Hosted by Teebs, V I E W P O I N T S focuses on eclectic sound selections and new demo playing with guest spots here and there.

Kwami Coleman is a jazz pianist and musicologist from New York. He recently wrote an essay on Free Jazz and is a music teacher at NYU.

From Kwami:
“this mix was inspired by a conversation i had with Teebs about Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-born composer (who, because of World War II, emigrated to the U.S., eventually landing in Los Angeles) probably most associated with the abstract sound of modern concert music.

by around 1907, Schoenberg was writing music that pushed beyond tonality — which is the hierarchical system of tones and the rules that govern their relationship that every trained composer in Europe learned and used — and developed an approach that embraced dissonance. famously (but, for music traditionalists of the time, infamously) Schoenberg arrived at a way of composing where all of the twelve unique tones on the piano — the white keys do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do and their five black chromatic neighbors — could be used equally, interchangeably, and irrespective of the old tonal rules that governed “beautiful” concert music. he called this approach pantonality, and this sound would inspire many composers and music creators in the years and decades after to use tones and fragments of sound in the way an abstract painter might use color: in strands, shapes, textures, and in static and dynamic motion.

i tried to pull together some pieces that i felt were in conversation with Schoenberg’s pantonality, or reflected the kind of open-minded and abstract musical conceptualism that something like pantonality represents, or were just “classical” in how intricate and meticulous the creators and performers did their thing. i wanted to have the globe represented in this mix, so you’ll hear work by composers/creators/musicians from Brazil, Korea, Japan, Western Europe, and the United States. i open and close the mix with tracks that i made that, i hope, capture the essence of the music you’ll hear. ultimately, it’s about celebrating the beauty and power of musical and sound-based imagination, creativity, and collaboration.”