TORONTO, August 28, 1997 -- The York Fine Arts digital recording and publishing label is launching its York Artists Signature Series with five simultaneous CD releases, profiling York University's prominent talent in performance, composition and production.

Featured in the York Artists Signature Series are:

David Mott, solo baritone saxophone: The Sky Ringing in an Empty Bell

The nine pieces on this CD, all composed and performed by Mott, are part of a body of work that he has developed over almost two decades. Strongly influenced by non-western music, this recording reflects Mott's own spiritual journey. He is involved in the shamanic and healing aspects of music and is a martial arts master.

Although it is studio recorded, this disc offers a listening experience of great immediacy. Mott notes that many of the sometimes complex sounds created in the music are the result of extended instrumental techniques, including circular breathing, multiphonics, unusual tonguing techniques, etc. These sounds are instrumentally manipulated in real time without recording modifications other than close miking and occasional use of amplification.

Bill Westcott, barrelhouse piano: Early Rags - Early Blues

This recording energetically recreates the style and mood of the early 20th century through ragtime and blues selections which illustrate the variety and original substance of the music. A number of selections are very close to the original recorded versions, while others, especially those older examples drawn from published sheet music, have grown and changed in the artist's imagination over many years of performance.

Phillip Werren: Stone Witness - Summer Evening

Both works on this CD were written for dance, as is much of this composer's work. For Stone Witness, commissioned by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in 1986, Werren recorded a host of natural sounds at his Bancroft, Ontario property and made about sixty studies using different tunings, worked out on computer, before structuring this piece with choreographer Linda Rabin. In ten seamless sections, the music and the action move from an ancient matriarchal world into a modern patriarchal city where confusion rises to a violent yet cleansing epilogue.

Summer Evening, composed for choreographer Peter Randazzo and the Toronto Dance Theatre in 1992, is an equally original but much gentler score. Using a digital sampler, Werren recreates a strange aural landscape of birds, crickets and cicadas, interspersed with excerpts from the 1940s Tommy Dorsey hit "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You".

Various Artists: Rhythms Riffs & Rhymes

This compilation disc features tracks by Al Henderson, Barry Elmes, Mike Murley, Mark Crawford, Rita di Ghent, David Mott, Tim Posgate and Lighthouse with pianist Paul Hoffert - all artists associated with York University.

When York's music department was founded in 1970, it was considered revolutionary for making jazz, particularly small ensemble work, an integral component of its program. In this CD's liner notes, York music professor and Grammy Award winner Rob Bowman writes: "While bop has tended to be the lingua franca of York University's formal program, students and faculty alike have long explored a variety of other traditions." As Bowman points out, this CD covers a lot of territory, from "in-the-tradition" post-bop to jazz-rock. The end result makes clear why York University has a reputation as a vibrant centre of contemporary music-making.

Maurice Elliott reads Charles Dickens

York English professor and University Orator Maurice Elliott has been winning audiences with his inimitable talent for public readings since the 1970s. As Master of York University's Winters College from 1980 to 1987, he held a hugely popular annual reading of Dickens for the Fellows. In his liner notes, Elliott writes that the pieces on this CD "remind us that many, if not most, children in the world receive their education in far from ideal circumstances." The disc presents selections from David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities.

Established last year in York University's Faculty of Fine Arts, the York Fine Arts label's premier release was the CD Two of a Kind, the first joint recording by pianist Christina Petrowska and her husband, baritone Louis Quilico. Today, concurrently with the York Artists Signature Series, the label is also launching the York Learning Series with Shadow on the Prairie, the first ever interactive multimedia tutorial on Canadian dance history, produced by York dance professors Mary Jane Warner and Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt.

For more information or review copies, please contact:

Brigitte Kleer
Manager, Public Relations
Faculty of Fine Arts
(416) 736-2100 ext. 77143
email: bkleer@yorku.ca

Sine MacKinnon
Senior Advisor for Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100 ext. 22087
email: sinem@yorku.ca
YU/070/97