Michael Robinson will premiere and discuss his new album, Taffeta Patterns, together with three earlier recordings, Dark Yellow, Rainbow Thunder, and October Sky.

From the Taffeta Patterns liner notes by Michael Robinson:
Hold onto your hat. Taffeta Patterns takes a Western keyboard to places it has rarely if ever gone before, flowing from an ardent drum and cymbal ostinato sometimes regarded as a forbidden realm.

Related to dance music, repeated patterns are a centrally defining feature of traditional African music, an influence imparted to jazz in myriad forms. Additionally, emphatically accented, repetitive rhythmic patterns are an essential attribute of North Indian bhajans, a major form of ecstatic devotional music often performed by raga masters in addition to specialists.  

Growing up on various forms of rock and pop predated my immersion into Western classical, jazz, and Indian classical, those earlier influences being so much a part of my being as to be subconscious, coloring and shading the overall assimilation process informing the continuing development of my inner musical vision.  

Relying upon pure melodic invention weaving in and out of the melodic and rhythmic ostinatos, I delighted in incorporating rhythmic patterns and phrases inspired by tabla artist Alla Rakha for my keyboard utterances, also deploying generous stretches of silence counteracting what is often frenetic movement. The swaras (tones) used are from Asavari Thaat, the melodic wellspring related to such momentous ragas as Darbari Kanada and Jaunpuri.

After several opening melodic statements from the same synthesizer playing the chords, Taffeta Patterns follows with twenty-two engagements, meaning extended synth-electric piano passages separated by intervals of tacit, leaving either percussion alone, or percussion and minor seventh chord drones and bass part alone. In terms of listening, I tend to hear the engagements as individual episodes woven together like sections of an immense Mughal rug perceived at once.   

For more info visit azuremilesrecords.com

TRACKLIST:

1. Taffeta Patterns (title track of album)
2. Dark Yellow (title track of album)
3. Rainbow Thunder (title track of album)
4. October Sky (from Indian Jasmine)