LA MONTE YOUNG - THE WELL-TUNED PIANO CD BOX SET [COMPLETE]

Called "the grandfather of minimal music" by Brooke Wentz in Down Beat, La Monte Young has been a key figure in the musical avant-garde since the early 1960s. He evolved from a jazz and blues saxophonist in the 1950s to a minimalist pianist, composer, and performance artist who is still active in the 1990s. Musicians influenced by his theories include Terry Riley, a former classmate of his, and modern composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Young is known for keyboard pieces stripped down to bare essentials, with extended meditations on just one chord and frequent shifts from consonance to dissonance. A prime example is his "Dorian Blues in G," in which each chord of a six-chord progression is played for a solid 20 minutes. Some of Young's pieces last for hours, and his compositions have been known to evolve over many years.

The blues has been a major influence on his work. "Young's blues are unlike any you've heard before, and at the same time they're as pure a musical illumination of the form as you're ever likely to hear," wrote Glenn Kenny in Spin. Thorn Jurek claimed in the Detroit Metro Times that Young's compositions "are loosely related in concepito those of blues masters Robert Johnson, Son House and John Lee Hooker, who employed certain guitar strings as drones to lay their improvisations over."

Young's masterwork as a composer is "A Well-Tuned Piano," a piece that has developed over nearly 25 years, since the early 1960s. According to Neil Strauss in a 1994 issue of the New York Times, this composition has been called "one of the most important musical works of this quarter century." In Down Beat Wentz deemed it "a major documentation—a documentation that seems to end an era, or at least closes another chapter in modern music." Edward Rothstein opined in the New York Times, "With the creation of such works as The Well-Tuned Piano,' [Young] became an almost archetypal figure of the musical counterculture, devoted to varieties of Indian music while acting as a pioneer of Western Minimalism."

—Ed Decker

Disc 01

Disc 02

Disc 03

Disc 04

Disc 05