"When is Sonny Stitt going to get his props?" demands Harvey Pekar in the hortatory essay included with Stitt's Bits: The Bebop Recordings 1949—1952 (Prestige). Pekar, who penned liner notes to countless jazz discs long before the success of American Splendor, attacks the received notion that Stitt was just another imitator of saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. We'll never know whether Stitt had formulated his style before he heard Parker, and I don't really care; his angular attack and lusty tone burn it up with bandmates like pianist Bud Powell as well as saxophonist and longtime foil tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons. Apart from the occasional novelty item such as "Who Threw the Sleeping Pills in Rip Van Winkle's Coffee?" Stitt's Bits is a bounty of bop.
Another midpriced box set, Steve Reich: Phases (Nonesuch) collects the essential works of a 20th-century master on five discs. Steve Reich translates the rhythmic complexity of jazz and Stravinsky into a polyphonic web that welcomes casual ears—Reich always has a good riff going—or focused, readerly listening. Phases has all the "hits" and for much less than the regular albums: the landmark Music for 18 Musicians, Different Trains with the Kronos Quartet, Tehillim, Come Out, The Desert Music, and Piano Phase. Yet after two big anthologies, Phases and the 10-disc Steve Reich 1965—1995, released in 1997, it's time for Nonesuch to consider releasing a Reich rarities disc. I'm tired of cuing up my scratchy, out-of-print Music from Mills LP to hear "Melodica," and I'm certain better copies exist of my hissy bootlegs of "My Name Is" and especially "Livelihood," which Reich edited from surreptitious recordings made while working as a cabbie in San Francisco. You can hear a live version of "My Name Is" on archive.org; search for "Steve Reich" and a 1970 live performance at UC Berkeley. Like the early-1960s serial works of Philip Glass, and the seldom-discussed early-'70s electroacoustic pieces of another Minimalist, John Adams, Reich's first works remain uncharted territory for performers, scholars, listeners, and record companies.
Igor Stravinsky once suggested that composers of the future will have to "win their spurs" in new sonic territory. Since 1969, the Romanian composer Horatiu Radulescu has bypassed the traditional Western tuning system to compose music based on the naturally occurring harmonic spectra inherent in pitched acoustic sound. Intimate Rituals (Sub Rosa) grandly documents three works for viola: solo, duo, and with what Radulescu calls "sound icons"—grand pianos turned on their sides and bowed, struck, rubbed, and plucked like a giant harp. The resulting music trembles with gorgeous squeals and thrumming banshee harmonics. I'm also enchanted by The Sound of Light in Trees (Acoustic Ecology Institute). Using custom-built microphones, David Dunn recorded the circulatory systems of living pine trees and insect (mostly bark beetles) signals. A feast of crepitating squeaks and gentle crackles, it's as if Dunn captured a foreign language so utterly incomprehensible that we can hear it only as music.
