Word: piano
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...could forgive the obvious bullshit involved if the presence of Clarke--and his Return to 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...
...lack of structure and amorphous aspirations to write love songs do not sustain this album. Hubbard traces some of her roots back to Tchaikovsky, and she has clearly picked up the less desirable traits of the late 19th century romantics from her years of classical training. Her piano style is heavy-handed, 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...
...rest of the first side, graced by tunes like "Russian Roulette, 1st and 2nd movement"--the story of a Russian archduke who rides across Siberia, plays Russian roulette, dies and rises again from the dead. The death is heralded by crashing chords from Hubbard's piano, the ascension by a rising run on the bouzouki. As "Russian Roulette" gives way to "Dream #23," Clarke--in his sole appearance on the album--gives a grim picture of war-wracked Stuart England. His bass conveys depression and despair by a simple, minor sequence. Hubbard tries to flesh out the piece by drastically...
...grim song follows. A synthesizer simulates the wailing of Muslim prayer chants, in what sounds like an attempt to parody ancient ritual. Juxtaposed with her notes, Hubbard's piano part on the cut becomes simply a trite rendition of images that have long-ago been worked to death. In her search for a niche for herself, Hubbard, despite her supposed "renaissance," merely recasts old tunes, old images, and old ideas in a new, sucaryled form...
...longest work, the haunting Cantata No. 2 for voices, choir and orchestra (1943), takes scarcely a quarter of an hour to perform. The shortest of his Three Small Pieces for Cello and Piano (1914) consists of nine measures. His Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913) go by in an average of 40 seconds each-expressing, in the words of his mentor Arnold Schoenberg, ''a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath...