerisms. Again this is full of hammer – ons and pull – offs.
Then we have Buddha’s Hand, the very unusual orange, matched by some very unusual music, full of chords topped with artificial harmonics, at an Andante speed and quite a few places where instructions tell you exactly how to get your fingers around certain places in the music.
Monkey Ball is jumpy, full of leaping rhythms and also full of unusually placed pull- offs (normally to open strings) and often involving other placed notes as well. The sound the piece makes here is littered with false relations, pulling off a D#, fret 11, to an open E, and many more in that style besides. This lengthy piece is like nothing you will have played before, but it is so very much in its own musical world, that it keeps you intrigued, difficult to play though much of it is!
Green (yes there is a Green orange!) is the easiest piece of the 7 by far. It is the most tonal and is an Adagio Cantabile, and full of sad emotive writing.
The final work, Sumo is again very accented, lots of very unusual moments, strange runs that go all over the musical fingerboard in patterns that you most certainly won’t expect, and with a momentum that, once you have mastered it, is really exciting and gripping to play. Everything ends with a slam – bang coda that would have audiences on their feet.
To say this piece is completely in its own sound- world is putting the fact mildly. It is far from easy to play, and some will dislike its unusual musical harmonic style, but all I can say is that, if you stick with this piece, it is exceedingly entertaining, yes, very tricky at times to get your fingers around it,, but well worth staying with it, as this is such a fabulous piece of guitar writing.
Chris Dumigan
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