Word: musicalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Forever colleague, Chick Corea--had somehow managed to make this album worth listening to. But they are no more than sidemen on LifeTimes. Diana Hubbard, on her first album, runs the show, playing piano, (Corea isrelegated to the synthesizer on the one cut he graces) and writing all the music. But unfortunately Hubbard lacks emotion, technique; in fact, she lacks any creative vision beyond a vague desire to "contribute to a renaissance in romanticism...
Hubbard's music does not, as a result, offend the listener. It's not execrable. It is just extraordinarily dull. As a pianist/composer, Hubbard sounds like Bruckner rewritten for the dentist's office. Which is too bad, because Hubbard really can be quite a nice person, and she will go out of her way to try very hard to make you believe what she writes is in some way worthy of serious artistic attention...
...lost cause, however. Hubbard claims she wants to write music that "is felt but not heard." She tries to buck the trend in modern jazz and revive the purely romantic side of jazz. In her music, Hubbard states, she is "not trying to be any structured thing. In all of us we have the dreamer...
...unsubtle and flashy. She alternates booming chords organized in the most predictable of charts, with grandiose runs up and down the keyboard which sound like pallid attempts to imitate Keith Jarret's flourishes. The arrangements do nothing to cover for Hubgaucheries. To evoke Arabia, Hubbard gives us Bedouin ritual music, calling up wailing strings. For a picture of Siberian wilderness, we hear martial strains reminiscent of the Dr. Zhivago score, followed by a short bouzouki solo...
...album liner notes complete the grim destruction of subtlety. For every cut Hubbard has written a brief description of the precise scene she wants to create with her music. It would have been preferable just to read her notes and take the tedium of the album on faith...