Apart from the in-group listeners who will know what's going on, there's little in the graphics here to tell you, and the notes, with their upside-down text, aren't going to enlighten you totally. In brief,
Ethel is a string quartet, and Documerica was a 1971 collection of photographs commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency with the aim of documenting America's vanishing natural resources. Some of the pieces are tied closely to these photographs (the examples that appear in the booklet margins are apparently not the pertinent ones); others are more generally linked to aspects of the American landscape. The music ranges from abstract (
Mary Ellen Childs' Ephemeral Geometry came about because
Childs "gravitated toward the archive's more abstract photos") to pieces influenced by jazz, blues, and rock. These last are perhaps the most interesting: The Simplicity of Life, a four-section work by jazz bassist
Ulysses Owens, Jr., is dispersed around the program and shows some effectively straightforward ways of transferring something like gospel revival music (sample track six, the "Revival Crusade" movement, for an idea) to the string quartet medium. There is something here that you won't hear every day: a work by a Native American composer, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (track nine, Pisachi [Reveal]). To top off the conceptual experiment (or incoherence, depending on your point of view), the album comes with four covers, one each for the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West regions of the U.S. Collect them all! The overall concept here is vague, but the realization has some fine moments. ~ James Manheim