Bass clarinetist Jeff Anderle has assembled two chamber ensembles to record music by iconic post-minimalist composer Marc Mellits. Mellits' music has been a frequent addition to new music programs for decades, distinguishing itself through its unpredictable metric shifts and infectious modularity within a minimalist frame, and Anderle and his colleagues deliver these works with verve and polish.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 38:04 | |||
Tight Sweater | ||||
| Jeff Anderle, bass clarinet, Haruka Fujii, percussion, Kate Campbell, piano | ||||
| 01 | Exposed Zipper | Exposed Zipper | 2:40 | |
| 02 | Trans Fatty Acid's Rein | Trans Fatty Acid's Rein | 2:24 | |
| 03 | Mara's Lullaby | Mara's Lullaby | 4:32 | |
| 04 | Pickle Trousers | Pickle Trousers | 2:09 | |
| 05 | Evil Yellow Penguin | Evil Yellow Penguin | 2:23 | |
| 06 | Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts | Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts | 4:12 | |
Titan | ||||
| Jeff Anderle, bass clarinet, Friction Quartet | ||||
| 07 | Saturn | Saturn | 2:53 | |
| 08 | Vänern Kivu Hammar | Vänern Kivu Hammar | 3:04 | |
| 09 | Harada | Harada | 2:18 | |
| 10 | Hyperion Choroid | Hyperion Choroid | 2:43 | |
| 11 | Liquid Methane Rain | Liquid Methane Rain | 3:13 | |
| 12 | Dispersed Retina | Dispersed Retina | 2:34 | |
| 13 | Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy | Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy | 1:50 | |
| 14 | Phoebe & Janus | Phoebe & Janus | 1:09 | |
One might think of Marc Mellits' music as malleable post-minimalism. We hear repeated motives that would be at home in a Steve Reich piece, but in Mellits' hands, they become elastic, stretching and compressing like putty. Meter is his preferred tool for motivic development; his metric organization is modular and accordion-like, inviting addition and subtraction. Each new contextualization of a musical cell changes its semantic meaning in the rhythmic tapestry. In these two ensemble works, each featuring Jeff Anderle's powerful presence on bass clarinet, we hear this hallmark of Mellits' style mapped onto two different instrumentations, creating distinct harmonic and expressive worlds.
Tight Sweater, for bass clarinet, marimba, and piano, is a six movement work that treats the trio as a composite organism, building new interdependent textures in each movement. In "Exposed Zipper," a motoric, interlocking figure is the foundation for Mellits' characteristic rhythmic play. "Trans Fatty Acid's Rein" riffs on a moderate tempo, propulsive 7/8 groove, fading the focus in and out of a rhythmic figure anchored by the bass clarinet, while the keyboard and the percussion play rangy, moto perpetuo figures. "Mara's Lullaby" is reflective and inward, a bass clarinet melody singing over a steady alternating eighth note line that reminds us of the constant passing of time. "Pickle Trousers" is funky and driving, with a main motivic figure that alternates between 3/4 and 4/4, with furious virtuosic passages emerging in the keyboard and marimba. Haruka Fujii's marimba opens "Evil Yellow Penguin," a torrent of scalar figures that cascade like numbers flying across a stock ticker screen. "Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts" features raw, rhythmic unison passages between the bass clarinet and marimba that shift metrically, never settling into a predictable pattern.
Read MoreTitan for string quartet and bass clarinet, featuring the Friction Quartet, and is also in several short movements. While we hear many of the same motoric figures as in Tight Sweater, Mellits' style adjusts slightly in his writing for strings, featuring more sustained durations and layered textures. "Saturn" opens the piece a with three note figure that alternates between straight and syncopated treatments, gleefully anchoring the movement. In "Vänern Kivu Hammar" we hear echoes of fiddling traditions, with subtle grace note inflections, and brief soloistic flights by the violins. "Harada" is an expansive chorale, with lush string chords supporting a poignant violin and clarinet duo. "Hyperion Choroid" features propulsive, bariolage string oscillations over shifting harmonics outlined by the bass clarinet, the Baroque era peaking its head into the piece momentarily in this movement. "Liquid Methane Rain" paints a vivid picture with hazy, swelled chords and languid melodic lines. "Dispersed Retina" is in a rolling triple meter, providing pointillistic contrast as the strings shift to pizzicato for the second half of the movement as the bass clarinet is tacet. "Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy" returns to the driving mixed meter fabric that is a Mellits staple, with dramatic rests separating phrases. The arpeggio driven "Phoebe & Janus" closes the work with exuberance, leaning into a chromatic flat VI chord in a repeated progression that adds color to the harmony.
