Pianist, composer Josh Nelson’s follow-up to his 2011
science fiction inspired album Discoveries,
Exploring Mars, delivers everything you would expect from an album with
that title. Taking inspiration from actual science as well as science fiction,
Nelson takes the listener along on a journey of musical exploration of
variations on his Martian theme. There are tracks devoted to the exploratory
rovers. There are tracks devoted to Martian geography. There are tracks devoted to earlier
imaginative explorations in music and literature.
He opens the 10-track set with “Bradbury’s Spirit,” a
composition that in a real sense bridges the scientific and the imaginative.
Over an understated evocative waltz, Nelson reads a passage from Ray Bradbury’s
The Martian Chronicles, a passage
that describes a mystifying musical performance and its effects. It is a quite
effective prelude to the album’s programmatic concept combining Spirit and
Bradbury.
“Sojourner” follows featuring guitarist Larry Koonse and
Nelson on piano as it like its namesake takes its exploratory journey. Koonse
and his solo guitar handle the first of the geographically inspired pieces,
“Memnonia Quadrangle,” leading to a haunting ballad, “How You Loved Me On Mars”
with a pure and sensitive vocal interpretation from Kathleen Grace. Larry
Goldings adds B3 accompaniment.
“Opportunity” is an otherworldly up-tempo piece which gets
some exotically strange sounds from Nelson on the Nord Electro 3. Drummer Dan
Schnelle takes over for a percussive rhapsody in “Solis Lacus, The Eye of
Mars.” This leads to “Mars, The Bringer of War,” the one piece on the album not
composed by Nelson. Instead it is his adaptation of the first movement of
Gustave Holst’s The Planets for the
piano creating what he calls an arrangement “sort of like a Bill Evans Conversations with Myself approach to
overdubbing.” Interestingly, Larry Goldings in the liner notes uses the phrase
“converse with himself” to describe Nelson’s work on “Opportunity” trading
solos on the piano and synthesizer as well.
“Curiosity” and “Syrtis Major, The Hourglass Sea” highlight
the EVI (the Electro Valve Instrument), which like the Nord gives the pieces
that spacey other worldly sound. For those of you like me unfamiliar with the
EVI an interesting explanation of how the instrument is played and its range is
available from John Swana on YouTube. The set closes with a reprisal of
“Spirit,” this time without the spoken word passage, focusing attention on the
music where indeed it belongs.
For the timid souls among us unlikely to be exploring
anything at all, let alone Mars, Josh Nelson’s Exploring Mars offers a welcome taste of what we’re missing.