Mellits writes, "Tight Sweater is music that is tightly composed, with rapidly shifting patterns of notes and rhythms. Each one of the six movements explore relationships between the instruments, combining them in unique ways that each create vivid sound worlds. The instruments themselves are treated as only one small part of a larger combined instrument. Linear melodic lines are formed from vertical sounding harmonies; funky bass lines can dictate harmonic textures while chordal sounds can inspire melodic writing occurring between the instruments. Tight Sweater was commissioned by 'Real Quiet' and the Muzik 3 Foundation.
"Titan is Saturn's largest moon. It is a mammoth icy world with a dense, golden, hazy atmosphere.. It has rivers and lakes of liquid methane, and an active cycle of rain flowing to the surface, and then evaporating back into the sky. It is the only other known body in space, other than Earth, to have stable bodies of lakes and seas. Within this cold and formidable land, there is also otherworldly joy, full of inspiration: The music in my Titan is in eight, short, interconnected movements of play depicting a joyful life for our fictional interstellar friends. The motives of music also circulate, like rain, throughout all eight movements, and form eight different bodies of sound. The Bass Clarinet serves as an anchor, and a 'Titan,' for which the rings of music circle. All musical material stems from the sound of the integration of the Bass Clarinet within its four rotating, golden, hazy, and 'string-like' atmospheric rings. Within this world, Phoebe and Janus might not be able to see very well, but they love to swim in the healing methane lakes of Vänern, Kivu, and Hammar."
– Dan Lippel
Recorded at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco, CA
Recording and mixing: Cory Todd
Mastering: Zach Miley
Producer: Jeff Anderle
Design and layout: Samantha Godoy
A pioneer in the world of clarinet and bass clarinet, Jeff Anderle is exploding the boundaries of classical music through innovative performances, recordings, commissions, and mentorship. Anderle has augmented the sonic and musical possibilities of the clarinet as a soloist with orchestras and music festivals across the country and as a member of several cutting-edge ensembles including Sqwonk, Splinter Reeds, and Edmund Welles. In 2024, Anderle was appointed as the Assistant Professor of Clarinet at Arizona State University after sixteen years of teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
http://www.jeffanderle.comComposer Marc Mellits is one of the leading American composers of his generation, enjoying hundreds of performances throughout the world every year, making him one of the most performed living composers in the United States. His unique musical style is an eclectic combination of driving rhythms, soaring lyricism, and colorful orchestrations that all combine to communicate directly with the listener. Mellits' music is often described as being visceral, making a deep connection with the audience. He started composing very early, and was writing piano music long before he started formal piano lessons at age 6. He went on to study at the Eastman School of Music, Yale School of Music, Cornell University, and Tanglewood. Mellits often is a miniaturist, composing works that are comprised of short, contrasting movements or sections. His music is eclectic, all-encompassing, colorful, and always has a sense of forward motion
If titles are one sign of contemporary compositional bona fides, those in two works by Marc Mellits (born 1966) are as up-to-date as it is possible to be. Tight Sweater (itself a very “today-sounding” title), which is for bass clarinet, marimba and piano, has six movements called Exposed Zipper, Trans Fatty Acid’s Rein, Mara’s Lullaby, Pickle Trousers, Evil Yellow Penguin, and Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts. It is fair to ask just what the titles have to do with the music (not much) and what effect they are supposed to have on the way listeners hear the piece (also not much). Ultimately, like all music, Mellits’ has to reach out – or fail to reach out – based on its own merits. The primary interest here is the multifaceted use of the bass clarinet, whose distinctive timbre (explored and exploited with considerable skill by the very talented Jeff Anderle) blends and contrasts surprisingly effectively with the two keyboards’ sound. The specific meaning of Trans Fatty Acid’s Rein, to cite one example, may be entirely obscure, but the way the woodwind intersects with the keyboards is aurally interesting – and contrasts with equally interesting interactions in much less frantic material, such as Maria’s Lullaby. By and large, the movements feature dramatic rhythms, sometimes initiated and maintained by the bass clarinet and sometimes established by the other instruments so the woodwind can perform riffs above them. There is a certain underlying (and overarching) sense of good humor about the entirety of Tight Sweater – the movement titles do, after all, point in that direction – and even though there is a degree of sonic sameness and repetitiveness that results in the piece wearing out its welcome well before its conclusion, there is much in it to enjoy. This entire CD runs only 38 minutes, split almost evenly between the two works on it, and that is just as well, since Titan – whose eight movements relate to the Saturnian moon, not to the precursors of the Greek gods – exists in much the same sound world as Tight Sweater, the differing instrumentation notwithstanding. Titan has some movement titles partaking of similar sensibilities (Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy, for example), but it does have periodic lush episodes that allow the strings to fulfill some of their communicative potential. It also features some moderately effective tone painting: Liquid Methane Rain, for instance, sounds expressively oceanic and even, to some extent, lyrical, while the strings-only pizzicato portion of Dispersed Retina is intriguing. Mellits’ bass-clarinet creations will certainly appeal to clarinetists and, more than that, to listeners who find low-woodwind sounds attractive and will enjoy hearing some unexpected and even surprising forms of interplay among the instruments for which Mellits writes.
— Mark Estren, 8.06.2026
The music of composer Marc Mellits caught my attention back in 2018 with its adventurous mixture of minimalism and rhythmic complexity. “If there’s a nagging voice in the back of your head telling you serious music shouldn’t also be fun,” I wrote, “tell it to shut up and listen to Marc Mellits’s works on Smoke.”
Bass clarinet and marimba were prominent on that album. Now bass clarinetist Jeff Anderle has recorded a new set of Mellits’s propulsive music. On the six intense movements of Tight Sweater, Anderle is joined by Haruka Fujii on marimba and Kate Campbell on piano. On the equally rhythmic eight movements of Titan, Anderle teams with the Friction Quartet.
Throughout, Mellits continues to mold his unique short-attention-span minimalism that combines seriousness of purpose with a spirit of play. Along with the continual rhythmic gaming, part of the fun is picking out individual instruments to focus on in turn as you listen.
The uptempo movements, and that’s most of them, have a definite minimalist flavor, but within the repetitive phrasing lurks continuous change, harmonic but also rhythmic. You can lock attention on a steady beat, such as the rapid seven-counts of the first two movements of Tight Sweater, amusingly titled “Exposed Zipper” and “Trans Fatty Acid’s Rain.” But as these brief pieces play out, runs emerge that adhere to the rhythm while breaking, or seem to, the bounds of time signature.
Anderle finds the soulful side of the bass clarinet in pieces like the pastoral “Mara’s Lullaby.” The piano provides swelling harmonic accompaniment while the marimba murmurs gauzy atmospherics.
Just as you’ve caught on to the two alternating time signatures in “Pickle Trousers,” the mischeivous Mellits trips you up with odd-time measures. And the watery, polyrhythmic “Evil Yellow Penguin” mixes common time with unpredictable beats.
The final movement returns to the three-plus-four time of “Exposed Zipper,” but then blows it up. The listening brain wants so hard to make sense out of it, but after a while it feels safer to just surrender to the temporariness of it all. Mellits even creates the illusion of an accelerando in the closing minute by shrinking the length of the measures.
On Titan Anderle works with violinists Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violist Mitso Floor, and cellist Doug Machiz. The first movement builds a cartoonish theme into a vaguely menacing development that’s over before you know it. In the second, staccato punctuation marks from the bass clarinet pound with airy force and duet with arco strings – except where the two switch places in a pastoral middle section that’s all the more effective for its tininess.
This suite too has slow movements with pretty melodies. “Harada” runs barely more than two minutes, yet manages to find a surprising ending. The swaying chords of “Liquid Methane Rain” make way for an evocative melody from the bass clarinet, played in an upper register with something of the muted timbre of a French horn.
The tense, dynamically active “Hyperion Chorioid” harks back to the pioneering work of Laurie Anderson, full of dark emotion, but diving in and getting out – like the majority of the pieces in this collection – in less than three minutes. “Dispersed Retina” plays with the ambiguity of 3/4 vs. 6/8 time, the latter winning out in a rare pizzicato sequence. Bars in different time signatures alternate in the sunny “Velvet Kickbox Hydroxy,” though the three-plus-four that we heard in Tight Sweater plays an important part again.
A minute-long final piece called “Phoebe & Janus” serves as a prickly coda to this well-nigh irresistible collection, with Anderle overblowing to create a percussive effect, as if to say: I am the master of this instrument. And a bass clarinet guru he certainly is.
— Jon Sobel, 8.24.2026
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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